On the following morning, having breakfasted and completed their preparations for immediate departure, the two young Englishmen, feeling strangely lonely, walked over to the spot where the funeral pyre had been built, and inspected what remained of it. They found that it had been completely consumed, to the very last twig; and upon searching among the white ashes they found a calcined skull and a few fragments of the larger bones. These they gathered carefully together and reverently buried; after which, having now done all that was possible to preserve the remains of their late friend from desecration, they returned to the camp, embarked in their canoe, and resumed their voyage down the river. The following fortnight proved quite uneventful for our two adventurers; they journeyed on down the river at an average rate of about twenty miles a day, and from time to time encountered rapids or cataracts, or both together, shooting most of the former, and, of course, being compelled to carry the canoe down past the latter; but they had by this time become so thoroughly accustomed to the negotiation of rapids and waterfalls that they had long since ceased to regard the passage of one or the other as an adventure. True, they saw a few Indians occasionally; but these generally beat a hasty retreat when the white men appeared, and remained concealed until the canoe and its two occupants, now garbed like savages in the skins of beasts, had disappeared round the next bend in the river. As foretold by Vilcamapata, they reached the "much mightier river"--the Maranon--on the afternoon of the twelfth day, and there their pleasant journeying with the current ceased; henceforward the current would again be their enemy, instead of their friend as it had been of late, and every inch of progress would have to be won either with the assistance of the sail or by arduous toil with the paddle. Luckily for them, they had had the prescience to bring the sail along with them when they found themselves obliged to abandon the boat, and now they reaped the full reward of their labours, and were glad that they had resisted the often-repeated temptation to leave it behind when they encountered some exceptionally difficult bit of road.