316 TO THE AMAZON AND HOME [chap, x 



He was most kind and hospitable, and gave us another 

 boat to replace the last of our shovel-nosed dugouts. 

 The large, open house was cool, clean, and comfortable. 



With these began a series of half a dozen sets of rapids, 

 all coming within the next dozen kilometres, and all 

 offering very real obstacles. At one we saw the graves 

 of four men who had perished therein ; and many more 

 had died whose bodies were never recovered ; the toU of 

 human life had been heavy. Had we been still on an 

 unknown river, pioneering our own way, it would doubt- 

 less have taken us at least a fortnight of labour and peril 

 to pass. But it actually took only a day and a half. 

 All the channels were known, all the trails cut. Senhor 

 Caripe, a first-class waterman — cool, fearless, and brawny 

 as a bull — came with us as guide. Half a dozen times 

 the loads were taken out and carried down. At one 

 cataract the canoes were themselves dragged overland ; 

 elsewhere they were run down empty, shipping a good 

 deal of water. At the foot of the cataract, where we 

 dragged the canoes overland, we camped for the night. 

 Here Kermit shot a big cayman. Our camp was along- 

 side the graves of three men who at this point had 

 perished in the swift water. 



Senhor Caripe told us many strange adventures of 

 rubber-workers he had met or employed. One of his 

 men, working on the Gy-Parana, got lost, and after 

 twenty-eight days found himself on the Madeirainha, 

 which he thus discovered. He was in excellent health, 

 for he had means to start a fire, and he found abundance 

 of Brazil-nuts and big land-tortoises. Senhor Caripe 

 said that the rubber-men now did not go above the 

 ninth degree, or thereabouts, on the upper Aripuanan 

 proper, having found the rubber poor on the reaches 

 above. A year previously five rubber-men, Mundurucu 



