This Madeira river had the look of very adventurous fishing, and the Doctor had brought with him an assortment of tackle. The water was opaque, and it was deep. Its prospects, though the forest closed round us, were spacious. It flowed silently, with great power, and its surface was often coiled by profound movements. The coils of the river, as we were looking over the side one morning, began to move in our minds also, and the Doctor mentioned his tackle. There was the forest enclosing us, as mute as the water, its bare roots clenched in aqueous earth. Nobody could tell us much about the fish in this river, but we heard stories of creatures partly seen. There was one story of a thing taken from the very place in the river where we were anchored, a fish in armour which the natives declared was new to them; a fearful ganoid I guessed it, reconstructing it in vision from fragments of various tales about it, such as is pictured in a book on primeval rocks. There were alligators, too, and there was the sucuruju, which I could call the great water serpent, only the Indian name sounds so much more right and awful; and that fellow is forty feet long in his legend, but spoils a good story through reducing himself by half when he is actually killed. Still, twenty feet of stout snake is enough for trouble. I saw one, just after it was killed, which was twenty-two feet in length, and was three feet round its middle. So to fish in the Madeira was as if one's hook and line were cast into the deeps where forms that are without name stir in the dark of dreams. We got out our tackle, and the cook had an assortment of stuff he did not want, and that we put on the hooks, and waited, our lines carried astern by the current, for signals from the unknown. Yet excepting for a few catfish, nothing interrupted the placid flow of stream and time. The Doctor put a bight of the lime round his wrist, sat down, and slept. We had fine afternoons, broad with the wealth of our own time.
Old man Jim came aboard and saw our patience with amusement. He suggested dynamite, and no waiting. The river was full of good fish, and he would come next day with a canoe and take us where we could get a load. It was a suggestion which needed slurring, to look attractive to sportsmen. Jim took it for granted that we simply wanted fish to eat, and as many as we could get; and next morning there he was alongside with his big boat and its crew. Jim himself was in the stern, the navigator, and he was sitting on what I was told was a box of dynamite. Now, there were two others of our company who, but the day before, were even eager to see what dynamite would send up from the bottom of that river; but when they saw the craft alongside with its wild-looking crew, and Jim with his rifle sitting on a power which could lift St. Paul's, they considered everything, and decided they could not go that day. I went alone.