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Updated: June 8, 2025
No signs could be gained from what they heard, and none from what they saw. They were now passing through the very depth of the forest a tropical forest, with the trees meeting overhead, and not a speck of sky visible through the interwoven branches, loaded with their thick festoons of leaves and lianas.
Everything was bright, the climate, too, was fighting for us; and then, Andrés, we lost man after man, the bravest, the youngest, first: they were murdered, as I may be tonight, killed among the lianas, overtaken in the villages, smothered in small detachments by great forces, until now. And it is for that I have said so much, when it is unnecessary to pronounce a word.
After breakfast, a great number of short poles were cut and were laid crosswise on the path, and then three light montarias which we had brought with us were dragged up the bank by lianas, and rolled away to be embarked on the pool. A large net, seventy yards in length, was then disembarked and carried to the place.
How difficult an enterprise this was, you, Sir, are well aware, who know how thickly the banks of the rivers are beset with trees, underwood, herbage and lianas, and that it is often necessary to cut one's way. They returned to their hut, took what provisions they had left behind, and began their journey.
“How can he see them?” Stephen asked. “He does not see them, señor, he feels them. He holds his bow at arm’s-length before him, and so touches even the smallest of the lianas; the large ones he can see plainly enough, and so could he the small ones were they level with the eye. It is those that are but a foot or two above the ground that are dangerous.”
I spent the day hunting in the woods, for the most part by the river, but saw nothing. In the season of the rains game is away from the river and fish are scarce and turtles absent. Yet it was pleasant to be in the great silent forest. Here and there grew immense trees, and on some of them mighty buttresses sprang from the base. The lianas and vines were of every size and shape.
From the absence of undergrowth and of lianas stretching from tree to tree anywhere low down, Stephen came to the conclusion that they were following what was in the dry season a track through the forest. The Indians were quite young men, and laughed and talked without any of the gravity that distinguished the older men among the natives.
A forester could easily see that no woodman had been there with his hatchet or ax, for the effects of a clearing are visible for many centuries afterward. If the new trees are even a hundred years old, the general aspect still differs from what it was originally, for the lianas and other parasitic plants alter, and signs remain which no native can misunderstand.
It moved and paused like the first, but the recurrent scrutiny of the farther gloom by its paddlers was that of men who saw only a meaningless, monotonous bulk of buttresses and trunks and tangle of looping lianas. In this dimness and bewildering chaos the trio might as well have been blind. The eyes of the tiny fleet were in the first boat. The progress of the dugouts was almost stealthy.
To step aside from a thing even for a hundred yards in this terrible place was to lose it; even the rubber collectors, from whom the forest holds few secrets have, in these thick places, to blaze a trail by breaking branches, tying lianas and marking tree trunks. "True," said Berselius in a weary voice, "we have lost even that." "No matter," said Adams, "we have got a guide.
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