“This can’t be it,” Dan said. “Hardly a secret, hidden river if even the captain there knows about it.”
“You’re probably right,” Ben replied. “Their expedition followed a side river for half a day, and then found a smaller tributary they called a river of paradise, in a secret opening. That took them many more miles into the interior, well, as far as they could go anyway. Apparently, they had to take to wading when it shallowed out.”
“Wading…” Dan grinned. “… in an Amazon river? Oh yeah, good plan.”
“Think of it as a dip in a tropical pool.” Ben nudged him with an elbow. “Might be no choice if we’re to find the landmarks he depicted — a large rock on the shoreline that looked to have been carved. And at the very edge, there was the huge trunk of some sort of tree. He called it an Assai palm and it should be hanging out over the water.”
Jenny had joined them, overhearing. “He probably meant Acai palm, but close enough. Problem is, after over a century, don’t expect anything much to be left of a tree trunk. Things vanish in this humidity after a few years.”
Ben sighed. “Then we better keep our eyes peeled.” He pointed. “Looks like our rides are ready to go.”
“Oh boy,” Dan said, chuckling softly.
The canoes were long, narrow, and looked hewn from a single tree. Crossbeams had been added, and there were several inches of muddy-looking water in each of them.
Ben and Emma took the lead canoe, Dan, Nino, and Jenny next, followed by a grumpy-looking Andrea and Steve at the rear. Their boatmen, local Pemon, were all no more than five feet tall, but well-muscled. Their nut-brown limbs were matched by even darker hair that was cut in a bowl-cut and shaved up at the neck.
In the canoe behind, Ben heard Jenny and Nino chatting to their boatman, but he had no idea how to converse. After a moment, he leaned around Emma and nodded, smiled, and his rower returned the gesture.
“English, Español?’ Ben raised his eyebrows.
The man just stared. He had a vivid red stripe running from under his fringe, down his forehead and to the tip of his nose. After a moment, he curled his lip and shook his head. Ben refused to at least find out his name. He touched his chest. “Ben.” Then reached forward to touch Emma’s shoulder. “Emma.”
The small man continued to stare as he paddled but then nodded. He took one hand off his oar to touch the center of his own chest. “Ataca.” He nodded and tapped again. “Ataca.”
Ben and Emma repeated the name, nodding theatrically and repeating the name. Ataca then pointed to the two other paddlers in the canoes behind them. The first paddler had what looked like long sticks poked right through his earlobes.
Ataca pointed. “Ipetu.” He turned, making sure that Emma and Ben understood.
“Ipetu,” they repeated.
Ataca grunted, and then pointed to the last canoe paddler, who seemed the oldest of the three, and by the way his jaw sat, possibly had few teeth remaining. “Mukmet.”
“Mukmet,” Ben and Emma repeated again.
And then that was it for conversation. From time to time, Ataca would lift his arm to point at something or other off in the brush, but after a while, the canopy closed in even tighter overhead, and the jungle got gloomy with only occasional bars of light penetrating through to the steaming, coffee-colored water.
Though the sunlight was heavily filtered, the humidity was not, and there seemed to be a mist threading its way along the jungle floor that was strangely devoid of vegetation. Large tree trunks acted as columns to a canopy a hundred feet above their heads, and giant fingered epiphyte plants clung to forks in trees and knots in the bark to give the appearance of broken, green umbrellas hung up after a heavy storm.
Above them, things moved about, shaking limbs, occasionally screaming their fear or anger at the intrusion. Discarded berries, leaves, and possibly dung rained down, but whether it was a band of monkeys, birds, or some other climbing species, they remained invisible to them.
Emma trailed a hand in the water for a moment and lifted it out to rub her thumb and fingers together. “Like a warm, gritty bath,” she said and went to dip her hand back in.
“Uh-uh.” Ataca waved a hand at her, one finger up. He shook his head. Emma had already pulled her hand back and watched as the native put his hand towards his mouth and made a show of his teeth biting at it.
Ben nodded. “I’m guessing there’s more than just a few goldfish beneath the surface of that soup.”
“Got it.” Emma gave him a thumbs-up and kept her hands in the canoe from then on.
Ataca slowed his paddling, his eyes shining white and round as the darkness closed in even tighter around them. Ben could see he was becoming fearful and remembered what Jenny had told him about the superstitious nature of the locals. But he also knew that the jungle was home to plenty of physical horrors that could take a life in an instant.
At a narrowing bend in the river, they needed to come in closer to the shoreline. The jungle was at its darkest here and below them the water was the shade of ink. Ben looked over the side, and in some of the shallower places, he saw submerged logs trailing slimy, green beards. Tiny things zigzagged below the surface, and he wasn’t sure if they were small fish or some sort of water insect.
Ben squinted into the darkening jungle — some of the tree trunks here were huge, massive columns reaching up to merge with the roof canopy. Others were covered in strangler figs that grew their own lattice up and around the living tree trunks and used their bodies to climb to the sunlight. They eventually choked their host of nutrients and light, and the result was a hollow shell of fig-lattice where the fig survived, but the host tree died and rotted away.
Ben pulled his flashlight from his pack and the others did the same. Shining it over the jungle floor, he saw something the size of a football lump the soil as it burrowed along, never breaking the surface as it searched for food, or hid from the light.
There were also insects and spiders living, hunting, and feeding amongst the matted carpet of debris. Bugs as big as his hand were preyed upon by spiders of even greater size, and he shuddered at the thought of having to break camp at a place like this.
Ben had slept rough in jungles before, and the key thing was to be aware of your environment, check trees overhead and even their trunks, and make damn well sure you were up off the ground. It was surprising how many creatures could burrow up beneath a warm, sleeping body and tap into it for a quick feed.
They paddled for more hours, slowly now, Ataca and the other oarsmen carefully dipping their paddles in, pulling back, and lifting without a sound. Several times, they spotted creatures prospecting on the jungle floor — an anteater, easily seven feet long from pointed snout to the end of its wire-brush stiff tail, probed the leaf detritus. And once, they caused a family of wild boar to pause and stare back with eyes that were way too human.
Ben was tempted to bring one or more down, as he knew that they didn’t have the supplies to last the entire journey and living off the land would soon be a priority. But something made him stay his hand, as the thought of letting loose a rifle shot might alert man or beast to their presence — and it wasn’t the beasts he was worried about.