440 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP. 



about the margin of the lake and up its tributary 

 creeks in my curiara, and gather specimens of the few 

 trees that were in flower. On the 22nd, at 4 P.M., 

 when we were cooking our dinner, we were startled 

 by hearing the report of a musket in the forest on 

 the opposite bank of the river, there not more than 

 80 yards wide. It is scarcely possible to conceive 

 the strangeness of such a sound in savage, desolate 

 forests which scarcely any human being could pene- 

 trate, especially one accustomed to firearms. A 

 region of at least 10,000 square miles, of which we 

 were the centre, had scarcely 400 inhabitants, and 

 those chiefly half-wild Indians, whose weapon was 

 the blowing-cane. The nearest settlement was that 

 of Yamadu-bani, but we knew that none of their 

 hunting tracks extended to Vasiva ; and the half- 

 dozen adult males had neither sains nor ammunition 



o 



when we left them only the day before. There had 

 been no inhabitants on Vasiva for very many years, 

 and there were no traders or other travellers on the 

 Casiquiari at that season beside ourselves. I was 

 completely puzzled. The report was not exactly 

 like that of either musket or rifle, nor was it any 

 one of the accustomed sounds which at rare in- 

 tervals break the silence of those vast solitudes, 

 and with which I had become familiar. The crash 

 of a huge tree falling from sheer age the explosion, 

 like distant cannon, of an old hollow Sassafras or 

 Capivi tree, burst by the balsam accumulated in the 

 cavity the solitary thunderclap in an apparently 

 cloudless sky the roar of cataracts, and of the 

 approaching hurricane all these sounds I had 

 previously heard, and had learnt to distinguish. 

 My Indians, however, although even more startled 



