How long he lay there he will never know. Enough to say that when at last he struggled back to a sitting position the thunder of the falls filled all the air, while the trees and bushes, as if borne on by a cyclone, sped by him at unbelievable speed.
“Gotta stop!” he groaned. “Gotta get offa here somehow! Death in the falls. Won’t do! Gotta get off!”
With a mighty effort he dragged his scattered senses together. The next instant he found himself gripping the tough branches of a red mangrove tree, while his raft shot on to its doom.
With a sinking sensation about his heart and a dull pain in his head, Johnny saw his hope of an early return to camp disappear downstream. On that raft was tied a bit of peccary meat, the only morsel of food he had in the world. Yet where there is life there is hope, and after climbing carefully back over the limb that had saved him, he descended the tree to the ground.
An hour of struggling forward, sometimes through thickets, sometimes over rocks or through water to his waist, he ended at the top of a steep precipice that stood thirty feet above the side of a most beautiful waterfall.
“Beautiful things at times become terrible,” he told himself. “My raft is gone; my dinner with it. These beautiful falls took them. No use to waste time in vain regrets. I’ve got to get down some way.”
After exploring every corner he became convinced that there was no suggestion of a rugged stairway anywhere.
“Have to be some other way,” he thought wearily. Having glanced at a towering sapodilla tree, he noticed that a wild fig vine grew up its side.
“Make a rope of it. Let myself down,” he said, beginning to unlace his shoes.
Having climbed the tree for a distance of forty feet, he cut the vine and began stripping off a stem an inch in diameter. It was a long and dangerous task, for these vines, with a grip of death, in time hug the very life out of a tree. But in time he won and, attaching one end of the vine rope to the trunk of a tree, dropped it over the precipice. He then began nimbly following down.