"Rapids again!" grumbled one. "I thought we had had enough of them on the Orinoco!"
"We shall have to get out, and draw the canoes overland, I suppose!"
"There's worse behind; don't you see the spray behind the palms?"
"Stop grumbling, my masters, and don't cry out before you are hurt. Paddle right up to the largest of those islands, and let us look about us."
In front of them was a snow-white bar of foam, some ten feet high, along which were ranged three or four islands of black rock. Each was crested with a knot of lofty palms, whose green tops stood out clear against the bright sky, while the lower half of their stems loomed hazy through a luminous veil of rainbowed mist. The banks right and left of the fall were so densely fringed with a low hedge of shrubs that landing seemed almost impossible; and their Indian guide, suddenly looking round him and whispering, bade them beware of savages, and pointed to a canoe which lay swinging in the eddies under the largest island, moored apparently to the root of some tree.
"Silence, all!" cried Amyas, "and paddle up thither and seize the canoe. If there be an Indian on the island, we will have speech of him. But mind, and treat him friendly; and on your lives, neither strike nor shoot, even if he offers to fight."
So, choosing a line of smooth backwater just in the wake of the island, they drove their canoes up by main force, and fastened them safely by the side of the Indian's, while Amyas, always the foremost, sprang boldly on shore, whispering to the Indian boy to follow him.
Once on the island, Amyas felt sure enough that, if its wild tenant had not seen them approach, he certainly had not heard them, so deafening was the noise which filled his brain, and which seemed to make the very leaves upon the bushes quiver and the solid stone beneath his feet reel and ring. For two hundred yards and more above the fall, nothing met his eye but one white waste of raging foam, with here and there a transverse dike of rock, which hurled columns of spray and surges of beaded water high into the air,—strangely contrasting with the still and silent cliffs of green leaves which walled the river right and left, and more strangely still with the knots of enormous palms upon the islets, which reared their polished shafts a hundred feet into the air, straight and upright as masts, while their broad plumes and golden-clustered fruit slept in the sunshine far aloft, the image of the stateliest repose amid the wildest wrath of Nature.
Ten yards farther, the cataract fell sheer in thunder; but a high fern-fringed rock turned its force away from the beach. Here, if anywhere, was the place to find the owner of the canoe. He leaped down upon the pebbles; and as he did so, a figure rose from behind a neighboring rock, and met him face to face. It was an Indian girl.
He spoke first, in some Indian tongue, gently and smilingly, and made a half-step forward; but quick as light she caught up from the ground a bow, and held it fiercely toward him, fitted with the long arrow, with which, as he could see, she had been striking fish, for a line of twisted grass hung from its barbed head. Amyas stopped, laid down his own bow and sword, and made another step in advance, smiling still, and making all Indian signs of amity. But the arrow was still pointed straight at his breast, and he knew the mettle and strength of the forest nymphs well enough to stand still and call for the Indian boy.