We crossed the river at this point, and entered a narrow channel which penetrates the interior of the island of Tupinambardana, and leads to a chain of lakes called the Lagos de Cararaucu. A furious current swept along the coast, eating into the crumbling earthy banks, and strewing the river with débris of the forest. ‘The mouth of the channel lies about twenty-five miles from Villa Nova; the entrance is only about forty yards broad, but it expands, a short distance inland, into a large sheet of water. We suffered terribly from insect pests during the twenty-four hours we remained here. At night it was quite impossible to sleep for mosquitoes: they fell upon us by myriads, and without much piping came straight at our faces as thick as raindrops in a shower. The men crowded into the cabins, and then tried to expel the pests by the smoke from burnt rags, but it was of little avail, although we were half suffocated during the operation. In the daytime the Mottica, a much larger and more formidable fly than the mosquito, insisted upon levying his tax of blood. We had been tormented by it for many days past, but this place seemed to be its metropolis. The species has been described by Perty, the author of the entomological portion of Spix and Martius’

travels, under the name of Hadrus lepidotus. It isa member of the Tabanidz family, and indeed is closely related to the Hematopota pluvialis, a brown fly which haunts the borders of woods in summertime in England. The Motticais of a bronzed-black colour; its proboscis is formed of a bundle of horny lancets, which are shorter and broader than is usually the case in the family to which it belongs. Its puncture does not produce much pain, but it makes such a large gash in the flesh that the blood trickles forth in little streams. Many scores of them were flying about the canoe all day, and sometimes eight or ten would settle on one’s ankles at the same time. It is sluggish in its motions, and may be easily killed with the fingers when it settles. Penna went forward in the montaria to the Pirarecu fishing stations, on a lake lying farther inland; but he did not succeed in reaching them on account of the length and intricacy of the channels; so after wasting a day, during which, however, I had a profitable ramble in the forest, we again crossed the river, and on the 16th continued our voyage along the northern shore. The clay cliffs of Cararaucti are several miles in length. The hard pink-and-red-coloured beds are here extremely thick, and in some places present a compact stony texture. The total height of the cliff is from thirty to sixty feet above the mean level of the river, and the clay rests on strata of the same coarse iron-cemented conglomerate which has already been so often mentioned. Large blocks of this latter have been detached and rolled by the force of currents up parts of the cliff, where they are seen resting on terraces of the clay. On the top of all lies a bed of sand and vegetable mould, which supports a lofty forest, growing up to the very brink of the precipice. After passing these barreiros we continued our way along a low uninhabited coast, clothed, wherever it was elevated above high-water mark, with the usual vividly-coloured forests of the higher Ygapé lands, to which the broad and regular fronds of the Murumurt palm, here extremely abundant, served as a great decoration. Wherever the land was lower than the flood height of the Amazons, Cecropia trees prevailed, sometimes scattered over meadows of tall broad-leaved grasses, which surrounded shallow pools swarming with water-fowl. Alligators were common on most parts of the coast; in some places we saw also small herds of Capybaras (a large Rodent animal, like a colossal Guinea-pig) amongst the rank herbage on muddy banks, and now and then flocks of the graceful squirrel monkey (Chrysothrix sciureus), and the vivacious Caiarara (Cebus albifrons) were seen taking flying leaps from tree to tree. On the 22nd we passed the mouth of the most easterly of the numerous channels which lead to the large interior lake of Saracd, and on the 23rd threaded a series of passages between islands, where we again saw human habitations, ninety miles distant from the last house at Cararaucu. On the 24th we arrived at Serpa.

Serpa is a small village, consisting of about eighty houses, built on a bank elevated twenty-five feet above the level of the river. The beds of Tabatinga clay, which are here intermingled with scoria-looking conglomerate, are in some parts of the declivity prettily variegated in colour; the name of the town in the Tupi language, Ita-coatidra, takes

