Foraging ants (Eciton erratica) constructing a covered road—Soldiers sallying out on being disturbed.

reaching a rotting log, or other promising hunting-ground, pour into the crevices in search of booty. I have traced their arcades, occasionally, for a distance of one or two hundred yards; the grains of earth are taken from the soil over which the column is passing, and are fitted together without cement. It is this last-mentioned feature that distinguishes them from the similar covered roads made by Termites, who use their glutinous saliva to cement the grains together. The blind Ecitons, working in numbers, build up simultaneously the sides of their convex arcades, and contrive, in a surprising manner, to approximate them and fit in the key-stones without letting the loose uncemented structure fall to pieces. There was avery clear division of labour between the two classes of neuters in these blind species. The large-headed class, although not possessing monstrously lengthened jaws like the worker-majors in E. hamata and E. drepanophora, are rigidly defined in structure from the small-headed class, and act as soldiers, defending the working community (like soldier Termites) against all comers. Whenever I madea breach in one of their covered ways, all the ants underneath

were set in commotion, but the worker-minors remained behind to repair the damage, whilst the large-heads issued forth in a most menacing manner, rearing their heads and snapping their jaws with an expression of the fiercest rage and defiance.

The armies of all Ecitons are accompanied by small swarms of a kind of two-winged fly, the females of which have a very long ovipositor, and which belongs to the genus Stylogaster (family Conopsidee). These swarms hover with rapidly vibrating wings, at a height of a foot or less from the soil over which the Ecitons are moving, and occasionally one of the flies darts with great quickness towards the ground. I found they were not occupied in transfixing ants, although they have a long needle-shaped proboscis, which suggests that conclusion, but most probably in depositing their eggs in the soft bodies of insects, which the ants were driving away from their hiding-places. These eggs would hatch after the ants had placed their booty in their hive as food for their young. If this supposition be correct, the Stylogaster would offer a case of parasitism of quite a novel kind. Flies of the genus Tachinus exhibit a similar instinct, for they lie in wait near the entrances to bees’ nests, and slip their eggs into the food which the deluded bees are in the act of conveying for their young.

CHAPTER XIII.

EXCURSIONS BEYOND EGA.

Steamboat-travelling on the Amazons—Passengers—Tunantins—Caishana Indians—

The Jutahi—Indian tribes on the Jutahi and the Jurta—The SapOo—Maraua

Indians—Fonte Boa—Journey to St. Paulo—Tuctina Indians—IIlness-—Descent to Para—Changes at Para—Departure for England.

November 7th, 1856.—Embarked on the Upper Amazons steamer, the Tabatinga, for an excursion to Tunantins, a small semi-Indian settlement, lying 240 miles beyond Ega. The Zaéatinga is an iron boat of about 170 tons burthen, built at Rio de Janeiro, and fitted with engines of fifty-horse power. ‘The saloon, with berths on each side for twenty passengers, is above deck, and open at both ends to admit a free current of air. The captain or ‘‘commandante ” was a lieutenant in the Brazilian navy, aman of polished, sailor-like address, and a rigid disciplinarian; his name, Senhor Nunes Mello Cardozo. I was obliged, as usual, to take with me a stock of all articles of food, except meat and fish, for the time I intended to be absent (three months); and the luggage, including hammocks, cooking utensils, crockery, and so forth, formed fifteen large packages. One volume consisted of a mosquito tent, an article I had not yet had occasion to use on the river, but which was indispensable in all excursions beyond Ega; every person, man, woman, and child, requiring one, as without it existence would be scarcely possible. My tent was about eight feet long and five feet broad, and was made of coarse calico in an oblong shape, with sleeves at each end through which to pass the cords of a hammock. Under this shelter, which is fixed up every evening before sundown, one can read and write, or swing in one’s hammock during the long hours which intervene before bedtime, and feel one’s sense of comfort increased by having cheated the thirsty swarms of mosquitoes which fill the chamber.

We were four days on the road. The pilot, a mameluco of Ega, whom I knew very well, exhibited a knowledge of the river and powers of endurance which were quite remarkable. He stood all this time at his post, with the exception of three or four hours in the middle of each day, when he was relieved by a young man who served as apprentice; and he knew the breadth and windings of the channel, and the extent of all the yearly-shifting shoals from the Rio Negro to Loreto, a distance of more than a thousand miles. There was no slackening of speed at night, except during the brief but violent storms which occasionally 364

broke upon us, and then the engines were stopped by the command of Lieutenant Nunes, sometimes against the wish of the pilot. The nights were often so dark that we passengers on the poop deck could not discern the hardy fellow on the bridge; but the steamer drove on at full speed, men being stationed on the look-out at the prow, to watch for floating logs, and one man placed to pass orders to the helmsman; the keel scraped against a sandbank only once during the passage.

