and binding them, instead of cord, with a climbing plant growing in those forests, and embracing the trees like ivy, and when these structures, each large enough to hold two men (and in appearance something like huge wicker baskets) were completed, vessels and crew were ready.
The safest plan was to stand upright in them, armed with long poles to push them off from the rocks, against which the fierce current every moment threatened to dash them. As it was, they
sank two or three feet deep in the water, so that we were nearly always immersed up to our waists.
This river rises in the mountains of Segovia, and falls into the sea at Cape Gracia a Dios, after having flowed for a long distance, with frightful rapidity, among an infinite number of huge rocks, and between the most terrible precipices imaginable. We had to pass more than a hundred cataracts great and small, and there were three which the most daring of us could not look at without turning giddy with fear, when we saw and heard the water plunging from such a height into those horrible gulfs.
