among the reeds and vegetation at the foot of the bank, we shall not
be an hour before we find it.”
“To work, then!” answered Benito.
There was but one way of working. The boats approached the bank, and
the Indians, furnished with long poles, began to sound every part of
the river at the base of the bluff which had served for the scene of
combat.
The place had been easily recognized. A track of blood stained the
declivity in its chalky part, and ran perpendicularly down it into
the water; and there many a clot scattered on the reeds indicated the
very spot where the corpse had disappeared.
About fifty feet down stream a point jutted out from the riverside
and kept back the waters in a kind of eddy, as in a large basin.
There was no current whatever near the shore, and the reeds shot up
out of the river unbent. Every hope then existed that Torres’ body
had not been carried away by the main stream. Where the bed of the
river showed sufficient slope, it was perhaps possible for the corpse
to have rolled several feet along the ridge, and even there no effect
of the current could be traced.
The ubas and the pirogues, dividing the work among them, limited the
field of their researches to the extreme edge of the eddy, and from
the circumference to the center the crews’ long poles left not a
single point unexplored. But no amount of sounding discovered the
body of the adventurer, neither among the clumps of reeds nor on the
bottom of the river, whose slope was then carefully examined.
Two hours after the work had begun they had been led to think that
the body, having probably struck against the declivity, had fallen
off obliquely and rolled beyond the limits of this eddy, where the
action of the current commenced to be felt.
“But that is no reason why we should despair,” said Manoel, “still
less why we should give up our search.”
“Will it be necessary,” exclaimed Benito, “to search the river
throughout its breadth and its length?”
“Throughout its breadth, perhaps,” answered Araujo, “throughout its
length, no–fortunately.”
“And why?” asked Manoel.
“Because the Amazon, about a mile away from its junction with the Rio
Negro, makes a sudden bend, and at the same time its bed rises, so
that there is a kind of natural barrier, well known to sailors as the
Bar of Frias, which things floating near the surface are alone able
to clear. In short, the currents are ponded back, and they cannot
possibly have any effect over this depression.”
This was fortunate, it must be admitted. But was Araujo mistaken? The
old pilot of the Amazon could be relied on. For the thirty years that
he had followed his profession the crossing of the Bar of Frias,
where the current was increased in force by its decrease in depth,
had often given him trouble. The narrowness of the channel and the
elevation of the bed made the passage exceedingly difficult, and many
a raft had there come to grief.
And so Araujo was right in declaring that if the corpse of Torres was
still retained by its weight on the sandy bed of the river, it could
not have been dragged over the bar. It is true that later on, when,
on account of the expansion of the gases, it would again rise to the
surface, the current would bear it away, and it would then be
irrevocably lost down the stream, a long way beyond the obstruction.
But this purely physical effect would not take place for several
days.
They could not have applied to a man who was more skillful or more
conversant with the locality than Araujo, and when he affirmed that
the body could not have been borne out of the narrow channel for more
than a mile or so, they were sure to recover it if they thoroughly
sounded that portion of the river.
Not an island, not an islet, checked the course of the Amazon in
these parts. Hence, when the foot of the two banks had been visited
up to the bar, it was in the bed itself, about five hundred feet in