day's
rations for six men, our number. But we made each box last a day and a
half, or at times two days, and in addition we gave some of the food
to the camaradas. It was only on the rare occasions when we had killed
some monkeys or curassows, or caught some fish, that everybody had
enough. We would have welcomed that tapir. So far the game, fish, and
fruit had been too scarce to be an element of weight in our food
supply. In an exploring trip like ours, through a difficult and
utterly unknown country, especially if densely forested, there is
little time to halt, and game cannot be counted on. It is only in
lands like our own West thirty years ago, like South Africa in the
middle of the last century, like East Africa to-day that game can be
made the chief food supply. On this trip our only substantial food
supply from the country hitherto had been that furnished by the
palmtops. Two men were detailed every day to cut down palms for food.

A kilometre and a half after leaving this camp we came on a stretch of
big rapids. The river here twists in loops, and we had heard the
roaring of these rapids the previous afternoon. Then we passed out of
earshot of them; but Antonio Correa, our best waterman, insisted all
along that the roaring meant rapids worse than any we had encountered
for some days. "I was brought up in the water, and I know it like a
fish, and all its sounds," said he. He was right. We had to carry the
loads nearly a kilometre that afternoon, and the canoes were pulled
out on the bank so that they might be in readiness to be dragged
overland next day. Rondon, Lyra, Kermit, and Antonio Correa explored
both sides of the river. On the opposite or left bank they found the
mouth of a considerable river, bigger than the Rio Kermit, flowing in
from the west and making its entrance in the middle of the rapids.
This river we christened the Taunay, in honor of a distinguished
Brazilian, an explorer, a soldier, a senator, who was also a writer of
note. Kermit had with him two of his novels, and I had read one of his
books dealing with a disastrous retreat during the Paraguayan
war.

Next morning, the 25th, the canoes were brought down. A path was
chopped for them and rollers laid; and half-way down the rapids Lyra
and Kermit, who were overseeing the work as well as doing their share
of the pushing and hauling, got them into a canal of smooth water,
which saved much severe labor. As our food supply lowered we were
con