Torres hesitated; he tried to resume his thoughts with coolness, and
finally, after giving vent to a last imprecation, he was about to
abandon all idea of regaining possession of his case, when once more,
in spite of himself, there flashed across him the thought of his
document, the remembrance of all that scaffolding on which his future
hopes depended, on which he had counted so much; and he resolved to
make another effort.
Then he got up.
The guariba got up too.
He made several steps in advance.
The monkey made as many in the rear, but this time, instead of
plunging more deeply into the forest, he stopped at the foot of an
enormous ficus--the tree of which the different kinds are so numerous
all over the Upper Amazon basin.
To seize the trunk with his four hands, to climb with the agility of
a clown who is acting the monkey, to hook on with his prehensile tail
to the first branches, which stretched away horizontally at forty
feet from the ground, and to hoist himself to the top of the tree, to
the point where the higher branches just bent beneath its weight, was
only sport to the active guariba, and the work of but a few seconds.
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