“That was my worst hour,” said Courtland.  “I had gone up the Fly River in my steam launch to a point never previously reached by a European.  I was fortunate enough to get some specimens that had never been seen before, and I was returning to the coast.  My engineer and I were captured when ashore one night getting fuel for our furnace.  They took us into the forest a long way, binding our hands with the fiber of one of the creepers, and I had no trouble whatever gathering that it was their intention to make a feast of us—­a sort of high tea, it was to be, for they began brewing the herbs which I knew they used only when they were cannibalizing.  We were courteously permitted to watch these preparations, for it was rightly assumed that they would be in some degree interesting to us.  We were, indeed, greatly interested in all we saw, but much more so when, toward evening, a number of the natives arrived on the scene carrying with them some of the stores which they had found aboard the steam launch.  They broke open with a stone hatchet some tins of preserved meat, and seemed to enjoy the contents greatly.  The biscuits they didn’t care for much, and the cakes of soap which they began to eat could not honestly be said to be an entire success as comestibles.  But while we watched them at these hors d’oeuvres to the banquet at which we were expected to take a prominent part, a straggler came up with some reserve supplies; I saw them; tins of dynamite—­we carried dynamite for blowing up the snags that obstructed the narrower reaches of the river.  We watched the thieves crowd around the bearer of the tins, and we saw that the general impression that prevailed in regard to them was that they had come upon some of the most highly concentrated beef they had ever had in their hands.  When they laid the tins among the hot ashes of their fires and began to break them open with their stone hatchets, my engineer thought with me that all the interest there would be in the subsequent proceedings could not possibly compensate us for the waste of precious time which would be entailed by our remaining.  We bolted in spite of our fettered hands, but before we had got more than a couple of hundred yards from the camp, there took place the severest earthquake, coincidental with a thunderstorm and the salute of a battery of a thousand heavy guns.  We were whirled into the air like feathers in a breeze, but managed to cling—­our bonds being broken—­to some of the boughs among which we found ourselves.  Shortly afterward, a quarter of an hour or so, there came on the heaviest shower I had ever experienced.  Such a downpour of branches of trees, gnarled roots, broken fruits, birds’ feathers, mutilated apes of many species, and—­well, anatomical specimens!  It went on and on until the boughs around us were made into splinters and we were beaten to the ground with the force of those missiles, all the dense forest around us echoing to the shrieks of the lories and parrots, the monkeys and the wildcats.”