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If any place ever lay out of the world, and was proud of itself for doing so, this little village of Aber-Aydyr must have been very near it. The village was built, as the people expressed it, of thirty cottages, one public-house, one shop universal, and two chapels. The torrent of the Aydyr entered with a roar of rapids, and at the lower end departed in a thunder of cascades.
Its numerous falls and rapids are such as seem to invite the engineer's level rather than the pencil of the tourist; and the mason who piles up the huge brick fabrics at their feet is seldom, I suspect, troubled with sentimental remorse or poetical misgivings.
But, though we might have had deeper water farther out, I believe that no part of the rapids is very deep. The river is spread out more than a mile, and the water flows rapidly over the rocky bottom. The portions only three hundred yards wide are very deep, and contain large volumes of flowing water in narrow compass, which, when spread over the much larger surface at the rapids, must be shallow.
They made what is known as the Mirror Landing portage in a York boat which happened to be above the rapids of the Little Slave River, where a wagon portage usually is made of some fifteen or sixteen miles. Here on the Athabasca they found yet another steamboat lying alongshore, and waiting for the royal mails from Peace River Landing.
A native called to us from the left bank, and said that a man on his side knew how to pray to the Kariba gods, and advised us to hire him to pray for our safety, while we were going down the rapids, or we should certainly all be drowned. No one ever risked his life in Kariba without first paying the river-doctor, or priest, for his prayers.
Colonel Rondon said that in many villages where he had been on the lower Madeira the people had built stockaded enclosures in the water in which they bathed, not venturing to swim in the open water for fear of the piraiba and the big cayman. Next day, April 8, we made five kilometres only, as there was a succession of rapids.
What a river it was now, this unbridled Salagua which had been their moat and rampart for so many years! Its waters flowed thin and impotent over the rapids, lying in clear pools against the base of the black cliffs, and the current that had uprooted trees like feathers was turned aside by a snag.
Chiefly he saw himself splashing into the rapids and whirling down them to the Fall, clutching and drowning, but also he had a vision of being hopelessly in the air, going fast and unable to ground.
Five of the officers took their stations at each end of the portage, which was between three and four miles in length; a number of men mounted guard at short distances along the heights immediately overlooking the river, while the residue, thus protected from surprise, employed themselves below in dragging up the barges and canoes, and carrying up the goods along the narrow margin of the rapids.
And who can run a stretch of water like the one ahead yender, with his eyes blinded? No, boy, we must git there ahead of the fire, for we can't run the rapids in the smoke. Here," he added, "ye be pullin' a murderin' stroke, and it's best that I spell ye. Down with ye, pups, down with ye, and lie still as a frozen otter while the boy comes over ye."
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