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Updated: June 12, 2025
Never was any artist more devoted to his medium, whether that medium were water colours or progressive harmonies, than was Professor Opdyke to his balances and his blow-pipes, to his effervescent mixtures and to his most unholy smells.
They were clad in somewhat scanty garments a sort of kilt of matting, ornamented with feathers, round their waists, their cheeks and body painted with red and yellow. They were, however, pleasant-looking men. They had quivers at their backs, and long tubes, which I soon found to be blow-pipes, in their hands.
All the regiment marched back to guard them, and the hairy enemy, armed with blow-pipes, rejoiced in the forest. Five of the crew had died, but there lined up on the Governor's verandah two-and-twenty men marked about the legs with the scars of leech-bites.
Blow-pipes and retorts, crucibles and jars, porcelain and glass vessels, of all odd sorts and shapes, confronted them on tables and shelves, and seated before small furnaces, with gauze protectors for their faces and metal ones for their knees, and queer little rubber gloves for their hands, were the very queerest of all the elves Leo had yet seen.
The upper part consisted of a rim of the red wood of the japura, highly polished; and it was secured over the shoulder by a belt ornamented with coloured fringes and tassels of cotton. We afterwards saw blow-pipes formed in a different way, two stems of small palms being selected, of different sizes, the smaller exactly to fit inside the larger.
With a roar that rebounded from the face of the high cliff and echoed through the valley like a peal of thunder, he sprang out and rushed at the savages in front, who scattered like chaff right and left. But at the same instant fifty blow-pipes sent their poisoned shafts into his body, and, after a few convulsive bounds, the splendid monarch of the American forests fell dead on the ground.
They have not much muscular force, as I have said, but they are second to none in enduring fatigue, especially in the case of long marches, to which they are well accustomed as every day they walk about 20 miles, carrying upon their shoulders the by no means light product of the chase, together with the various roots and bulbs they find in the forest, as well as their inseparable blow-pipes and well-filled quivers.
We were some time in sight of the village, the whole inhabitants of which we saw moving off, the men stalking first, with their bows and spears in their hands and their blow-pipes at their backs, and the women following, bending under the weight of the loads they carried. Even the children, except the smallest, who sat on their mother's backs or were led by the hand, carried packages.
With the bamboo the inhabitants build their houses, and erect a pretty kind of fence around their farms. The peasantry make with it sweet-sounding flutes; it furnishes them also with drinking-cups, water-buckets, and bird-cages, chairs and baskets, blow-pipes and arrows.
We had been told of how cunningly the Germans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electric wires so that every strand had to be retraced to and from its source, how they had turned the course of water pipes, all over the ship, how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted nuts and rods far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how they had scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not make steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, a floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country as they went to their training camps.
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