“When I did see a human face again, it gave me a start. I’d found a good spot in the jungle to rest in. The stream ran clear there, this stream I’d been following, and the bottom of it was sandy. One does not often find a place like that. Thinking of an ideal spot, you imagine a stream in the shade of a tree, with grass all about. But when you get your stream, there is often mud, and where there is shade there is no grass. Here there was everything; a pleasant kind of spot, and I didn’t move all day. I just rested and smoked and bathed my feet and watched the insects. It was quiet, too, still as midnight, and the sun never pierced the leafy roof. It was just a great, green arch like a cathedral, with smooth, lofty tree-trunks, chamber after chamber of green, and, what was specially fine, the place was clear of lianas. So I rested there and read an old newspaper I had picked up in Callao and brought along. I’d read it before dozens of times. Then my eyes would tire of the print, and I’d doze off. I did that dozens of times. The peace of the place was too much for me--too much both ways. The perfectness of it overcame me, and drove me to the little thing, the silly newspaper. “Once I woke with the notion that some one was watching me. What I saw gave me a shiver. There was a big flowering-bush not ten yards away. They were great red flowers, meat color, like raw beef, and right between two of the flowers, as if it was stuck in a cleft, was a man’s face, snag-toothed, red-bearded, shock-haired. It might have been a great ape. The eyes stared straight at me. Remember, I’d seen no natives for a long while, nor was there a settlement near, and it was a region as big as the State of Illinois, and no white man, I thought, had ever set foot there. Yet here was a face, and it was not the face of a native. I knew enough to keep still, and only peered through the narrowest slits I could make with my eyelids, so I judged that the face in the flower would think I slept. Believe me, I watched closely. “It moved my way, but cautiously as a snake, and I saw a hairy chest, a hairy human being, and stark. He came on hands and toes, and I knew that he was a fellow used to the jungle and no native. Noiselessly he came, not stirring leaf or blade, hardly. The smell of his body assailed me unpleasantly, for there were sweetly smelling spice-trees, and the human smell was rank as poison. “I sat up suddenly when the fellow was not more than five yards away. He stopped, rigid, expectant. Fear was in his eyes. Perhaps he saw it in mine. In such cases men hate each other. Each resents the presence of the other where white men should not be. Then he rose to his feet, turned without a word, his feet making no sound, and made for the flowering-bush again. I knew in a moment, somehow, that he was ashamed of his nakedness in the presence of another of his race. So I hailed him. At that he stood, regarding me with doubt.