20 OUR SEARCH FOR A WILDERNESS. 



Monkeys are perfectly at home in this land of branches, 

 the ever-cautious capuchins and now and then a long-limbed 

 spider monkey swinging through the trees with as easy a 

 motion as the ihght of a bird. Biggest of all are the great 

 red howlers, who keep to the deeper, more narrow channels, 

 and in the evening and again at dawn send their voices to the 

 farthest limits of the mangro\'es. They do not howl, they 

 roar, and the sound is perfectly suited to such a wilderness 

 as this. Before the first signs of day light up the east, a low, 

 soft moaning comes through the forest, like the forewarning 

 s>i a storm through pine trees. This gains in volume and 

 depth until it becomes a roar. It is no wind now, nor like 

 anything one ever hears in the north; it is a deep, grating, 

 rumbling roar — a \'oice of the tropics; a hint of the long-past 

 ages when speech was yet unformed. We grew to Ioa'c the 

 rhythm of this wild music, and it will always be for us the 

 memory-awakening sound of the tropical wilderness. 



The wealth of life in this region was evident when we 

 began to explore a river flowing down from the highlands 

 in the far-distant interior of \'enczuela. One could spend 

 a year here and not begin to e.xhaust the wonders on every 

 hand. 



With every high tide the Captain would pull up anchor and 

 shift our craft a little upstream, until at last our keel touched 

 bottom and we could go no farther. We anchored firmly 

 and buoyed ourselves by ropes to the nearest trees so as to 

 keep on an even keel. This, our home for a time, was in a 

 little bight of the Guarapiche (War-ah-pcc'diy) River, where 

 two tumbled-down, long deserted Indian huts still retained 

 the name of La Ceiba. We were so close to the left bank 

 that at low tide we could walk ashore on oars laid down 

 over the mud. Here the birds came and fed and bathed, 

 here the howling monkeys roared over our very heads and 

 Macaws swung and shrieked at us. 



