Chapter Six.
The Monkey-Pots.
“The Gapo?” exclaimed the master of the craft. “What is it, Munday?”
“The Gapo?” repeated Tipperary Tom, fancying by the troubled expression on the face of the Indian that he had conducted his companions toward some terrible disaster. “Phwat is it, Manday?”
“Da Gapoo?” simultaneously interrogated the negro, the whites of his eyeballs shining in the moonlight. “What be dat?”
The Mundurucú made reply only by a wave of his hand, and a glance around him, as if to say, “Yes, the Gapo; you see we’re in it.”
The three interrogators were as much in the dark as ever. Whether the Gapo was fish, flesh, or fowl, air, fire, or water, they could not even guess. There was but one upon the galatea besides the Indian himself who knew the signification of the word which had created such a sensation among the crew, and this was young Richard Trevannion.
“It’s nothing, uncle,” said he, hastening to allay the alarm around him; “old Munday means that we’ve strayed from the true channel of the Solimoës, and got into the flooded forest,—that’s all.”
“The flooded forest?”
“Yes. What you see around us, looking like low bushes, are the tops of tall trees. We’re now aground on the branches of a sapucaya,—a species of the Brazil-nut, and among the tallest of Amazonian trees. I’m right,—see! there are the nuts themselves!” As the young Paraense spoke, he pointed to some pericarps, large as cocoa-nuts, that were seen depending from the branches among which the galatea had caught. Grasping one of them in his hand, he wrenched it from the branch; but as he did so, the husk dropped off, and the prism-shaped nuts fell like a shower of huge hailstones on the roof of the toldo. “Monkey-pots they’re called,” continued he, referring to the empty pericarp still in his hand. “That’s the name by which the Indians know them; because the monkeys are very fond of these nuts.”