his right hand and shook his head.

“If anyone attacks you with a knife or gun, don’t try to stop him that way,” he said. “It won’t work fast enough, as I found out. Hit his wrist like this”—Serbot opened his right hand, bent it backward, and drove it against his left wrist—“with the heel of your hand, upward and outward. Try it.”

Biff practiced the action a few times and apparently won Serbot’s approval, for the smiling man added:

“That not only will stop him, it will jar the weapon from his grasp, enabling you to snatch it all in the same move.”

Serbot demonstrated that, too. Then, noting that some of the other passengers were beginning to look their way, Serbot changed the subject abruptly. Leaning toward Biff, he began pointing out more sights from the window, as the plane followed the north bank of the river.

There, the jungle had opened into widespread grazing lands, studded by a range of low, flat-topped mountains. Perched on one summit was a little town that Serbot said was called Monte Alegre. Then they were far out over the river again, and the Amazon once more resembled a choppy, yellow sea, until the order came to “Fasten safety belts!” The plane was coming to a landing at Santarém on the south bank.

Serbot pointed out to Biff the wide Tapajóz River which disgorged a huge flood into the turbulent Amazon, splotching the yellow tide with long streaks of green that looked like wash from the jungle and shone with emerald brilliance in the noonday sun.

The plane roared off again, and at Obidos, eighty miles farther upstream, the Amazon narrowed to a single deep channel only a mile and a quarter wide with the walls of solid forests fringing both bluffs. Later, the river widened again, and Serbot indicated small settlements built on high stilts in clearings back from the bank.

“Those show you how high the river rises,” Serbot told Biff. “Often it overflows its banks for many miles on both sides. Some of the native villages are so far off in the jungle that they can only be reached when the Amazon is in flood.”

Between pointing out these interesting scenes, Serbot talked occasionally of his war experiences, and Biff, wide awake and alert ever since his morning nap, was enjoying the trip more and more. He realized that he was gaining a slight preview of the Brazilian jungle that might prove helpful when he and his father set out on the safari that was actually to be 

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