amazon quotes

david grann - the lost city of z: a tale of deadly obsession in the amazon

"There were the Prudent, who said: 'This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do.' There were the Wise, who said: 'This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do; but at least you will know better next time.' There were the Very Wise, who said: 'This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do, but not nearly as foolish as it sounds.' There were the Romantic, who appeared to believe that if everyone did this sort of thing all the time the world's troubles would soon be over. There were the Envious, who thanked God they were not coming; and there were the other sort, who said with varying degrees if insincerity that they would give anything to come. There were the Correct, who asked me if I knew any of the people at the Embassy. There were the Practical, who spoke at length of inoculations and calibres... There were the Apprehensive, who asked me if I had made my will. There were the Men Who Had Done A Certain Amount of That Sort of Thing In Their Time, You Know, and these imparted to me elaborate stratagems for getting the better of ants and told me that monkeys made excellent eating, and so for that matter did lizards, and parrots; they all tasted rather like chicken." (p79)

"But it wasn't the big predators that he and his companions fretted about most. It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce men’s clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night. The ticks that attached like leeches (another scourge) and the red hairy chiggers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness. The berne flies that drove their ovipostors through clothing and deposited larval eggs that hatched and burrowed under the skin. The almost invisible biting flies called piums that left the explorers’ bodies covered in lesions. Then there were the 'kissing bugs,' which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Typanasoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling. Nothing, though, was more hazardous that the mosquitoes. They transmitted everything from malaria to “bone-crusher” fever to elephantiasis to yellow fever. '[Mosquitoes] constitute the chief single reason why Amazonia is a frontier still to be won,' Willard Price wrote in his 1952 book The Amazing Amazon." (p94)

"A snake-bite which bleeds in nonpoisonous. Two punctures, plus a bluish and bloodless patch, is a sign of poison." (227)