With this mood there drifted into his mind a bit of verse:
“I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.”
He felt a strange tightening at the throat as the words escaped his lips, and he blessed the teacher who had given them to him for just such a time as this.
Many and strange were the sensations that came to him as he drifted silently, swiftly beneath this cathedral-like arch of trees. A green parrot screamed at him as it fluttered away; a black monkey with a white face, clinging to a limb by a foot and his tail, scolded at him as he passed. A slow-moving snake, hanging from a tree trunk, darted out a black tongue. The jagged corner of the clumsy raft, catching on a snag, hung there while the water, warm as soapsuds, washed over the raft.
Loosened, the raft whirled on. More swiftly now they moved. The current was gaining strength. Rocks appeared, one to the right, one to the left, and one amid stream. The arch of trees rose higher. A patch of blue appeared. Rising to his feet, Johnny struggled with all his might, darting his pole first one side and then the other, to keep the raft off the rocks. Then suddenly, without warning, he was seized by an overhanging vine and dragged clear of the raft.
That was a tragic moment. With his raft went his last bit of food; and with it, too, for a moment his last bit of hope. With an eye out for drifting alligators, he swam strongly after the runaway raft.
Fortune favored him. For a moment the raft, caught in a corner between two rocks, hung motionless and in that moment, breathless, exhausted, he climbed aboard. At the same instant he sensed the presence of a wakened alligator nearby.
Quite motionless he lay for a full moment as the raft rushed on. This was no time for inaction. Faster, ever faster glided the raft; faster, faster the trees flew by.
And now a new catastrophe threatened. A sharp rock had cut one of the tie-tie vines that bound the raft. In another moment the raft might be torn in bits, leaving Johnny in the water, beyond hope. Seizing a fresh vine, he passed it over the ends of the logs and by exerting all his strength drew them to place and bound them there.