Word: gheerbrant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
JOURNEY TO THE FAR AMAZON (353 pp.) - Alain Gheerbrant - Simon & Schusfer...
Pants in the Ants. In Journey to the Far Amazon, Explorer Alain Gheerbrant tells how, with one Colombian and two Frenchmen, he plunged into the "green hell" of the Sierra Parima between Venezuela and Brazil. That vast sea of vegetation, never before crossed by a white man, was filled with reptiles, insects and maiir eating fish, all unfriendly. One night in a grotto a scraping noise awakened Gheerbrant. It was an advancing column, 16 inches wide, of red ants. They had already devoured his belt, half his trousers and were starting on his leather camera case...
...through the seemingly impenetrable Sierra, Gheerbrant needed the help of local Indians. His principle was nonviolence, his method diplomacy. Sometimes negotiations began with a bow and arrow aimed at a white man's heart and ended with Gheerbrant allowing savages to tug his beard and strip him of his possessions. But his supreme instrument of diplomacy was a Mozart symphony. Military marches left the Indians impassive; Louis Armstrong's trumpeting failed to send them; but Mozart always soothed the savage breast. "Such music." Gheerbrant writes, "did not . . . clamp down a mask of fear on [their] faces ... It opened...
...Dark. The most primitive of these barbarians were the Guaharibos. They lived in the depths of the forest, and Gheerbrant concluded that they "had remained on earth by an anthropological anachronism." They had no implements of iron or stone, not even a hatchet or a knife. They did not know how to build huts or make canoes, did no farming and went about naked. Sometimes they practiced cannibalism. Mostly they ate what was easily come upon: "wild berries, marsh flowers full of earthworms, caterpillars and insects, and even earth." About all that distinguished them from animals was that they could...