The Shameless Diary of an Explorer (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII LAST STRAWS July 8.--Sh-sh-sh In two hours we made a large clear stream between high diorite cliffs--the Talushalitna Every time I leaped behind a horse's pack in fording it, a bunch of them tore back to shore; so I crossed alone on foot, through a hundred tickliest yards of icy water. Then we covered endless meadows and one-pond swamps, purple with iris, golden with arnica. Jack's horses stampeded, and he flew into a passion. Now we slid down grassy benches, to a silty slew, where the bent willows were rustred with glacial mud--from river-floods Glad omen But never was reapproach to a river so vanishing: more sloughs and silt flats, a level spruce forest growing from white moss and roses; at last a lead along an endless, gouged drift-pile, and we heard shouts, and saw two tents on a gravel island in the middle of the brown river. The Professor, Miller, and two Siwashes, one big, one little, cavorted across to us in a long boat. Our leader first gravely shook my hand and smiled. "Hello, Dunn," said he (like that prig Stanley's icy, "Mr. Livingstone, I believe?" when he met the missionary in darkest Africa, thought I). "You've done excellently. We arrived here only this morning." Mosquito hats choked all of them. They blind and deafen, and if a man as God made him can't stand the 'skeets, he's no right up in this country. We started to ford, from the south shore to the north. The Bay Dunnage mare was mired in a quicksand and pulled out before we even unpacked and loaded the boat. It was the best place ever for putting in horses to swim, a cut bank they couldn't climb up on their side, a narrow current nearly all in one channel and shooting across diagonally to the other shore, where a long bar stretched below. I crossed to...