As we have said, the canoe got out of reach of the terrible avalanche just in time, but it could not escape the wave. The Indian, however, was prepared for that. It was not the first time he had seen such a catastrophe. Turning the bow of the canoe instantly towards the falling bank, he thus met the wave, as it were, in the teeth, and rode safely over it.
If he had been less alive to the danger, or less prompt to meet it, or if he had under-estimated it, and allowed the wave to catch them on the side of the canoe, the adventures of our five friends had that day come to an abrupt close, and, what is probably of greater consequence to the reader, this faithful record would never have been written!
Chapter Nineteen.
In which, among other things, Lawrence refuses an Invitation, and bids a Final Farewell to Manuela.
A jump of several hundreds of miles at one mighty bound may seem difficult, perhaps impossible, but if the reader will kindly put on the grasshopper legs of imagination which we now provide, such a jump will be found not only possible, but, perchance, agreeable.
We pass at one fell spring, then, from the thick forests of Bolivia to the wide rolling pampas, or plains, of South America.
You are still within sight of the Andes, good reader. You may travel from north to south if you will—from the equatorial regions of the Mexican Gulf to the cold and stormy cape at Tierra del Fuego—without losing sight of that magnificent backbone of the grand continent.
We have reached a frontier town which lies among the undulating hills at the base of the mountains, yet within sight of the outskirts of the grassy pampas. A small town it is, with little white houses and a church glittering in the sunshine. A busy town, too, with a mixed population fluttering in the streets in the variegated trappings and plumage of merchants, and priests, and muleteers, and adventurers, and dark-eyed senhoras, enveloped in all the mysterious witchery that seems inseparable from Spanish mantillas and fans.