its origin from this circumstance, signifying striped or painted rock. It is an old settlement, and was once the seat of the district government, which had authority over the Barra of the Rio Negro. It was in 1849 a wretched-looking village, but it has since revived, on account of having been chosen by the Steamboat Company of the Amazons as a station for steam saw-mills and tile manufactories. We arrived on Christmas-eve, when the village presented an animated appearance from the number of people congregated for the holidays. The port was full of canoes, large and small—from the montaria, with its arched awning of woven lianas and Maranta leaves, to the two-masted cuberta of the peddling trader, who had resorted to the place in the hope of trafficking with settlers coming from remote sitios to attend the festival. We anchored close to an igarité, whose owner was an old Juri Indian, disfigured by a large black tattooed patch in the middle of his face, and by his hair being close cropped, except a fringe in front of the head. In the afternoon we went ashore. The population seemed to consist chiefly of semi-civilised Indians, living as usual in half-finished mud hovels. The streets were irregularly laid out, and overrun with weeds and bushes swarming with ‘‘mocuim,” a very minute scarlet acarus, which sweeps off to one’s clothes in passing, and attaching itself in great numbers to the skin causes a most disagreeable itching. The few whites and better class of mameluco residents live in more substantial dwellings, whitewashed and tiled. All, both men and women, seemed to me much more cordial, and at the same time more brusque in their manners than any Brazilians I had yet met with. One of them, Captain Manoel Joaquim, I knew for a long time afterwards: a lively, intelligent, and thoroughly good-hearted man, who had quite a reputation throughout the interior of the country for generosity, and for being a firm friend of foreign residents and stray travellers. Some of these excellent people were men of substance, being owners of trading vessels, slaves, and extensive plantations of cacao and tobacco.

We stayed at Serpa five days. Some of the ceremonies observed at Christmas were interesting, inasmuch as they were the same, with little modification, as those taught by the Jesuit missionaries, more than a century ago, to the aboriginal tribes whom they had induced to settle on this spot. In the morning all the women and girls, dressed in white gauze chemises and showy calico print petticoats, went in procession to church, first going the round of the town to take up the different ““mordomos,” or stewards, whose office is to assist the Juiz of the festa. These stewards carried each a long white reed, decorated with coloured ribbons; several children also accompanied, grotesquely decked with finery. Three old squaws went in front, holding the “sairé,” a large semicircular frame, clothed with cotton and studded with ornaments, bits of looking-glass, and so forth. This they danced up and down, singing all the time a monotonous whining hymn in the Tupi language, and at frequent intervals turning round to face the followers, who then all stopped for a few moments. I was told that this sairé was a device adopted by the Jesuits to attract the savages to church, for these everywhere followed the mirrors, in which they saw as it were magically reflected their own persons. In the evening, good-humoured revelry

prevailed on all sides. The negroes, who had a saint of their own colour—St. Benedito—had their holiday apart from the rest, and spent the whole night singing and dancing, to the music of a long drum (gamba) and the caracashd. The drum was a hollow log, having one end covered with skin, and was played by the performer sitting astride upon it and drumming with his knuckles. The caracashé is a notched bamboo tube, which produces a harsh rattling noise by passing a hard stick over the notches. Nothing could exceed in dreary monotony this music and the singing and dancing, which were kept up with unflagging vigour all night long. The Indians did not get up a dance; for the whites and mamelucos had monopolised all the pretty coloured girls for their own ball, and the older squaws preferred looking on to taking a part themselves. Some of their husbands joined the negroes, and got drunk very quickly. It was amusing to notice how voluble the usually taciturn red-skins became under the influence of liquor. The negroes and Indians excused their own intemperance by saying the whites were getting drunk at the other end of the town, which was quite true.

The forest which encroaches on the ends of the weed-grown streets yielded me a large number of interesting insects, some of which have been described in the preceding chapter. The elevated land on which Serpa is built appears to be a detached portion of the ¢erra firma; behind, lies the great interior lake of Saracd, to the banks of which there is a foot-road through the forest, but I could not ascertain what was the distance. Outlets from the lake enter the Amazons both above and below the village. The woods were remarkably dense, and the profoundest solitude reigned at the distance of a few minutes’ walk from the settlement. The first mile or two of the forest road was very pleasant: the path was broad, shady, and clean; the lower trees presented the most beautiful and varied foliage imaginable, and a compact border of fern-like selaginellas lined the road on each side. The only birds I saw were ant-thrushes in the denser thickets, and two species of Cerzeba, a group allied to the creepers. These were feeding on the red gummy seeds of Clusia trees, which were here very numerous, their thick oval leaves, and large, white, wax-like flowers making them very conspicuous objects in the crowded woods. The only insect I will name amongst the numbers of species which sported about these shady places is the Papilio Ergeteles, and this for the purpose of again showing how much may be learned by noting the geographical relations ot races and closely-allied species. The Papilio Ergeteles is of a velvety black colour, with two large spots of green and two belts of crimson on its wings. Its range is limited to the north side of the lower Amazons from Obydos to the Rio Negro; on the south side of the river it is replaced by a distinct kind called the Papilio Echelus. The two might be considered, as they have been hitherto, perfectly distinct species, had not an intermediate variety been found to inhabit Cayenne, where neither extreme form occurs. The two forms are as distinct as any two allied species can well be, and they are different in both sexes. They are found in no other part of America than the districts mentioned. The intermediate varieties, however, link the two together, so that they cannot be considered otherwise than as modifications of one and the

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