Down an Unknown River 301 



now come to it. Before white men came to South Amer- 

 ica there had already existed therein various semiciviliza- 

 tions, some rude, others fairly advanced, which rose, 

 flourished, and persisted through immemorial ages, and 

 then vanished. The vicissitudes in the history of hu- 

 manity during its stay on this southern continent have 

 been as strange, varied, and inexplicable as paleontology 

 shows to have been the case, on the same continent, in 

 the history of the higher forms of animal life during the 

 age of mammals. Colonel Rondon stated that such fig- 

 ures as these are not found anywhere else in Matto 

 Grosso where he has been, and therefore it was all the 

 more strange to find them in this one place on the un- 

 known river, never before visited by white men, which 

 we were descending. 



Next morning we went about three kilometers before 

 coming to some steep hills, beautiful to look upon, clad 

 as they were in dense, tall, tropical forest, but ominous 

 of new rapids. Sure enough, at their foot we had to 

 haul up and prepare for a long portage. The canoes we 

 ran down empty. Even so, we were within an ace of 

 losing two, the lashed couple in which I ordinarily jour- 

 neyed. In a sharp bend of the rapids, between two big 

 curls, they were swept among the bowlders and under 

 the matted branches which stretched out from the bank. 

 They filled, and the racing current pinned them where 

 they were, one partly on the other. All of us had to help 

 get them clear. Their fastenings were chopped asunder 

 with axes. Kermit and half a dozen of the men, stripped 

 to the skin, made their way to a small rock island in the 

 little falls just above the canoes, and let down a rope 



