DOWN AN UNKNOWN RIVER 301 



which the cliff walls rose almost sheer on either hand. 

 When a rushing river thus "canyons," as we used to say 

 out West, and the mountains are very steep, it becomes 

 almost impossible to bring the canoes down the river itself 

 and utterly impossible to portage them along the cliff sides, 

 while even to bring the loads over the mountain is a task 

 of extraordinary labor and difficulty. Moreover, no one 

 can tell how many times the task will have to be repeated, 

 or when it will end, or whether the food will hold out; 

 every hour of work in the rapids is fraught with the pos- 

 sibility of the gravest disaster, and yet it is imperatively 

 necessary to attempt it; and all this is done in an unin- 

 habited wilderness, or else a wilderness tenanted only by 

 unfriendly savages, where failure to get through means 

 death by disease and starvation. Wholesale disasters to 

 South American exploring parties have been frequent. The 

 first recent effort to descend one of the unknown rivers to 

 the Amazon from the Brazilian highlands resulted in such 

 a disaster. It was undertaken in 1889 by a party about 

 as large as ours under a Brazilian engineer officer, Colonel 

 Telles Peres. In descending some rapids they lost every- 

 thing canoes, food, medicine, implements everything. 

 Fever smote them, and then starvation. All of them died 

 except one officer and two men, who were rescued months 

 later. Recently, in Guiana, a wilderness veteran, Andre, 

 lost two-thirds of his party by starvation. Genuine wilder- 

 ness exploration is as dangerous as warfare. The conquest 

 of wild nature demands the utmost vigor, hardihood, and 

 daring, and takes from the conquerors a heavy toll of life 

 and health. 



Lyra, Kermit, and Cherrie, with four of the men, 



