Dark America

P: In Washington, D. C, the tales of Captain A. W, Stevens, air-map maker (TIME,.May 11) for the Brazilian exploration (12 white men, 100 Indians) of Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, continued last week:.

The trekking-menage sat down to dinner. Such succulent meats! What were they? Before the white men lay crackly tidbits of wild tapir (pig). The coppery Indian guides gorged on chunks of monkey carcasses, on the crisped torsos of giant lizards.

That music--what was it? In the dank fastnesses of the jungle along the banks of the Rio Parima, towards whose source the white men were hacking their way,, stirred unearthly strains. "Debbils," groaned the natives. "Station KDKA, Pittsburgh," chortled the expedition's justly proud radio expert, John Swanson. A deep, pontifical voice broke the hot silence. "That," explained the man with the ear phones, "is Judge Elbert H. Gary, of the U. S. Steel Corporation."

P:Also last week, there sailed into Manhattan another steamer from South America and Dr. Charles C. Bull, Stevens' cartographer, onetime Harvard footballer, geologist of the Rice expedition, continued, with interruptions by recurrent fits of jungle ague, Stevens' narrative.

The travelers had crossed the Sierra Pacaraima from Brazil into Venezuela to investigate the aboriginal legend that the Orinoco and the Amazon have a common source. They came to the Rio Merarwi and here, stars ill-boding, three of their canoes capsized, dumping out five months' provender and sending the party speedily homewards. (Hence Stevens' monkey meat.)

Said Bull of some Indians seen: "Some had the build and faces of Tartars, others of Orientals, others were as Egyptian as Pharaoh."

P: Finally, last week, looking healthily gaunt, Dr. Rice turned up, having joined his wife in Lisbon and come home on a Cunarder. He filled in the story:

Entering Brazil, the explorers had been delayed by civil war (TIME, July 14 et seq., LATIN AMERICA) and occupied their time establishing schools for the natives on the Rios Branco and Negro. Threading up the Rio Parima, Lieutenant Walter Hinton, trans-Atlantic flier and air-scout for Dr. Rice, had sought trails from the Parima valley into the Orinoco country. He found none, but located a tribe of furtive, stunted "white" Indians, the Shiritanas, who exhibited neither fear nor curiosity at sight of the white men and their aircraft. The Shiritanas favored cocaine as a relish for their diet of plantains. They wore no clothing, carried bows strung with poisoned arrows, moved in and out between the trees "like jaguars," without making a sound or causing a rustle of the leaves.