NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
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 guns nor ammunition 
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 
