THE RIVER OF MISFORTUNE. 95 
sandflies. We got into the canoe, a large 
boat-load, to explore its fishing. We started 
in the usual humour in which you engage on 
an agreeable adventure, and we paddled up the 
first reach talking and laughing and naming 
the birds. Our mood appeared to be that of 
those expecting a pleasant enterprise. True, a 
feeling of undefined apprehension lay heavy on 
me, but I put it down to the weather, and 
apparently my companions did not share it. 
When we got round the bend, however, and shut 
out the launch with its homely and comforting 
everyday life, it became clear that they did : for 
talk gradually died down, until silence fell on 
all, even on Pedroso the light-hearted. The 
air was hot and heavy. A sense of oppression 
lay on everything. There was not a sound 
except the growing roar of the falls, the scoop 
of the paddles, and the patter of the water 
under the bow. We seemed cut off from the 
world we knew. We had stepped suddenly from 
the familiar into the strange. The river was 
sinister. It had clearly fallen several yards 
in the last few days and had laid bare twenty 
or thirty feet of steep, glistening mud, scored 
here and there by the clumsy trail of the tapir, 
and thinly covered with an unwholesome looking 
water plant about a foot high, sickly green in 
colour. It thus ran through an immense mud 
trough, at the edges of which rose the forest, 
sombre and impenetrable. 
