“He did not get into the house or the dining-room, as I feared?”
“No, all the time he was not in his cabin he was in the bow of the raft.”
“And what was he doing?”
“Holding an old piece of paper in his hand, consulting it with great attention, and muttering a lot of incomprehensible words.”
“All that is not so unimportant as you think, Mr. Fragoso. These readings and writings and old papers have their interest! He is neither a professor nor a lawyer, this reader and writer!”
“You are right!”
“Still watch him, Mr. Fragoso!”
“I will watch him always, Miss Lina,” replied Fragoso.
On the morrow, the 27th of July, at daybreak, Benito gave the pilot the signal to start.
Away between the islands, in the Bay of Arenapo, the mouth of the Japura, six thousand six hundred feet wide, was seen for an instant. This large tributary comes into the Amazon through eight mouths, as if it were pouring into some gulf or ocean. But its waters come from afar, and it is the mountains of the republic of Ecuador which start them on a course that there are no falls to break until two hundred and ten leagues from its junction with the main stream.