Amyas had no wish to stay where he was longer than was absolutely necessary to bring up the sick men from the Orinoco; but this, he well knew, would be a journey probably of some months, and attended with much danger.

Cary volunteered at once, however, to undertake the adventure, if half-a-dozen men would join him, and the Indians would send a few young men to help in working the canoe:  but this latter item was not an easy one to obtain; for the tribe with whom they now were, stood in some fear of the fierce and brutal Guahibas, through whose country they must pass; and every Indian tribe, as Amyas knew well enough, looks on each tribe of different language to itself as natural enemies, hateful, and made only to be destroyed wherever met.  This strange fact, too, Amyas and his party attributed to delusion of the devil, the divider and accuser; and I am of opinion that they were perfectly right:  only let Amyas take care that while he is discovering the devil in the Indians, he does not give place to him in himself, and that in more ways than one.  But of that more hereafter.

Whether, however, it was pride or shyness which kept the maiden aloof, she conquered it after a while; perhaps through mere woman’s curiosity; and perhaps, too, from mere longing for amusement in a place so unspeakably stupid as the forest.  She gave the English to understand, however, that though they all might be very important personages, none of them was to be her companion but Amyas.  And ere a month was past, she was often hunting with him far and wide in the neighboring forest, with a train of chosen nymphs, whom she had persuaded to follow her example and spurn the dusky suitors around.  This fashion, not uncommon, perhaps, among the Indian tribes, where women are continually escaping to the forest from the tyranny of the men, and often, perhaps, forming temporary communities, was to the English a plain proof that they were near the land of the famous Amazons, of whom they had heard so often from the Indians; while Amyas had no doubt that, as a descendant of the Incas, the maiden preserved the tradition of the Virgins of the Sun, and of the austere monastic rule of the Peruvian superstition.  Had not that valiant German, George of Spires, and Jeronimo Ortal too, fifty years before, found convents of the Sun upon these very upper waters?

So a harmless friendship sprang up between Amyas and the girl, which soon turned to good account.  For she no sooner heard that he needed a crew of Indians, than she consulted the Piache, assembled the tribe, and having retired to her hut, commenced a song, which (unless the Piache lied) was a command to furnish young men for Cary’s expedition, under penalty of the sovereign displeasure of an evil spirit with an unpronounceable name—­an argument which succeeded on the spot, and the canoe departed on its perilous errand.

John Brimblecombe had great doubts whether a venture thus started by direct help and patronage of the fiend would succeed; and Amyas himself, disliking the humbug, told Ayacanora that it would be better to have told the tribe that it was a good deed, and pleasing to the Good Spirit.