hed the bank, and
the Indians, furnished with long poles, began to sound every part of the
river at the base of the bluff which had served for the scene of combat.

The place had been easily recognized. A track of blood stained the
declivity in its chalky part, and ran perpendicularly down it into the
water; and there many a clot scattered on the reeds indicated the very
spot where the corpse had disappeared.

About fifty feet down stream a point jutted out from the riverside and
kept back the waters in a kind of eddy, as in a large basin. There was
no current whatever near the shore, and the reeds shot up out of the
river unbent. Every hope then existed that Torres' body had not been
carried away by the main stream. Where the bed of the river showed
sufficient slope, it was perhaps possible for the corpse to have rolled
several feet along the ridge, and even there no effect of the current
could be traced.

The ubas and the pirogues, dividing the work among them, limited the
field of their researches to the extreme edge of the eddy, and from
the circumference to the center the crews' long poles left not a single
point unexplored. But no amount of sounding discovered the body of the
adventurer, neither among the clumps of reeds nor on the bottom of the
river, whose slope was then carefully examined.

Two hours after the work had begun they had been led to think that
the body, having probably struck against the declivity, had fallen off
obliquely and rolled beyond the limits of this eddy, where the action of
the current commenced to be felt.

"But that is no reason why we should despair," said Manoel, "still less
why we should give up our search."

"Will it be necessary," exclaimed Benito, "to search the river
throughout its breadth and its length?"

"Throughout its breadth, perhaps," answered Araujo, "throughout its
length, no--fortunately."

"And why?" asked Manoel.

"Because the Amazon, about a mile away from its junction with the Rio
Negro, makes a sudden bend, and at the same time its bed rises, so that
there is a kind of natural barrier, well known to sailors as the Bar of
Frias, which things floating near the surface are alone able to clear.
In short, the currents are ponded back, and they cannot possibly have
any effect over this depression."

This was fortunate, it must be admitted. But was Araujo mistaken? The
old pilot of the Amazon could be relied on. For the thirty years that he
had followed his