Well, this journey of Benee's was certainly no sinecure. Apart even from all the dangers attached to it, from wild beasts and wilder men, it was one that would have tried the hardest constitution, if only for the simple reason that it was all a series of forced marches.
There was something in him that was hurrying him on and encouraging him to greater and greater exertions every hour. His daily record depended to a great extent on the kind of country he had to negotiate. He began with forty miles, but after a time, when he grew harder, he increased this to fifty and often to sixty. It was at times difficult for him to force his way through deep, dark forest and jungle, along the winding wild-beast tracks, past the beasts themselves, who hid in trees ready to spring had he paused but a second; through marshes and bogs, with here and there a reedy lake, on which aquatic birds of brightest colours slept as they floated in the sunshine, but among the long reeds of which lay the ever-watchful and awful cayman.
In such places as these, I think Benee owed his safety to his utter fearlessness and sang-froid, and to the speed at which he travelled.
It was not a walk by any means, but a strange kind of swinging trot. Such a gait may still be seen in far-off outlying districts of the Scottish Highlands, where it is adopted by postal "runners", who consider it not only faster but less tiresome than walking.
For the first hundred miles, or more, the lonely traveller found himself in a comparatively civilized country. This was not very much to his liking, and as a rule he endeavoured to give towns and villages, and even rubber forests, where Indians worked under white men overseers, a wide berth.
Yet sometimes, hidden in a tree, he would watch the work going on; watch the men walking hither and thither with their pannikins, or deftly whirling the shovels they had dipped in the sap-tub and holding them in the dark smoke of the palm-tree nuts, or he would listen to their songs. But it was with no feeling of envy; it was quite the reverse.
For Benee was free! Oh what a halo of happiness and glory surrounds that one little word "Free"!
Then this lonely wanderer would hug himself, as it were, and, dropping down from his perch, start off once more at his swinging trot.
Even as the crow flies, or the bee wings its flight, the length of Benee's journey would be over six hundred miles. But it was impossible for anyone to keep a bee-line, owing to the roughness of the country and the difficulties of every kind to be overcome, so that it is indeed impossible to estimate the magnitude of this lone Indian's exploit.
His way, roughly speaking, lay between the Madeira River and the Great Snake River called Puras (vide map); latterly it would lead him to the lofty regions and plateaux of the head-waters of Maya-tata, called by the Peruvians the Madre de Dios, or Holy Virgin River.