[Illustration: Putting the tape on a tusker Reading from left to right: unknown gun-bearer, Kasitura, Father, Juma Johari, Tarlton, Cuninghame]
Father was more fluent than exact in expressing himself in foreign languages. As he himself said of his French, he spoke it “as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, having neither gender nor tense.” He would, however, always manage to make himself understood, and never seemed to experience any difficulty in understanding his interlocutor. In Africa he had a most complicated combination of sign-language and coined words, and though I could rarely make out what he and his gun-bearer were talking about, they never appeared to have any difficulty in understanding each other. Father could read Spanish, and he had not been in Brazil long before he could make out the trend of any conversation in Portuguese. With the Brazilians he always spoke French, or, on rare occasions, German.
He was most conscientious about his writing. Almost every day when he came in from hunting he would settle down to work on the articles that were from time to time sent back to _Scribner’s_. This daily task was far more onerous than any one who has not tried it can imagine. When you come in from a long day’s tramping, you feel most uninclined to concentrate on writing a careful and interesting account of the day’s activities. Father was invariably good-humored about it, saying that he was paying for his fun. In Brazil when the mosquitoes and sand-flies were intolerable, he used to be forced to write swathed in a mosquito veil and with long gauntlets to protect hands and wrists.
During the descent of the River of Doubt in Brazil there were many black moments. It was impossible to hazard a guess within a month or more as to when we would get through to the Amazon. We had dugout canoes, and when we came to serious rapids or waterfalls we were forced to cut a trail around to the quiet water below. Then we must make a corduroy road with the trunks of trees over which to haul the dugouts. All this took a long time, and in some places where the river ran through gorges it was almost impossible. We lost in all six of the ten canoes with which we started, and of course much of our food-supply and general equipment. It was necessary to delay and build two more canoes--a doubly laborious task because of the axes and adzes which had gone down in the shipwrecks. The Brazil nuts upon which we had been counting to help out our food-supply had had an off year. If this had not been so we would have fared by no means badly, for these nuts may be ground into flour or roasted or prepared in a number of different ways. Another source upon which we counted failed us when we found that there were scarcely any fish in the river. For some inexplicable reason many of the tributaries of the Amazon teem with fish, while others flowing through similar country and under parallel conditions contain practically none. We went first onto half rations, and then were forced to still further reduce the issue. We had only the clothes in which we stood and were wet all day and slept wet throughout the night. There would be a heavy downpour, then out would come the sun and we would be steamed dry, only to be drenched once more a half-hour later.