The time passed all too quickly with each day spent on the Guarapiche river—a gleaming stage, with a setting of green trees, brilliant flowers and fragrant orchids, and an ever-changing plot with ever-changing actors. Of them all, man was the least important. There were populous villages of Hoatzins and great wandering tribes of Scarlet Ibises and Plovers; Herons, much occupied with their unsocial and taciturn calling as fishermen, stood silent and solitary in secluded pools. With all this wild life the river teemed. It was only with the rising and falling of the tide that man entered upon the scene; and so quietly, so much a part of nature, that one hardly felt any difference between him and the forest folk. In a silently, swiftly moving _curiara_ he would glide under the shadows of the overhanging mangroves. Sometimes the _curiara_ would be a merchant vessel, laden with ollas, fruit, etc., with its destination Maturin, many miles away in the interior. Again its only occupant was a fisherman, as silent as the Herons themselves. Like a Heron also he would station himself near a shady pool, and sit all day, motionless save for the changing of bait or the pulling in of a fish. With the turning of the tide the line would be drawn up, the fish covered with cool green leaves and the _curiara_ would move away, the bronze figure of its owner skilfully guiding it up the winding river. [Illustration: FIG. 44. THE SILENT SAVAGES.] Occasionally the fisherman was accompanied by his squaw, hardly to be distinguished from him, and in the bow there was often the little naked figure of a child playing with a mite of a tame monkey, or both sound asleep with their arms wrapped about each other. All that these simple folk ask of life is one fish to eat, another with which to buy cassava and a yard of cotton cloth. In the brief tropical twilight we would hastily make preparations for the night, spreading our air-beds on deck, hanging over them a white mosquito canopy and putting our electric flashlight and revolver at hand. After the first two nights we had abandoned the cabin, which had added to its other discomforts the fact that all the mosquitoes of the caño had selected it as their abode. Never were nights more beautiful than those which we spent on the deck of that little sloop, and never was sleep more dreamless and peaceful.