The explorer smiled, “As Colonel Maidley would say, ‘rawther’,” he replied. “I don’t suppose I’m up-to-date, but it is something of a hobby with me.”
“Gee, that’s bully!” cried Tom. “Did Dad tell you about our subsea radio?”
Once started on this subject the two boys and Mr. Thorne forgot all else and held an animated conversation which continued without cessation until they reached the little river steamer and the boys’ interests were aroused by new sights.
Never had the two boys seen such an odd, many colored cosmopolitan crowd as thronged the “stelling” and the boat. Swathed in cotton, bare-legged and with their heads covered with immense turbans of red, white, or green the East Indian men stalked about. There were Parsees with their odd embroidered hats; Brahmins with the painted marks of holy men upon their foreheads; fakirs in rags, with long matted hair and beards, carrying their highly polished brass begging bowls and their goatskins as their total possessions; fat, sleek “Baboos” in silk, protecting their turbaned heads under huge, green umbrellas; and East Indian women by the score, ablaze with color and laden down with heavy barbaric jewelry, their wrists, ankles and arms encircled by scores of heavy bands and rings of beaten silver and gold, their sleek, black hair bound with dangling silver and jeweled ornaments, huge golden hoops in their noses--clad, besides, in brilliant embroidered jackets, fluttering gauze veils and silken draperies. A chattering, dark-hued throng that transformed the spot to a bit of India. Back and forth among them, elbowed the big, burly negroes--“pork knockers,” as Mr. Thorne called them--each carrying his “battell” or gold pan strapped to his pack and all bound for the gold and diamond diggings. Chinese there were too, prosperous merchants in European garments; farmers with huge, saucerlike hats, loose trousers and blouses; Chinese women in flapping, pajamalike costumes, and toddling Chinese kiddies that might have stepped from an Oriental screen. To swell the crowd and add to the multiplicity of nationalities there were sallow Portuguese, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons; bronzed English planters; dark-eyed Venezuelans; broad-shouldered, mighty-muscled “Boviander” rivermen; and half a dozen short, deep-chested, stolid-faced native Indians or “bucks,” as the explorer told the boys they were called.
And such confusion! Such a chaos of live stock, baggage, squalling babies, and wildly clucking and clacking fowls! How they would ever get straightened out; how they would ever find their own belongings, or how the tiny side-wheel steamer could ever accommodate them all was a mystery to the boys. But gradually order came out of chaos; the big, heavily booted, blue-clad “bobbies” shooed and berated and shoved and ordered and helped and at last, with a toot of the whistle, the gang plank was drawn in, the mooring lines were cast off and loaded to the gunwales, the little steamer swung into the swirling muddy stream and poked her blunt bow up river to the deafening cheers, farewells, and parting shouts of the kaleidoscopic crowd upon the stelling.
“Well, we’re off!” exclaimed Rawlins, “We may not know where we’re going but we’re on our way!”
“Yes, and to think we’re way down in South America!” cried Tom. “I can’t really believe it yet.”
“It isn’t much like the popular idea of South America, I admit,” laughed the explorer who had joined them. “But you’ve only begun to see unexpected and surprising things.”
“You’ll have to tell us everything,” declared Frank. “We want to learn all we can and everything’s absolutely new to us, you know.”
“I’ll do my best,” replied Mr. Thorne, “but even I learn something new every time I go into the bush.”