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tomorrow, early, start working for me."
    "What do I have to do?"
    "Whatever I tell you. For right now, I'm telling you to go to bed."
    "Good night, Kate," murmured Alex, curling up on the sofa cushions.
    "Bah!" his grandmother grumbled. But she waited until he fell asleep and then pulled a couple of blankets over him.
     
CHAPTER FOUR
The Amazon River
     
    KATE AND ALEXANDER WERE flying across northern Brazil in a commercial airplane. For hours and hours, they had been seeing an endless expanse of forest, all the same intense green, cut through by rivers like shining serpents. The most formidable of all was the color of coffee with cream.
    "The Amazon River is the widest and longest on earth; five times greater than any other," Alex read in the guidebook his grandmother had bought him in Rio de Janeiro. "Only the astronauts on their way to the moon have ever seen it in its entirety." What the book didn't say was that this vast area, the last paradise on the planet, was being systematically destroyed by the greed of entrepreneurs and adventurers, as he had learned in school. They were building a highway, a slash cut through the jungle, on which settlers were coming in and tons of woods and minerals were going out.
    Kate informed her grandson that they would go up the Río Negro to the Upper Orinoco, to an almost unexplored triangle in which most of the tribes they were interested in were concentrated. The Beast was supposed to live in that part of the Amazon.
    "In this book it says that those Indians are still in the Stone Age. They haven't even invented the wheel," Alex commented.
    "They don't need it. There is no use for it in this terrain; they don't have anything to transport and they're not in a hurry to get anywhere," replied Kate, who didn't like to be interrupted when she was writing. She had spent a good part of the flight taking notes in a tiny, spidery writing like fly tracks.
    ""They don't know how to write,'" Alex added.
    "I'm sure they have a good memory," said Kate.
    "'There is no expression of art among them, only the tradition of painting their bodies and decorating themselves with feathers,'" Alex read.
    "They don't care about posterity, or showing off. Most of our so-called
artists
would do well to follow their example," his grandmother answered.
    They were on their way to Manaus, the most populous city of the Amazon region, which had prospered in the times of the rubber plantations at the end of the nineteenth century.
    "You are going to see the most mysterious jungle in the world, Alexander. There are places there where spirits appear in broad daylight."
    "Right. Like the Abominable Jungleman we're looking for." Alexander smiled sarcastically.
    "It's called the Beast. It may not be the only one, there may be several, a family or a tribe of Beasts."
    "You're very trusting for your age, Kate," her grandson commented, unable to suppress a hint of mockery when he saw that his grandmother believed such tales.
    "With age, you acquire a certain humility, Alexander. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. At your age, you can afford to commit the sin of arrogance, and it doesn't matter much if you look ridiculous," his grandmother lectured.
•
    When they got off the airplane in Manaus, the humidity hit them like a towel soaked in warm water. There they met the other members of the
International Geographic
expedition. Besides Kate and her grandson, Alexander, there were Timothy Bruce, an English photographer with a long horse face and yellow nicotine-stained teeth, his assistant, Joel González, and the famous anthropologist Ludovic Leblanc. Alex had imagined Leblanc as a wise old man with a white beard and imposing appearance, but he turned out to be a short, thin, nervous fifty-year-old man with a permanent expression of either scorn or cruelty on his lips, and the squinty little eyes of a mouse. He was decked out like a movie version of a wild-game