No more gloomy spot could have been selected for a camp than that sandy terrace, encompassed by rocks and hemmed in narrowly by those dark woods, which rose from the river's edge to the height of 600 feet, and pent in the never-ceasing uproar created by the writhing and tortured stream and the twin cataracts, that ever rivalled each other's thunder. The imagination shudders at the hapless position of those crippled men, who were doomed to remain inactive, to listen every moment to the awful sound of that irreconcilable fury of wrathful waters, and the monotonous and continuous roar of plunging rivers, to watch the leaping waves, coiling and twisting into changing columns as they ever wrestled for mastery with each other, and were dashed in white fragments of foam far apart by the ceaseless force of driven currents; to gaze at the dark, relentless woods spreading upward and around, standing perpetually fixed in dull green, mourning over past ages, past times, and past generations; then think of the night, with its palpable blackness, the dead black shadows of the wooded hills, that eternal sound of fury, that ceaseless boom of the cataracts, the indefinite forms born of nervousness and fearfulness, that misery engendered by loneliness and creeping sense of abandonment; then will be understood something of the true position of these poor men. And what of us trudging up these wooded slopes to gain the crest of the forest uplands, to tramp on and on, whither we knew not, for how long a time we dared not think, seeking for food with the double responsibility weighing us down for these trustful, brave fellows with us, and for those, no less brave and trustful, whom we had left behind at the bottom of the horrible cañon! As I looked at the poor men struggling wearily onward it appeared to me as though a few hours only were needed to ensure our fate. One day, perhaps two days, and then life would ebb away. How their eyes searched the wild woods for the red berries of the phrynia, and the tartish, crimson, and oblong fruit of the amoma! How they rushed for the flat beans of the forest, and gloated over their treasures of fungi! In short, nothing was rejected in this severe distress to which we were reduced except leaves and wood. We passed several abandoned clearings; and some men chopped down pieces of banana stalk, then searched for wild herbs to make potage, the bastard jack fruit, or the _fenessi_, and other huge fruit became dear objects of interest as we straggled on. "Return we could not, nor Continue where we were; to shift our place Was to exchange one misery with another. And every day that came, came to decay A day's work in us.