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might have thought, only the rhythm was more intellectual than zoological.
    “Guess we should have expected them,” said Cherrie.
    “Who?”
    “The two -legged fauna.”
    The men looked at each other.
    “Are you sure?” asked Kermit.
    “Sure enough.”
    As they stood listening in the fading light, the voices seemed to make strands around them, and Kermit had a curious impulse to thrash himself free. But the sounds vanished as quickly as they came, leaving the jungle that much quieter.
    “Part of me wishes they’d show themselves,” said Cherrie. “Part of me wishes they’d stay far away. God knows we’d be in no shape to hold them off.”
    “The Nhambiquara were friendly enough.”
    “Why, because they gave us canoes? I’d say we paid them well enough. The trick being we knew how to pay them. Because we were able to talk to them. Because we were able to see them in the first place.”
    It was true. During the last week, no face, no body had emerged from that impenetrable forest, only signs. A well-worn path. Footprints. Old fishing baskets. Trees methodically stripped of their bark. Somebody was out there.
    With a small shock, Kermit registered the fact that Cherrie was laughing. Revealing, with that simple act, just how much of him had withered away. All you could see of him were his teeth, scandalously oversized, jabbering like a fun-house skeleton, and, beyond that, the chasm from which words were somehow emerging.
    “I’d ask them for supper,” said Cherrie, “if there were any to go around.”

 
    3
    Dinner passed in a blink, and the expeditioners, lacking strength even for talk, retired to their tents and hammocks. Except the Colonel, who found a tiny clearing ten yards down the shore, seated himself in a camp chair, draped mosquito netting over his sun helmet, and swaddled his arms in fringed gauntlets, leaving only his hands free.
    He looked, thought Kermit, like a dowager aunt on a transatlantic crossing, but Kermit knew the old man didn’t care. He had work to do. He had contracted with Scribner’s to keep a daily journal of his travels, and keep it he would, no matter how low the sun or how the insects chaffed. And he would give himself so thoroughly to this work that an hour might slip by without his missing it, and Kermit could stand there—as he was doing tonight—and be acknowledged no more than a moth. Only the sight of a cup waving back and forth before the old man’s eyes broke his concentration.
    “Coffee?” he gasped.
    “The last of the last.”
    “Well, then,” he said, unfurling his netting. “Don’t mind if I do.”
    There was no other chair, so Kermit sat on the ground, watching the old man fold his mouth around the cup’s rim.
    “You’re well?” the Colonel asked.
    “Well enough.”
    “I was just setting down how … how very optimistic I’m feeling. About the day ahead.”
    “Yes?”
    “The current is quite obviously picking up. As is the breeze. Once we’re past those damned rapids, we should make at least ten kilos before sunset. Twelve, if the gods smile.”
    “You may be right.”
    “And in that event, we should reach the Aripuanã before another three weeks have passed. From there to the Amazon, and from there, home.” He nodded for emphasis. “We’ll get to the end of this.”
    Kermit’s gaze settled on the river, simmering in the quarter-light.
    “Of course, you must promise me,” the Colonel added, “that when we reach civilization, you will take a razor to that growth of yours.”
    Smiling, Kermit ran his fingers through his beard. He had grown it in solidarity with the camaradas, and it stretched now to his clavicle.
    “I can’t shave it, Father. It’s the record of our days. Here now…” At random, he plucked a mote from the brown shawl. “This was the stinging ant I was wrestling with just this morning. Touch and go, I tell you. And this little termite? Don’t let his looks fool you. I caught him eating Colonel Rondon’s hanky