Jean consulted his guidebook by M. Chaffanjon.
At midday the boat’s passengers—around twenty in all—answered the call to lunch in the dining room, where M. Miguel and his two colleagues were the first to be seated. As for Sergeant Martial, he was right behind them with his nephew in tow, whom he treated with a sternness M. Miguel could not help noticing.
“That Frenchman’s a tough old guy,” he commented to M. Varinas as he sat down next to him.
“He’s a soldier, what do you expect?” answered the guardian of the Guaviare.
No, one could not miss it—the old NCO was dressed in a military style that was unmistakable.
Sergeant Martial started his lunch with a little libation, downing a licorice brandy. But Jean apparently did not care for hard liquor and had no need for a before-dinner drink to do justice to the meal. He was seated at the end of the room next to his uncle, and the old veteran scowled so forbiddingly that nobody tried to sit down next to them.
As for the geographers, they monopolized both the center of the table and the conversation. Knowing the goal of their trip, the other passengers had ears only for them. Yet why was Sergeant Martial so irritated about the keen interest his nephew was displaying?
The menu had much variety but little quality; however, people were not finicky on the Orinoco boats. To tell the truth, while sailing the upper reaches of the river, some people were only too glad to eat steaks such as these, which tasted like they had been lassoed on a rubber plantation, or even the waterlogged stews in their rust-colored sauce, the eggs so hard-boiled you could skewer them, the chicken bits that only a long cooking could tenderize. As for fruit, there were plenty of bananas, but whether in their raw state or covered with molasses, they had softened into a sort of marmalade. How about the bread? Oh, it was pretty good, if you liked dry cornbread. What of the wine? Low grade, high price. In Spanish the word for lunch is almuerzo, and this, then, was the kind of almuerzo they were offered. But they still gobbled it down.
That afternoon the Simón Bolívar passed by the island of Bernavelle. Clogged with such islands and islets, the Orinoco grew narrower at this point. To overcome the strong current here, the paddle wheel had to churn the water double-time. Fortunately the captain was a capable sailor, so there was no danger of running aground.
The left side of the river offered numerous coves with tree-covered banks, notably one leading to the miniature village of El Almacén, with a population of around thirty, still exactly as M. Chaffanjon had found it eight years earlier. Nearby two tiny tributaries flowed down, the Bari and the Lima. At their mouths grew a number of mauritia palms and some clumps of copaiba trees, whose oil is drawn out through cuts in the bark and very profitably marketed. All around there were hordes of monkeys, whose meat is edible and much better than the shoe-leather steaks offered at lunch and dinner aboard the steamboat.
Islands were not the only reason the Orinoco was sometimes hard to navigate. Dangerous boulders were also encountered, which reared up suddenly in midchannel. But the Simón Bolívar successfully avoided any collisions, and by evening after a run of fifty or sixty miles she headed into the harbor at the village of Moitaco.
There she had to lay over in port till the next day, because it would not have been wise to continue on after dark with an overcast sky and no moon.
At nine o’clock in the evening Sergeant Martial thought it was time for bed, and Jean had no inclination to disobey his uncle’s orders.
So they both headed for their cabins, astern on the second story of the superstructure. Each cabin contained a plain wooden frame with a light blanket and one of those straw mats called esteras in this country—for the tropics a perfectly acceptable bed.
In his cabin, the young man undressed and lay down, then Sergeant Martial covered his bedstead with an awning—a sort of cheesecloth that is used for mosquito netting, an indispensable protection from the pesky insects of the Orinoco. He did not want a single one of those vile gnats attacking his nephew’s skin. As for his own, not to worry. The sergeant swore that his thick, leathery hide had nothing to fear from bug bites and could easily stand up to the most ferocious of them.
Thanks to these measures, Jean slept through till morning, despite the plague of tiny pests that buzzed around his protective awning.
Next day, at the crack of dawn, the Simón Bolívar, whose fires had been kept warm, set out again after the crew had returned on board and filled the lower deck with wood that had been chopped down earlier in the riverside forests.
During the night, the steamboat had berthed in one of Moitaco’s two bays, which lay to the left and right of the village. As soon as she set out from the bay, this clutch of dainty cottages, once a headquarters for the Spanish missions, vanished behind a bend in the river. It was the same village where M. Chaffanjon had searched in vain for the grave of François Burban, a comrade of Dr. Crevaux, in a grave still hidden somewhere in Moitaco’s modest cemetery.6
That day they passed by the hamlet of Santa Cruz, a collection of some twenty huts on the left bank. Then appeared the island of Guanarès, formerly a home for missionaries and almost at the spot where the river curves south only to head west again, and the island of Muerto.
There they had to go through several rapids, or in local parlance raudals, which were caused by the riverbed becoming narrower. Though these rapids usually take an exhausting toll on the crews of rowboats or sailboats, they cost the Simón Bolívar nothing more than a little extra fuel for the generators. Her valves whistled away with no stoking needed. Her huge paddle wheel dug its wide blades more fiercely into the waves. And this way she plowed through three or four rapids in practically no time, including those by the mouth of the Inferno River, which Jean identified above the island of Matapolo.
“So,” Sergeant Martial asked him, “does your old book by that Frenchman match up with everything we’re seeing from the Simón Bolívar?”
“It matches perfectly, uncle.7 Only we’ve traveled as many kilometers in one day as M. Chaffanjon did in three or four! It’s true, though, that in the central portion of the Orinoco, when we swap this steamboat for a canoe, we’ll slow down to his speed. But so what? The idea isn’t just to reach San Fernando, where I hope we’ll get more information—”
“We’re sure to! The old Colonel couldn’t possibly have gone through there without leaving some traces. We’re certain to find out where he set up camp! And when we finally lay eyes on him, when you run up and give him a hug, when he realizes—”
“That I’m your nephew … your nephew!” snapped the young man, wincing at the careless remarks blurted out by his “uncle.”
That evening the Simón Bolívar docked at the base of a gorge on the left bank. The small market town of Mapire perched gracefully above them.
They had an hour’s worth of twilight, and MM. Miguel, Felipe, and Varinas wanted to spend it visiting this important trading center. Jean had his heart set on going ashore with them, but when Sergeant Martial said “No!” the lad obediently stayed on board.
As for our three colleagues from the Geographic Society, they had no reason to regret their outing. From its lofty perch Mapire commands a grand view of the river both upstream and down, even the grasslands to the north where Indians breed horses, donkeys, and mules on wide plains encircled by a girdle of green forests.
By nine o’clock that evening the passengers were all asleep in their cabins, after taking the usual safeguards against the armies of mosquitoes.
Their next travel day was a washout—literally—due