out; every hour of work in the rapids is fraught with the possibility of the gravest disaster, and yet it is imperatively necessary to attempt it; and all this is done in an uninhabited wilderness, or else a wilderness tenanted only by unfriendly savages, where failure to get through means death by disease and starvation.  Wholesale disasters to South American exploring parties have been frequent.  The first recent effort to descend one of the unknown rivers to the Amazon from the Brazilian highlands resulted in such a disaster.  It was undertaken in 1889 by a party about as large as ours under a Brazilian engineer officer, Colonel Telles Peres.  In descending some rapids they lost everything—­ canoes, food, medicine, implements—­everything.  Fever smote them, and then starvation.  All of them died except one officer and two men, who were rescued months later.  Recently, in Guiana, a wilderness veteran, Andre, lost two-thirds of his party by starvation.  Genuine wilderness exploration is as dangerous as warfare.  The conquest of wild nature demands the utmost vigor, hardihood, and daring, and takes from the conquerors a heavy toll of life and health.

Lyra, Kermit, and Cherrie, with four of the men, worked the canoes half-way down the canyon.  Again and again it was touch and go whether they could get by a given point.  At one spot the channel of the furious torrent was only fifteen yards across.  One canoe was lost, so that of the seven with which we had started only two were left.  Cherrie labored with the other men at times, and also stood as guard over them, for, while actually working, of course no one could carry a rifle.  Kermit’s experience in bridge building was invaluable in enabling him to do the rope work by which alone it was possible to get the canoes down the canyon.  He and Lyra had now been in the water for days.  Their clothes were never dry.  Their shoes were rotten.  The bruises on their feet and legs had become sores.  On their bodies some of the insect bites had become festering wounds, as indeed was the case with all of us.  Poisonous ants, biting flies, ticks, wasps, bees were a perpetual torment.  However, no one had yet been bitten by a venomous serpent, a scorpion, or a centipede, although we had killed all of the three within camp limits.

Under such conditions whatever is evil in men’s natures comes to the front.  On this day a strange and terrible tragedy occurred.  One of the camaradas, a man of pure European blood, was the man named Julio, of whom I have already spoken.  He was a very powerful fellow and had been importunately eager to come on the expedition; and he had the reputation of being a good worker.  But, like so many men of higher standing, he had had no idea of what such an expedition really meant, and under the strain of toil, hardship, and danger his nature showed its true depths of selfishness, cowardice, and ferocity.  He shirked all work.  He shammed sickness.  Nothing could make him do his share; and yet unlike