NO FAITH IN THE COMPASS 
some animal we might shoot, but there was the silence of 
death all around us. Not a branch, not a leaf was moved 
by a living thing; no fruit of any kind was to be seen. 
Our appetite was keen, and it certainly had one good 
effect: it stopped Filippe’s fever and, in fact, cured it 
altogether. 
The two men tormented me the whole day, saying 
they had no faith in the compass: how could a brass box 
— that is what they called it — tell us where we could find 
feijao? It was beyond them to understand it. They be¬ 
moaned themselves incessantly, swearing at the day they 
had been persuaded to come with me and leave their happy 
homes in order to die of starvation in the forest with a mad 
Englishman! And why did we go across the forest at all, 
where there was no trail, when we could have gone down 
by the river on a trading boat? 
On September sixth it was all I could do to wake up 
my men. When they did wake, they would not get up, 
for they said the only object in getting up was to eat, and 
as there was nothing to eat there was no use in getting up. 
They wanted to remain there and die. 
I had to use a great deal of gentle persuasion, and 
even told them a big story: that my agulha or needle (the 
compass) was telling me that morning that there was 
plenty of feijao ahead of us. 
We struggled on, kilometre after kilometre, one or 
another of us collapsing under our loads every few hun¬ 
dred metres. We went over very hilly country, crossing 
eight hill ranges that day, with steep ravines between. 
In fact, all that country must once have been a low table¬ 
land which had been fissured and then eroded by water, 
leaving large cracks. At the bottom of each we found 
brooks and streamlets of delicious water. Of the eight 
rivulets found that day one only was fairly large. It fell 
in little cascades over rock. We could see no fish in its 
waters. 
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