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descended once more to climb over the rocks and so on. I stopped for a break after a few hours. I drank, ate a few pieces of fruit, and plodded on. The slope flattened out. I gave up wending my way over the rocks and headed up to the jungle, never letting the river out of my sight.

A few more hours passed, and I thought that I surely must have gone more than half a mile. Doubt began to gnaw at me. What if I didn't find Curiplaya? How did I know that it even existed? Since it wasn't marked on the map, I had only Karl's word to go on. Maybe Karl had been mistaken or maybe he was lying. No, Karl would not have told an outright lie.

I remembered how concerned he had been for us. But he was a strange guy. And we had never seen the island and the little beachhead that were supposed to warn us that we were heading into the canyon. That could have cost us our lives; perhaps it had taken Kevin's. At first Karl had claimed that he had travelled the length of the river twice and then had contradicted himself when he said that he had never been down it. We hadn't been told about San Pedro Canyon until we were almost halfway there.

No, Karl wasn't particularly reliable. I remembered something else that was weird. Karl kept changing the date that he was supposed to return to La Paz. Looking back, the whole business about the truck he was to bring to his uncle's ranch seemed a bit fishy. Still I had seen the letter with