Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage might not have got across what had been trickling streams a few days before
We impressed an Indian father and son into service as carriers
Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points
An Indian village along the Rupununi
We were already soaking wet, so that we paid little attention to the roaring rain that soon began to fall, though I still strove to keep my kodak from being ruined. Even the shoes on our backs were as wet as if we had worn them. Our baggage, on the Indians’ backs, was covered with old pieces of canvas, but the rain poured down in cataracts upon it and promised to soak everything it contained. To make things worse, the Indians could not keep up with us. The aged thirty-five-year-old man was in sad straits, and we were in constant dread of his falling down in some mud-hole. At down-pouring noon we reached the base of the range of hills and began to skirt it, the storm making a tumultuous yet musical sound on the dense forest. In dry weather, no doubt, it would be screaming with parrakeets, though it is said always to be raining in the Kanukus. Deep in the woods we stopped among mammoth trees at the bank of a creek to assuage our gnawing hunger. It was pouring incessantly, yet the older Indian got a fire started, roofed by green banana-like leaves, and into this we thrust slabs of sun-dried beef spitted on sticks. We made tea, also, and each ate his rationed half-pint of farinha, which would soon swell to a quart. All this time we had not a suggestion of shelter and the water ran down us in streams throughout the meal, washing our fingers as rapidly as we soiled them. Yet somehow we felt in unexpectedly good spirits. Hart rolled three cigarettes, handed two of them to the Indians, and we were off again. The forest grew ever denser, and the rain became an absolute torrent. Only in crossing the Malay Peninsula years before had I bowed my back to such volumes of water, water which, as the ground grew a bit hilly, rushed down the narrow ruts worn by former travelers so swiftly as almost to sweep us off our feet.
With every step forward I grew more uneasy. We were drawing near the notorious Suwara-auru, situated where the forest that spills down a spur of the mountains is thickest and the rainfall is said to be the heaviest in all British Guiana, and which, according to Hart, “the devil himself often could not pass.” It may be knee-deep in the dry season, and a week later fill up the whole gorge or valley with a rushing current half a mile wide—a gorge still densely forested, too, for there are trees everywhere, except in the bit of space occupied by the creek in the dry season, and horses have been killed by the force with which the current hurls them against the trunks. Of course man himself can pass under almost any conditions; but it might well be impossible to get even such baggage as I carried across, and I might have to go clear back to Manaos, or wait for months until the rains subsided.