ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
My men were tired; they said they could stand the 
work no more, and they wanted to remain there and die. 
It took much persuasion to make them come on. I 
succeeded principally by giving them a good example, 
carrying down most of the loads that day myself from the 
upper end of the rapid to the lower, a distance of several 
hundred metres. I was getting tired, too, of carrying the 
heavy loads, but I never let my men see it; that would 
have been fatal. 
The river was divided into two channels by a group of 
islands which must at one time have been one great tri¬ 
angular one, subsequently worn by parallel and transverse 
channels into seven islands. The first, most southerly, 
was 300 metres broad, 150 metres long, and of a triangular 
shape. The three immediately behind this, and of irregu¬ 
lar shapes, had an average length of some 700 metres; 
whereas the last group of three, all of elongated shapes, 
had a length of 300 metres each. I was getting to the 
end of the list of names for all those islands, and I was 
at a loss to find seven names all of a sudden, so I called 
the group the Seven Sisters Islands. At the end of the 
group the river narrowed to 400 metres in width between 
a long island to the west and the right bank, and flowed 
due north for 12,000 metres in a direct line, indeed a most 
beautiful sight. Fifteen hundred metres down that dis¬ 
tance a great barrier of columnar or cylindrical rocks stuck 
out of the water from west-southwest to east-northeast. 
North of those rocks on the left side, upon the island, 
not less than 5,000 metres long, Lunghissima Island, was 
a beautiful yellow sand beach, 200 metres long, which 
formed a separate islet with trees upon its northerly half. 
Numerous rocks obstructed the east side (right) of 
the river. 
Farther on, another lovely sandy islet, 100 metres long, 
had formed behind a number of rocks, and was of a clean, 
beautiful yellowish white, with a few shrubs and trees 
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