BY the time I had watched the cassava cake making process and examined the weapons in the village and noted almost everything of how they lived, the Indians were ready to go on with us. They had been eating all night as I explained. Now they took a hasty farewell drink of that pink stuff, cassiri, and took a large mouthful of cassava cake; their baskets were already packed for travel, and so we started.

But did they carry their baskets?

No indeed! That would have been a disgrace, like a man washing dishes or making a dress for baby. Carrying the luggage was woman’s work. What did each man have a wife for if not to do his work? The men set off with only their weapons, and the women fastened the heavy baskets to their backs by means of vine ropes around their foreheads.

Each man carried various objects in his basket, some tools, hunks of smoked meat, some extra loin cloths with perhaps a ragged old shirt secured from some “pork knocker.” On top of these belongings was placed a stack of the cassava cakes and covered with palm leaves to keep out the rain, for it showed signs of raining when we set out.

The Indians went on ahead. The women followed. They had removed whatever garments they owned—some of them had loose garments, merely for style, made of strips of cotton—and traveled only with those little beaded aprons or queyus. We came last, but after a while the women stepped out of the path and let us go on ahead. I think they wanted to watch us, just as we would like to stay behind and watch something curious walking on ahead.

We thought we had a hard trip getting to the village, but we were in for the hardest traveling afoot that I ever knew. I called it “land swimming.” The mud was literally knee deep. We would put one foot down, then the next one, stand still and pull one foot out with a great effort, step ahead with that, pull the other out with a great sucking sound, and so on. It was only with great endurance that we made this trip through the rain, but even the worst journey must come to an end and finally we reached our own camp. Nothing ever looked more homelike than our shelters, our fires and the boats moored alongside.

Lewis and I made a dash for the boat to get some dry warm clothes. Jimmy, glad to see us back, made some hot tea. Soon we had on lighter shoes, dry woolen underclothes and dry suits and socks, lay back in our hammocks and drank good hot tea and felt none the worse for our journey into the primitive homes of the Indians.

We gave the women plenty to eat and made them presents of sugar, rice, salt and tea to take back with them. They were the happiest women you ever saw and chattered among themselves like kids at a Christmas tree. Then they turned and went back into the forests without a word of leave taking to their husbands, as this toting of their husbands’ baskets was all in their day’s work.

Of all the sticky, funny messes I ever saw it was the packs of these Indians. The rain had soaked through the palm leaves on top and through the meshes of the baskets at the sides. The cassava cakes had dissolved into a soft, semi-liquid dough. This had run down through the contents of the baskets. Nearly every one contained bits of red cloth—an Indian’s choice possession. The colors had run and there were pink dough and dough-covered arrows and pink smoked meat and sticky, cassava dough enameled shirts. It was a great mess, but the Indians scraped the dough together to dry out in the sun the next day and worried not at all, for the cassava dough would all dry and be rubbed off their belongings.

While the Indians like the white men, they do not like the blacks. They get along with them all right because they have nothing whatever to do with the “Me-go-ro-man” as they call them. Our blacks, as usual, had their three shelters a distance from ours. The Indians built a hasty shelter alongside our canvas one, slung their hammocks, now daubed with dough, and climbed in. Jimmy started the victrola, the camp fires burned brightly despite the rain, and the Indians sat up and stared open-eyed, at the “hoodoo” box from which came the, to them, weird sounds. They believed that the spirits of the dead were inside that victrola, but when they saw Jimmy putting on the records and saw that no ghosts came out to kill them, they lost their fear of it.

The plaintive Southern melodies seemed to please them most. Next in their favor was a weird jazz number. From the wet jungle came the peculiar roar of red baboons. We would have fresh baboon steak next day, if we could spare an hour for hunting.

And then from the black, dismal depths of that dripping jungle came the most pitiful sobbing that I ever heard. Whether a child or a woman, or a number of them, I could not make out. I leaped from my hammock, wondering what was happening to them, if they were lost, and trying to guess how far into the jungle we would have to travel to rescue them.

Never had I heard such distress as that weeping and wailing and heartbreaking sobbing.

I pictured some helpless women there, perhaps being attacked by wild animals. Even if they were Indian women, still they were humans, I thought—

“Black night monkey,” said Jimmy.

I looked at Lewis. He smiled and nodded.

For a moment I could scarcely believe that such human crying could come from animals.

“They always cry all night,” Lewis told me. “Very annoying at first. You’ll get used to it. Just remember that they are ugly black monkeys, that they like to make that noise, that they are not really crying any more than a dog is crying when he barks, and now go to sleep.”

No one else seemed to mind it. But I must admit that it kept me awake a long while. I couldn’t force myself to think that it was a natural noise made by an animal. I couldn’t believe anything could make such a noise unless it was actual crying caused by grief or suffering. Finally I fell asleep.