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hope then existed that Torres' body had not been carried away by the main
stream. Where the bed of the river showed sufficient slope, it was perhaps
possible for the corpse to have rolled several feet along the ridge, and even
there no effect of the current could be traced.
The ubas and the pirogues, dividing the work among them, limited the field of
their researches to the extreme edge of the eddy, and from the circumference
to the center the crews' long poles left not a single point unexplored. But no
amount of sounding discovered the body of the adventurer, neither among the
clumps of reeds nor on the bottom of the river, whose slope was then carefully
examined.
Two hours after the work had begun they had been led to think that the body,
having probably struck against the declivity, had fallen off obliquely and
rolled beyond the limits of this eddy, where the action of the current
commenced to be felt.
"But that is no reason why we should despair," said Manoel, "still less why we
should give up our search."
"Will it be necessary," exclaimed Benito, "to search the river throughout its
breadth and its length?"
"Throughout its breadth, perhaps," answered Araujo, "throughout its length,
nofortunately."
"And why?" asked Manoel.
"Because the Amazon, about a mile away from its junction with the Rio Negro,
makes a sudden bend, and at the same time its bed rises, so that there is a
kind of natural barrier, well known to sailors as the Bar of Frias, which
things floating near the surface are alone able to clear. In short, the
currents are ponded back, and they cannot possibly have any effect over this
depression."
Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon
CHAPTER VIII. THE FIRST SEARCH
123
This was fortunate, it must be admitted. But was Araujo mistaken? The old
pilot of the Amazon could be relied on. For the thirty years that he had
followed his profession the crossing of the Bar of Frias, where the current
was increased in force by its decrease in depth, had often given him trouble.
The narrowness of the channel and the elevation of the bed made the passage
exceedingly difficult, and many a raft had there come to grief.
And so Araujo was right in declaring that if the corpse of Torres was still
retained by its weight on the sandy bed of the river, it could not have been
dragged over the bar. It is true that later on, when, on account of the
expansion of the gases, it would again rise to the surface, the current would
bear it away, and it would then be irrevocably lost down the stream, a long
way beyond the obstruction. But this purely physical effect would not take
place for several days.
They could not have applied to a man who was more skillful or more conversant
with the locality than
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Araujo, and when he affirmed that the body could not have been borne out of
the narrow channel for more than a mile or so, they were sure to recover it if
they thoroughly sounded that portion of the river.
Not an island, not an islet, checked the course of the Amazon in these parts.
Hence, when the foot of the two banks had been visited up to the bar, it was
in the bed itself, about five hundred feet in width, that more careful
investigations had to be commenced.
The way the work was conducted was this. The boats taking the right and left
of the Amazon lay alongside the banks. The reeds and vegetation were tried
with the poles. Of the smallest ledges in the banks in which a body could
rest, not one escaped the scrutiny of Araujo and his Indians.
But all this labor produced no result, and half the day had elapsed without
the body being brought to the surface of the stream.
An hour's rest was given to the Indians. During this time they partook of some
refreshment, and then they returned to their task.
Four of the boats, in charge of the pilot, Benito, Fragoso, and Manoel,
divided the river between the Rio
Negro and the Bar of Frias into four portions. They set to work to explore its
very bed. In certain places the poles proved insufficient to thoroughly search
among the deeps, and hence a few dredgesor rather harrows, made of stones and
old iron, bound round with a solid barwere taken on board, and when the boats
had pushed off these rakes were thrown in and the river bottom stirred up in
every direction.
It was in this difficult task that Benito and his companions were employed
till the evening. The ubas and pirogues, worked by the oars, traversed the
whole surface of the river up to the bar of Frias.
There had been moments of excitement during this spell of work, when the
harrows, catching in something at the bottom, offered some slight resistance.
They were then hauled up, but in place of the body so eagerly searched for,
there would appear only heavy stones or tufts of herbage which they had
dragged from their sandy bed. No one, however, had an idea of giving up the
enterprise. They none of them thought of themselves in this work of salvation.
Benito, Manoel, Araujo had not even to stir up the Indians or to encourage
them. The gallant fellows knew that they were working for the fazender of
Iquitosfor the man whom they lvoed, for the chief of the excellent family who
treated their servants so well.
Yes; and so they would have passed the night in dragging the river. Of every
minute lost all knew the value.
A little before the sun disappeared, Araujo, finding it useless to continue
his operations in the gloom, gave the signal for the boats to join company and
return together to the confluence of the Rio Negro and regain the
Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon
CHAPTER VIII. THE FIRST SEARCH
124
jangada.
The work so carefully and intelligently conducted was not, however, at an end.
Manoel and Fragoso, as they came back, dared not mention their ill success
before Benito. They feared that the disappointment would only force him to
some act of despair.
But neither courage nor coolness deserted the young fellow; he was determined
to follow to the end this supreme effort to save the honor and the life of his
father, and he it was who addressed his companions, and said: "Tomorrow we
will try again, and under better conditions if possible."
"Yes," answered Manoel; "you are right, Benito. We can do better. We cannot
pretend to have entirely explored the river along the whole of the banks and
over the whole of its bed."
"No; we cannot have done that," replied Araujo; "and I maintain what I
saidthat the body of Torres is there, and that it is there because it has not
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