At first I
felt the lack of food keenly, but later the pain of hunger was dulled,
and only a warm, drugged sensation pervaded my system. Starvation
has its small mercies.
I became almost childishly interested in small things. There was a
peculiar sound that came from the deep forest in the damp nights;
I used to call it the "voice of the forest." To close one's eyes and
listen was almost to imagine oneself near the murmuring crowd of a
large city. It was the song of numerous frogs which inhabited a creek
near our _tambo_. Then I would hear four musical notes uttered in a
major key from the tree-tops close by, soon answered by another four
in a similar pitch, and this musical and cheerful(!) conversation was
continued all night long. The men told me that this was the note of
a species of frog that lived in the trees.
One day the jungle took the first toll from us. Young Brabo was very
low; I managed to stagger out of my hammock to give him a hypodermic
injection, but he was too far gone for it to do him any good. He
died in the early afternoon. We dug a grave with our machetes right
behind our _tambo_. No stone marks this place; only a small wooden
cross tied together with bark-strips shows where our comrade lies--a
son of the forest whom the forest claimed again.
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