The passengers were chiefly Peruvians, mostly thin, anxious Yankee-looking men, who were returning home to the cities of Moyobamba and Chachapoyas, on the Andes, after a trading trip to the Brazilian towns on the Atlantic sea-board, whither they had gone six months previously with cargoes of Panama hats to exchange for European wares. These hats are made of the young leaflets of a palm tree, by the Indians and half-caste people who inhabit the eastern parts of Peru. They form almost the only article of export from Peru by way of the Amazons, but the money value is very great compared with the bulk of the goods, as the hats are generally of very fine quality, and cost from twelve shillings to six pounds sterling each; some traders bring down two or three thousand pounds’ worth, folded into small compass in their trunks. The return cargoes consist of hardware, crockery, glass, and other bulky or heavy goods, but not of cloth, which, being of light weight, can be carried across the Andes from the ports on the Pacific to the eastern parts of Peru. All kinds of European cloth can be obtained at a much cheaper rate by this route than by the more direct way of the Amazons, the import duties of Peru being, as I was told, lower than those of Brazil, and the difference not being counterbalanced by increased expense of transit, on account of weight, over the passes of the Andes.

There was a great lack of amusement on board. The table was very well served, professed cooks being employed in these Amazonian steamers, and fresh meat insured by keeping on deck a supply of live bullocks and fowls, which are purchased whenever there is an opportunity on the road. The river scenery was similar to that already described as presented between the Rio Negro and Ega: long reaches of similar aspect, with two long, low lines of forest, varied sometimes with cliffs of red clay, appearing one after the other: an horizon of water and sky on some days limiting the view both up stream and down. We travelled, however, always near the bank, and for my part I was never weary of admiring the picturesque grouping and variety of trees, and the varied mantles of creeping plants which clothed the green wall of forest every step of the way. With the exception of a small village called Fonte Boa, retired from the main river, where we stopped to take in firewood, and which I shall have to speak of presently, we saw no human habitation the whole of the distance. The mornings were delightfully cool; coffee was served at sunrise, and a bountiful breakfast at ten o’clock; after that hour the heat rapidly increased until it became almost unbearable; how the engine-drivers and firemen stood it without exhaustion I cannot tell; it diminished after four o’clock in the afternoon, about which time dinner-bell rung, and the evenings were always pleasant. A few miles below Tunantins, and to the west of the most westerly

mouth of the Japurd, on the same side of the Solimoens, I saw, to my surprise, a bed of stratified rock, apparently a fine-grained sandstone, exposed on the banks of the river. It was elevated not more than three or four feet above the present level of the river, which was now, the season having been an unusually wet one, about half full. I had not seen rocks of any kind on the river banks since leaving Manacapuru, 450 miles distant, and this bed seems to have escaped the notice of Spix and Poeppig. ‘The bank, at the foot of which alone the rock was visible, was connected with a tract of land lying higher than the purely alluvial district that extends eastward to a distance of several hundred miles, and was clothed with the rounded, dark-green forest which is distinctive of the ferva firmas of the Amazons valley. The slightly elevated land continues, with scarcely a break, to the mouth of the Tunantins, which we entered, after making a long circuit to avoid a shoal, on the 11th of November.

November 11th to 30th.—The Tunantins is a sluggish black-water stream, about sixty miles in length, and towards its mouth from 100 to 200 yards in breadth. ‘The vegetation on its banks has a similar aspect to that of the Rio Negro, the trees having small foliage of a sombre hue, and the dark piles of greenery resting on the surface of the inky water. The village is situated on the left bank, about a mile from the mouth of the river, and contains twenty habitations, nearly all of which are merely hovels, built of lath-work and mud. The short streets, after rain, are almost impassable, on account of the many puddles, and are choked up with weeds,—leguminous shrubs, and scarlet-flowered asclepias. The atmosphere in such a place, hedged in as it is by the lofty forest, and surrounded by swamps, is always close, warm, and reeking; and the hum and chirp of insects and birds cause a continual din. The small patch of weedy ground around the village swarms with plovers, sandpipers, striped herons, and scissor-tailed flycatchers; and alligators are always seen floating lazily on the surface of the river in front of the houses. On landing, I presented myself to Senhor Paulo Bitancourt, a good-natured half-caste, director of Indians of the neighbouring river Issa, who quickly ordered a small house to be cleared for me. This exhilarating abode contained only one room, the walls of which were disfigured by large and ugly patches of mud, the work of white ants. The floor was the bare earth, dirty and damp; the wretched chamber was darkened by a sheet of calico being stretched over the windows, a plan adopted here to keep out the Piim-flies, which float about in all shady places like thin clouds of smoke, rendering all repose impossible in the daytime whenever they can effect an entrance. My baggage was soon landed, and before the steamer departed I had taken gun, insect-net, and game bag, to make a preliminary exploration of my new locality. I remained here nineteen days, and, considering the shortness of the time, made a very good collection of monkeys, birds, and insects. A considerable number of the species (especially of insects) were different from those of the four other stations, which I examined on the south

Page 112 of 120