Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

440 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP.
about the margin of the lake and up its tributary
creeks in my curiara, and gather specimens of the few
trees that were in flower. On the 22nd, at 4 P.M.,
when we were cooking our dinner, we were startled
by hearing the report
of a musket in the forest on
the opposite bank of the river, there not more than
80 yards wide. It is scarcely possible to conceive
the strangeness of such a sound in savage, desolate
forests which scarcely any human being could penetrate,
especially one accustomed to firearms. A
region of at least 10,000 square miles, of which we
were the centre, had scarcely 400 inhabitants, and
those chiefly half-wild Indians, whose weapon was
the blowing-cane. The nearest settlement was that
of Yamadu-bani, but we knew that none of their
hunting tracks extended to Vasiva ; and the halfdozen
adult males had neither osains
nor ammunition
when we left them only the day before. There had
been no inhabitants on Vasiva for very many years,
and there were no traders or other travellers on the
Casiquiari
at that season beside ourselves. I was
completely puzzled. The report was not exactly
like that of either musket or rifle, nor was it any
one of the accustomed sounds which at rare in-
tervals break the silence of those vast solitudes,
and with which I had become familiar. The crash
of a huge tree falling from sheer age the explosion,
like distant cannon, of an old hollow Sassafras or
Capivi tree, burst by the balsam accumulated in the
cavity the solitary thunderclap in an apparently
cloudless sky the roar of cataracts, and of the
approaching
hurricane all these sounds I had
previously heard, and had learnt to distinguish.
My Indians, however, although even more startled