The native girls were dirty; he never mentioned
that. The wild beasts were scrawny and less wild,
and what was indicated on his map as an immense
mountain was only a rather undistinguished hill.
Twenty-seven days it took him, half starved
and feverish toward the end, seeing visions,
to travel the same trail we traveled in a week,
stopping often to search for the giants he found.
Was the diary a fraud? No, we thought not.
At the river-fork where we had a picnic, he wept,
for the alternatives seemed death or death.
What did we know of total exasperation in blind
valleys, night-fear, terror at the awful cries
of imagined animals we saw were only monkeys?
We had none of that. We had modern weapons,
a city to go to, and the safety of a brave precedent.
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