er than half a mile long. They glanced
about them and saw that the trees were here, as everywhere along the
river bank, thickly draped with long, thin, tough lianas, and the same
idea flashed into both their minds at the same moment: why should they
not twist or plait a warp of lianas? There were plenty of them, and,
after all, it merely resolved itself into a question of time, while
time, just then, was of less importance to them than labour. There was
an alternative, of course, they might abandon the boat and construct a
canoe above the rapids; and it was worth considering whether the
construction of a canoe or the making of a warp would involve the more
labour. To settle the point they decided to go on through the woods
until they reached the head of the rapids, and there inspect the trees
with the view of ascertaining whether there were any suitable for the
construction of a canoe; and having come to this decision, they left the
rock and re-entered the forest.

For more than half an hour they were so busily engaged in forcing and
hewing their way through the dense, parasitical undergrowth that they
had no attention to spare for anything else; but at length they became
conscious of certain discordant sounds, reaching their ears above the
roar of the rapids, which presently became distinguishable as the
beating of drums, mingled with a sort of braying bellow, comparable to
nothing that they had ever heard before. As the pair pressed on, the
unearthly sounds gradually grew louder, not only because they were
approaching the source of them but also because it was evident that the
producers of the sounds were becoming more excited, for the tapping of
the drums increased in rapidity while the braying as steadily grew in
stridency and discord. Another five minutes of strenuous labour then
the two Englishmen burst through the last of the undergrowth and emerged
upon a cleared space of about a hundred acres on the bank of the river
just above the rapids. At this point the river widened out again to
about the space of half a mile from bank to bank, the gorge being about
a hundred yards below, and the current was again gentle enough to render
paddling against it an easy matter. A small strip of shingly beach was
dotted with some forty or fifty canoes, each hewn out of a single log;
and adjoining the beach, scattered over a space of about five acres of
ground, was a native village consisting of about fifty palm-leaf huts,