Then, for the first time, the idea of their power seemed to strike them, and they precipitated themselves upon the porters, who took to flight, rolling from under their packs like animals of burden.  In a moment every article of baggage, every knife and weapon, was seized, and the red-skins, singing and howling, were making off through the woods.  Among them was now seen the Siriniri with orioles’ feathers, who must have guided them to their prey.

The expedition was pillaged, and pillaged as a joke.  The thieves were heard laughing as they scampered off like deer through the woods.

It was hard to realize at once the gravity of the misfortune.  No one was hurt, no one was insulted.  But provisions, clothing, articles of exchange and weapons were all gone, except such arms and ammunition as the travelers carried on their persons.  A collection of cinchonas was in possession of one of the Bolivians, though it represented but a fraction of the species discovered.  The besiegers, however, had disappeared, and a westerly march was taken up.  Good time was made that day, and a heavy night’s sleep was the consequence.  With the morning light came the well-remembered and hateful cry, and the little army found itself surrounded by a throng of merry naked demons, among whom were some who had not profited by the distribution of the spoils.  At the magic word siruta all these new-comers rushed in a mass upon the white men.  Marcoy managed to slip his fine ivory-handled machete within his trowser leg, but every other cutting tool disappeared as if by magic from the possession of the explorers.  The shooting-utensils the savages, believing them haunted, would not touch.  Then, half irritated at the exhaustion of the booty, the amiable children of Nature burst out into open derision.  The artists of the tribe, filling their palms with rocoa, and moistening the same with saliva, went up to their late patrons and began to decorate their faces.  The latter, judging patience their best policy, sat in silence while the delicate fancy of the savages expended itself in arabesques and flourishes.  Perez and Aragon had their eyes surrounded with red spectacles.  The face of Marcoy, covered with a heavy beard, only allowed room for a “W” on the forehead, and Pepe Garcia was quit for a set of interfacings like a checkerboard.  Having thus signed their marks upon their visitors, the aborigines retired, catching up here and there a stray ball of cord or a strip of beef, saluting with the hand, and vanishing into the woods with the repeated compliment, Eminiki—­“I am off.”

The victims rested motionless for fifteen minutes:  then pellmell, through the thickest of the brush and down the steepest of the hill, blotted out under gigantic ferns and covered by umbrageous vines, stealing along water-courses and skirting the sides of the mountains, they rushed precipitately westward.