it would
collect in a small pool. Then they would fell the tree and cut rings
in the bark at regular intervals so that the milk could flow out. In
a few days when the milk had coagulated, forming large patches of
caoutchouc, they would return for it. The pieces were washed in the
creek and then tied into large bundles ready for transporting.

In all they located more than 800 caoutchouc trees. At this time too I
made my remarkable discovery of gold deposits in the creek. It seems
to me now like the plot of some old morality play, for while we were
searching eagerly for the thing that we considered the ultimate goal
of human desires--wealth, the final master, Death, was closing his
net upon us day by day. Our food supply was nearly gone.

While strolling along the shores of the creek in search of game, I
noticed irregular clumps or nodules of clay which had accumulated in
large quantities in the bed of the stream, especially where branches
and logs had caused whirlpools and eddies to form. They had the
appearance of pebbles or stones, and were so heavy in proportion to
their size that my curiosity was aroused, and throwing one of them
on the bank I split it open with my machete. My weakened heart then
commenced to beat violently, for what I saw looked like gold.

I took the two pieces to my working table near our _tambo_, and
examining the dirty-yellow heart with my magnifying glass, I found the
following: A central mass about one cubic inch in size, containing
a quantity of yellowish grains measuring, say, one thirty-second of
an inch in diameter, slightly adhering to each other, but separating
upon pressure of the finger, and around this a thick layer of hard
clay or mud of somewhat irregular shape. It immediately struck me
that the yellow substance might be gold, though I could not account
for the presence of it in the centre of the clay-balls.

I carefully scraped the granules out of the clay, and washing them
clean, placed them on a sheet of paper to dry in the sun. By this
time the attention of the other men had been attracted to what I was
doing, and it seemed to amuse the brave fellows immensely to watch
my painstaking efforts with the yellow stuff. I produced some fine
scales I had for weighing chemicals for my photographic work, and
suspended these above a gourd filled with water. Then I went down to
the creek and collected more of the clay-balls and scraped the mud of
one away from the solid centre of what