“Well I wish we were landed,” grumbled Hockley, who sat under the hood of the canoe, taking it easy. “I am tired of this everlasting water. There is a sameness that is perfectly sickening.”
“That’s because you don’t enjoy the beauties of nature,” returned Darry, with a grin. “You haven’t the poetic temperament, so to speak.”
“You needn’t poke fun at me,” growled the lank youth, with a scowl. “I say there is sameness, and there is. It’s been nothing but water and trees ever since we started.”
“If I were you, Hockley, I’d get out and wade back,” put in Frank. “I can’t imagine what made you come.”
“I came to have a good time, but it’s no good time drifting in a canoe like this,” was the surly response. “If we were ashore—”
“We’ll soon be ashore,” interrupted Mark. “There is the bluff, just around the bend. Cubara is right, it’s an ideal spot for camping out.”
“If there isn’t a puma there waiting to chew us up,” added Frank, but the smile on his face showed that he was not particularly afraid.
The canoe was run in among the bushes lining the bank below the bluff, and leaping ashore the Indian pulled the craft well out of the water. Then one after another leaped to the dry ground beyond.
“Leave the baggage where it is for the present,” said the professor. “I want to take a look around before I decide to pitch camp. There may be some objection which Cubara has overlooked.”
But there was none, and soon they had everything ashore and up to the edge of the bluff, which arose from the surrounding jungle to a height of thirty feet. To one side of the bluff was a series of rough rocks leading down to the river and on the other was a beautiful waterfall coming from a mountain a mile or more to the eastward. On the other side of the Orinoco the virgin forests stretched for miles.