To settle the point they decided to go on through the woods until they reached the head of the rapids, and there inspect the trees with the view of ascertaining whether there were any suitable for the construction of a canoe; and having come to this decision, they left the rock and re-entered the forest. For more than half an hour they were so busily engaged in forcing and hewing their way through the dense, parasitical undergrowth that they had no attention to spare for anything else; but at length they became conscious of certain discordant sounds, reaching their ears above the roar of the rapids, which presently became distinguishable as the beating of drums, mingled with a sort of braying bellow, comparable to nothing that they had ever heard before. As the pair pressed on, the unearthly sounds gradually grew louder, not only because they were approaching the source of them but also because it was evident that the producers of the sounds were becoming more excited, for the tapping of the drums increased in rapidity while the braying as steadily grew in stridency and discord. Another five minutes of strenuous labour then the two Englishmen burst through the last of the undergrowth and emerged upon a cleared space of about a hundred acres on the bank of the river just above the rapids. At this point the river widened out again to about the space of half a mile from bank to bank, the gorge being about a hundred yards below, and the current was again gentle enough to render paddling against it an easy matter. A small strip of shingly beach was dotted with some forty or fifty canoes, each hewn out of a single log; and adjoining the beach, scattered over a space of about five acres of ground, was a native village consisting of about fifty palm-leaf huts, dotted about without the slightest attempt at symmetrical arrangement, except that they were built round an open space. The remainder of the clearing consisted of cultivated ground divided into patches devoted in about equal proportions to cassava and maize, with a little indigo here and there. A whole forest of slender poles, connected with each other by lianas, from which large quantities of fish were suspended, drying in the sun, and which, by the way, gave off a most intolerable odour, indicated that the inhabitants depended as much upon the river as upon the soil for their subsistence.