Only about half way through (a slender, unfortunately abridged version), but as I bought it today that isn't so bad. It's terrific. The author, Peter Fleming (brother of Ian Fleming), is off in or around 1933 in search of the Fawcett expedition that vanished in Brazil in 1925.
I've read a similar account in The Lost City of Z, the book, and was intrigued when I found this closer account. It's excellent.
Excerpts:
"W made amicable and expansive gestures with our arms. We grinned. We put on every semblance of delight; "Ticanto" we cried. We had been told it was the thing to say. "Ticanto," we cried with desperate geniality, wondering what it meant."
- This upon meeting a possibly hostile tribe
"Alas the alligator is a fraud. His formidable reputation -- as empty as his skin, which mountebanks formerly hung in their booths -- is, like that skin, a hallowed device of quackery, a trick to fire imaginations which have to take the tropics on trust."
- This on alligator hunting.
"Beyond that, and forty feet below it, was the river; a river half a mile wide and more: a river so big, so long expected, and so phenomenal in every way that it seemed hardly possible to have come on it so suddenly, to have no more warning that it was waiting for us round the corner of those palms than we should have had of a dog's dead body in the road: a river fired and bloody in the sunset: a river that we loved instantly and learnt at last to hate. we gaped at this river. There was exaltation in the air."
- On first encountering the Amazon.
It's so far a great book, wonderful (although abridged) reading, and curious to note the author (like Speke in the search for the source of the Nile) died in a hunting accident. How common can that be?