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Updated: May 31, 2025
Sumichrast told us that we had scarcely three hundred feet more to ascend, and shouldered the basket himself. Now that I was a mere spectator, I could readily forgive him his fit of merriment. Nothing, in fact, could be more grotesque than the contortions he went through trying to keep his balance. L'Encuerado was the only one who retained his countenance.
Its cry a sort of clucking of which its Spanish name gives an idea tells the traveller its whereabout, although it is ready enough in making its escape. L'Encuerado returned to the bivouac, and Sumichrast led us along the edge of a ravine, obstructed by bushes and shaded by large trees.
"According to this," interposed l'Encuerado, "the pebbles ought to melt in the rivers." "So they do; but they do not melt so easily as some things sugar, for instance. Don't you recollect that in the Rio Blanco the water is almost like milk, and that it leaves a whitish coating on the branches, and even on the leaves with which it comes in contact."
The more l'Encuerado cried out to him, urging him to persevere, the louder the boy laughed. The brave Indian, who was under the full belief that an evil spirit must necessarily abandon a body placed upside down, seized the legs of his young master and shook him violently as if he was emptying a sack.
Thus l'Encuerado, whom the evening before we had seen braving tigers, crocodiles, and wild cattle, now trembled at the mere idea of facing an inoffensive animal, which was only a relation of the peccaries, with a snout terminated by a non-prehensile proboscis, yet to which his imagination attributed certain demoniac qualities.
As there was water in the cave, l'Encuerado offered to go in and fetch some; but the smoke which escaped from the hole made me feel anxious, so, for the time, I opposed the Indian's re-descending into it. We were surprised at the time our exploration had lasted; it had taken no less than four hours.
About a glassful of limpid fluid flowed from it into the calabash. "Can we get water from this shrub by merely pressing it?" asked Lucien, with surprise. "All that is needed is to bend it," I replied. "It treasures up the precious dew between its leaves, and l'Encuerado and I should have died of thirst in one of our expeditions if it had not been for this plant."
One beetle, indeed, seized hold of the hand of the mischievous wag, whose grimaces much amused us; as fast as he disengaged one of the insect's claws, the creature which possessed six soon found a chance to cling on with others. Annoyed at having to strive with such a paltry enemy, l'Encuerado at last tore the beetle roughly away, but the blood flowed from his bronze-colored skin.
The next day found us at work building our raft, and l'Encuerado went off with Lucien in quest of some flexible creepers, to be used for binding together the various portions of it. When our companions joined us, Sumichrast was squaring out the last trunks.
L'Encuerado and Sumichrast smoothed the planks with the help of two woodman's hatchets, while I cut pegs, all laboring without intermission until the next evening. A little before sunset we had succeeded in making two large and tolerably light boxes, a task which, without proper tools, was more difficult than any one could suppose who had not undertaken it.
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