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Naprikan Halmoran Sectory 10
Page 04
We walked and walked the entire day, until 6 p.m., covering a distance of 26 kil. The Indian Miguel worried me the whole day, saying that cutting the _picada_ was heavy work and he could not go on, as his finger was hurting him, and the pay he received--L1 sterling a day--was too small for the work he had to do. I had to keep constant watch on him, as he was a man of a slippery nature, and I did not know what he might do from one moment to another. Also he said we were simply committing suicide by trying to go through the virgin forest, as we should meet thousands of Indians who would attack us, and we had no chance of escape. I needed this man and his companion to carry my sextant and the unexposed photographic plates, some two hundred of them, which were of considerable weight.
Tree-frogs have, of course, in most circumstances much greater difficulty in getting at water than pond-frogs; and this is especially true in certain tropical or desert districts. Hence most of the frogs which inhabit such regions have had to find out or invent some ingenious plan for passing through the tadpole stage with a minimum of moisture. The devices they have hit upon are very curious. Some of them make use of the little pools collected at the bases of huge tropical leaf-stalks, like those of the banana plant; others dispense with the aid of water altogether, and glue their new-laid eggs to their own backs, where the fry pass through the tadpole stage with the slimy mucus which surrounds them. Nature always discovers such cunning schemes to get over apparent difficulties in her way: and the tree-frogs have solved the problem for themselves in half a dozen manners in different localities. Oddest of all, perhaps, is the dodge invented by "Darwin's frog," a Chilean species, in which the male swallows the eggs as soon as laid, and gulps them into the throat-pouch beneath his capacious neck: there they hatch out and pass through their tadpole stage: and when at last they arrive at frogly maturity, they escape into the world through the mouth of their father.
As they had not been able to spend a single penny since we had left Diamantino they had accumulated a considerable sum of cash. I warned them, as I had done with Benedicto, to be careful and not waste their money. They went out for a walk. Some hours later they returned, dressed up in wonderful costumes with fancy silk ties, patent leather shoes, gold chains and watches, and gaudy scarf-pins. In a few hours they had wasted away nearly the entire sum I had paid out to them. Everything was extremely expensive in Para--certainly three or four times the price which things would fetch in London or New York.
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