But the halts! the shouts of cheating! when the happy company thought they had lost their guiding thread! For it was necessary to go back and disentangle it from the knot of parasitic plants.
“There it is!” said Lina, “I see it!”
“You are wrong,” replied Minha; “that is not it, that is a liana of another kind.”
“No, Lina is right!” said Benito.
“No, Lina is wrong!” Manoel would naturally return.
Hence highly serious, long-continued discussions, in which no one would give in.
Then the black on one side and Benito on the other would rush at the trees and clamber up to the branches encircled by the cipo so as to arrive at the true direction.
Now nothing was assuredly less easy in that jumble of knots, among which twisted the liana in the middle of bromelias, karatas, armed with their sharp prickles, orchids with rosy flowers and violet lips the size of gloves, and oncidiums more tangled than a skein of worsted between a kitten’s paws.
And then when the liana ran down again to the ground the difficulty of picking it out under the mass of lycopods, large-leaved heliconias, rosy-tasseled calliandras, rhipsalas encircling it like the thread on an electric reel, between the knots of the large white ipomas, under the fleshy stems of the vanilla, and in the midst of the shoots and branchlets of the grenadilla and the vine.
And when the cipo was found again what shouts of joy, and how they resumed the walk for an instant interrupted!
For an hour the young people had already been advancing, and nothing had happened to warn them that they were approaching the end.
They shook the liana with vigor, but it would not give, and the birds flew away in hundreds, and the monkeys fled from tree to tree, so as to point out the way.
If a thicket barred the road the felling-sword cut a deep gap, and the group passed in. If it was a high rock, carpeted with verdure, over which the liana twisted like a serpent, they climbed it and passed on.
A large break now appeared. There, in the more open air, which is as necessary to it as the light of the sun, the tree of the tropics, par excellence, which, according to Humboldt, “accompanies man in the infancy of his civilization,” the great provider of the inhabitant of the torrid zones, a banana-tree, was standing alone. The long festoon of the liana curled round its higher branches, moving away to the other side of the clearing, and disappeared again into the forest.
“Shall we stop soon?” asked Manoel.
“No; a thousand times no!” cried Benito, “not without having reached the end of it!”
“Perhaps,” observed Minha, “it will soon be time to think of returning.”
“Oh, dearest mistress, let us go on again!” replied Lina.
“On forever!” added Benito.
And they plunged more deeply into the forest, which, becoming clearer, allowed them to advance more easily.
Besides, the cipo bore away to the north, and toward the river. It became less inconvenient to follow, seeing that they approached the right bank, and it would be easy to get back afterward.
A quarter of an hour later they all stopped at the foot of a ravine in front of a small tributary of the Amazon. But a bridge of lianas, made of bejucos, twined together by their interlacing branches, crossed the stream. The cipo, dividing into two strings, served for a handrail, and passed from one bank to the other.
Benito, all the time in front, had already stepped on the swinging floor of this vegetable bridge.
Manoel wished to keep his sister back.
“Stay—stay, Minha!” he said, “Benito may go further if he likes, but let us remain here.”
“No! Come on, come on, dear mistress!” said Lina. “Don’t be afraid, the liana is getting thinner; we shall get the better of it, and find out its end!”
And, without hesitation, the young mulatto boldly ventured toward Benito.
“What children they are!” replied Minha. “Come along, Manoel, we must follow.”
And they all cleared the bridge, which swayed above the ravine like a swing, and plunged again beneath the mighty trees.
But they had not proceeded for ten minutes along the interminable cipo, in the direction of the river, when they stopped, and this time not without cause.
“Have we got to the end of the liana?” asked Minha.
“No,” replied Benito; “but we had better advance with care. Look!” and Benito pointed to the cipo which, lost in the branches of a high ficus, was agitated by violent shakings.
“What causes that?” asked Manoel.
“Perhaps some animal that we had better approach with a little circumspection!”
And Benito, cocking his gun, motioned them to let him go on a bit, and stepped about ten paces to the front.
Manoel, the two girls, and the black remained motionless where they were.
Suddenly Benito raised a shout, and they saw him rush toward a tree; they all ran as well.
Sight the most unforeseen, and little adapted to gratify the eyes!
A man, hanging by the neck, struggled at the end of the liana, which, supple as a cord, had formed into a slipknot, and the shakings came from the jerks into which he still agitated it in the last convulsions of his agony!
Benito threw himself on the unfortunate fellow, and with a cut of his hunting-knife severed the cipo.
The man slipped on to the ground. Manoel leaned over him, to try and recall him to life, if it was not too late.
“Poor man!” murmured Minha.
“Mr. Manoel! Mr. Manoel!” cried Lina. “He breathes again! His heart beats; you must save him.”
“True,” said Manoel, “but I think it was about time that we came up.”
He was about thirty years old, a white, clothed badly enough, much emaciated, and he seemed to have suffered a good deal.
At his feet were an empty flask, thrown on the ground, and a cup and ball in palm wood, of which the ball, made of the head of a tortoise,
