Village Number Four We Anxiously Looked For; Village
Number Four We Never Saw; For Round Us Came The Dark, Seeming
To
come out on to the river from the forests and the side ravines,
where for some hours we had
Seen it sleeping, like a sailor with his
clothes on in bad weather. On we paddled, looking for signs of
village fires, and seeing them not. The Erd-geist knew we wanted
something, and seeing how we personally lacked it, thought it was
beauty; and being in a kindly mood, gave it us, sending the lovely
lingering flushes of his afterglow across the sky, which, dying,
left it that divine deep purple velvet which no one has dared to
paint. Out in it came the great stars blazing high above us, and
the dark round us was be-gemmed with fire-flies: but we were not as
satisfied with these things as we should have been; what we wanted
were fires to cook by and dry ourselves by, and all that sort of
thing. The Erd-geist did not understand, and so left us when the
afterglow had died away, with only enough starlight to see the
flying foam of the rapids ahead and around us, and not enough to see
the great trees that had fallen from the bank into the water.
These, when the rapids were not too noisy, we could listen for,
because the black current rushes through their branches with an
impatient "lish, swish"; but when there was a rapid roaring close
alongside we ran into those trees, and got ourselves mauled, and had
ticklish times getting on our course again. Now and again we ran up
against great rocks sticking up in the black water - grim, isolated
fellows, who seemed to be standing silently watching their fellow
rocks noisily fighting in the arena of the white water. Still on we
poled and paddled. About 8 P.M. we came to a corner, a bad one; but
we were unable to leap on to the bank and haul round, not being able
to see either the details or the exact position of the said bank,
and we felt, I think naturally, disinclined to spring in the
direction of such bits of country as we had had experience of during
the afternoon, with nothing but the aid we might have got from a
compass hastily viewed by the transitory light of a lucifer match,
and even this would not have informed us how many tens of feet of
tree fringe lay between us and the land, so we did not attempt it.
One must be careful at times, or nasty accidents may follow. We
fought our way round that corner, yelling defiance at the water, and
dealt with succeeding corners on the vi et armis plan, breaking,
ever and anon, a pole. About 9.30 we got into a savage rapid. We
fought it inch by inch. The canoe jammed herself on some barely
sunken rocks in it.
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