RISE AND FALL OF THE CAURA 137 



the alligator was trying to find out what had occurred to 

 him, the men ran for the rifles and wasted cartridges 

 taking snapshots at the exposed parts of his body while 

 he performed irresponsible somersaults. Eventually he 

 regained sufficient consciousness to realise that the pool 

 was no longer a haven of rest, and he headed for the 

 stream at a rate that would have made a bicycle scorcher 

 open his eyes. 



In the course of my description of fishing with 

 dynamite at La Prision, I referred to the creciente or 

 sudden rise of the Caura. Anyone unaccustomed to the 

 ways of streams in countries of heavy rains would be 

 surprised at the increase which sometimes takes place in 

 the volume of a river like the Caura in an exceedingly 

 short space of time. Though we were well aware of the 

 vagaries of the river we were exploring, we suffered 

 repeatedly, either by leaving things where we thought the 

 water could not possibly reach them, or by mooring our 

 boats close to the banks. We would awake in the morn- 

 ing to find that some very necessary article had been 

 carried away, or that a heavily laden boat was high and 

 dry on land. There is a large slab of rock close to ' The 

 Port ' at La Prision. We experienced a good deal of 

 inconvenience whenever this slab was covered by the 

 creciente, for we found it very useful in more ways than 

 one. By using it as a mark we were always able to tell 

 how much the river had risen or fallen in a given time. 

 Here the women used to wash our clothes and procure 

 our supply of drinking water, for the temperature of the 

 stream is several degrees lower than that of the Caura, 

 owing to its being completely shaded from the rays of the 

 sun by the tall trees of the forest through which it flows. 

 Here we spent the early morning and had our bath 



