Status Updates From Cloud Forest

“Toward noon, turning eastward into the Inuya, we saw the Geoffroy’s dolphin or inia, that gray-yellow river porpoise common throughout the Amazon; how strange it seems to find this animal more than three thousand miles from the sea — though of course there is a theory that all the dolphins and whales of the world were originally land mammals of the amazon basin…”

“Fear is very much like pain, in the sense that, in the intervals that one is free of it, one forgets how very disagreeable it is.”

“Quillabamba is the capital of the province of Concepcion, but its streets are of mud for all of that, and its best hotel and restaurant undistinguished to the point of simple filth; the hotel’s communal toilet had a roof, however, and the restaurant personnel, though barefoot, sadly soiled, and otherwise informal in their appearance, were friendly and fleet of foot.”

“One night George Glass showed the Indians colored slides, … , and they gazed admiringly, for the first time in their lives, at pictures of cities, of the sea, and of an ocean liner… But curiously — and this was somehow moving — they were affected most by pictures of wild animals and birds, the egrets, ocelots, and monkeys with which they were familiar.”

“Patagonia — loosely, ‘land of giant feet’ — was named by the small Spaniards in honor of the large footprints of the Indians; the Tehuelches, especially, were very tall, many of the men being six feet four inches and more.”