“At last!” said Shaddy as they regained their old quarters, where Joe and the four men had stood watching them. “It will give my chaps a pretty good warming if we come back this way. Strikes me that we four had better practise pulling together, so as to be able to give them a rest now and then when the stream’s very much against us.”
“By all means,” said Brazier.
“You see, men ain’t steam-engines, sir, and we might be where there was no place for landing. O’ course we could always hitch on to the trees, but that makes poor mooring, and we should be better able to make our way. There’s hardly a chance of getting into slack water in a river like this: it all goes along with a rush.”
“But I must get that plant, Naylor,” said Brazier. “If you’ll believe me, sir,” was the reply, “you needn’t worry about that one. I’m going to take you where you’ll find thousands.”
“Like that?”
“Ay, and other sorts too. Seems to me, sir, we want to catch a monkey and teach him how to use a knife. He’d be the sort of chap to run up the trees.” Rob laughed at the idea, and said it was not possible. “Well, sir,” said Shaddy, “you may believe it or no, but an old friend of mine ’sured me that the Malay chaps do teach a big monkey they’ve got out there to slip up the cocoa-nut trees and twist the big nuts round and round till they drop off. He said it was a fact, and I don’t see why not.”
“We’ll try and dispense with the monkey,” said Brazier; and trusting to finding more easily accessible specimens of the orchid, he gave that up, and a couple of hours after they were gliding swiftly along the stream, rapt in contemplation of the wonders on either hand, Shaddy being called upon from time to time to seize hold of some overhanging bough and check the progress of the boat, so that its occupants might watch the gambols of the inquisitive monkeys which kept pace with them along the bank by bounding and swinging from branch to branch.
The birds, too, appeared to be infinite in variety; and Rob was never weary of watching the tiny humming-birds as they poised themselves before the trumpet blossoms of some of the pendent vines to probe their depths for honey, or capture tiny insects with their beaks.
Their journey was prolonged from their inability to find a suitable place for a halt, and it was easy work for the boatmen, who smiled with content as they found that only one was required to handle the oars, so as to keep the boat’s head straight.
It was nearly night, when a narrow place was found where by the fall of a huge tree several others had been torn up by their roots, and lay with their water-worn branches in the river.