August 6th and 7th.—On leaving the sitio of Antonio Malagueita we continued our way along the windings of the river, generally in a southeast and south-south-east direction, but sometimes due south, for about fifteen miles, when we stopped at the house of one Paulo Christo, a mameluco whose acquaintance I had made at Aveyros. Here we spent the night and part of the next day, doing in the morning a good five hours’ work in the forest, accompanied by the owner of the place. In the afternoon of the 7th we were again under weigh: the river makes a bend to the east-north-east for a short distance above Paulo Christo’s establishment; it then turns abruptly to the south-west, running from that direction about four miles. The hilly country of the interior then commences, the first token of it being a magnificently wooded bluff, rising nearly straight from the water to a height of about 250 feet. The breadth of the stream hereabout was not more than sixty yards, and the forest assumed a new appearance, from the abundance of the Urucuri palm, a species which has a noble crown of broad fronds, with symmetrical rigid leaflets.

On the road we passed a little shady inlet, at the mouth of which a white-haired, wrinkle-faced old man was housed in a temporary shed, washing the soil for gold. He was quite alone: no one knew anything of him in these parts except that he was a Cuyabano, or native of Cuyaba in the mining districts, and his little boat was moored close to his rude shelter. Whatever success he might have had remained a secret, for he went away, after a three weeks’ stay in the place without communicating with any one.

We reached, in the evening, the house of the last civilised settler on the river, Senhor Joad Aract, a wiry, active fellow and capital hunter, whom I wished to make a friend of and persuade to accompany me to the Munduructi village and the falls of the Cupari, some forty miles further up the river. I stayed at the sitio of Joad Aracu until the 19th, and again, in descending, spent fourteen days at the same place. The situation was most favourable for collecting the natural products of the district. The forest was not crowded with underwood, and pathways led through it ‘for many miles and in various directions. I could make no use here of our two men as hunters, so, to keep them employed, whilst José and I worked daily in the woods, I set them to make a montaria under Joa6 Aract’s directions. ‘The first day a suitable tree was found for the shell of the boat, of the kind called Itaiiba amarello, the yellow variety of the stone-wood. They felled it, and shaped out of the trunk a log nineteen feet in length; this they dragged from the forest, with the help of my host’s men, over a road they had previously made with pieces of round wood to act as rollers. The distance was about half a mile, and the ropes used for drawing the heavy load were tough lianas cut from the surrounding trees. This part of the work occupied about a week; the log had then to be hollowed out, which was done with strong chisels through a slit made down the whole length. The heavy portion of the task being then completed, nothing remained but to widen the opening, fit two planks for the sides, and the same number of semicircular boards for the ends, make the benches, and caulk the seams.

The expanding of the log thus hollowed out is a critical operation, and not always successful, many a good shell being spoilt by its splitting or expanding irregularly. It is first reared on tressels, with the slit downwards, over a large fire, which is kept up for seven or eight hours, the process requiring unremitting attention to avoid cracks and make the plank bend with the proper dipat the two ends. Wooden straddlers, made by cleaving pieces of tough elastic wood and fixing them with wedges, are inserted into the opening, their compass being altered gradually as the work goes on, but in different degree according to the part of the boat operated upon. Our casca turned out a good one: it took a long time to cool, and was kept in shape whilst it did so by means of wooden cross-pieces. When the boat was finished, it was launched with great merriment by the men, who hoisted coloured hand-kerchiefs for flags, and paddled it up and down the stream to try its capabilities. My people had suffered as much inconvenience from the want of a montaria as myself, so this was a day of rejoicing to all of us.

I was very successful at this place with regard to the objects of my

journey. About twenty new species of fishes and a considerable number of small reptiles were added to my collection; but very few birds were met with worth preserving. A great number of the most conspicuous insects of the locality were new to me, and turned out to be species peculiar to this part of the Amazons valley. There is the most striking contrast between the productions of the Cupari and those of Altar do Chad in this department: the majority of the species inhabiting the one district being totally unknown in the other. At the same time a considerable proportion of the Cupari species were identical with those of Ega on the Upper Amazons, a region eight times further removed than the village just mentioned. The most interesting acquisition at this place was a large and handsome monkey, of a species I had not before met with—the white-whiskered Coaita, or spider monkey (Ateles marginatus). I saw a pair one day in the forest moving slowly along the branches of a lofty tree, and shot one of them; the next day Joad Aracti brought down another, possibly the companion. The species is about the same size as the common black kind of which I have given an account ina former chapter, and has a similar lean body with limbs clothed with coarse black hair; but it differs in having the whiskers and a triangular patch on the crown of the head of a white colour. It is never met with in the alluvial plains of the Amazons, nor, I believe, on the northern side of the great river valley, except towards the head waters, near the Andes; where Humboldt discovered it on the banks of the Santiago. I thought the meat the best flavoured I had ever tasted. It resembled beef, but had a richer and sweeter taste. During the time of our stay in this part of the Cupari, we could get scarcely anything but fish to eat, and as this diet ill agreed with me, three successive days of it reducing me to a state of great weakness, I was obliged to make the most of our Coaité meat. We smoke-dried the joints instead of salting them; placing them for several hours on a framework of sticks arranged over a fire, a plan adopted by the natives to preserve fish when they have no salt, and which they call ‘“ muquiar.” Meat putrefies in this climate in less than twenty-four hours, and salting is of no use unless the pieces are cut in thin slices and dried immediately in the sun. My monkeys lasted me about a fortnight, the last joint being an arm with the clenched fist, which I used with great economy, hanging it in the intervals between my frugal meals on a nail in the cabin. Nothing but the hardest necessity could have driven me so near to cannibalism as this, but we had the greatest difficulty in obtaining here a sufficient supply of animal food. About every three days the work on the montaria had to be suspended and all hands turned out for the day to hunt and fish, in which they were often unsuccessful, for although there was plenty of game in the forest, it was too widely scattered to be available. Ricardo and Alberto occasionally brought in a tortoise or an ant-eater, which served us for one day’s consumption. We made acquaintance here with many strange dishes, amongst them Iguana eggs; these are of oblong form, about an inch in length, and covered with a flexible shell. The lizard lays about two score of them in the hollows of trees. They have an oily taste; the men ate them raw, beaten up with farinha, mixing a pinch of salt in the mess; I could

only do with them when mixed with Tucupi sauce, of which we had a large j2r fuli always ready to temper unsavoury morsels.

One day as T was entomologising alone and unarmed, in a dry Ygapo, where the trees were rather wide apart and the ground coated to the depth of eight or ten inches with dead leaves, I was near coming into collision with a boa-constrictor. I had just entered a little thicket to capture an insect, and whilst pinning it, was rather startled by a rushing noise in the vicinity I looked up to the sky, thinking a squall was coming on, but not a breath of wind stirred in the treetops. On stepping out of the bushes I met face to face a huge serpent coming down a slope, and making the dry twigs crack and fly with his weight as he moved over them. I had very frequently met with a smaller boa, the Cutim-boia, in a similar way, and knew from the habits of the family that there was no danger, so I stood my ground. On seeing me the» reptile suddenly turned, and glided at an accelerated pace down the path. Wishing to take a note of his probable size and the colours and markings of his skin, I set off after him; but he increased his speed, and I was unable to get near enough for the purpose. There was very little of the serpentine movement in his course. The rapidly moving and shining body looked like a stream of brown liquid flowing over the thick bed of fallen leaves, rather than a serpent with skin of varied colours. He descended towards the lower and moister parts of the Ygapd. The huge trunk of an uprooted tree here lay across the road; this he glided over in his undeviating course, and soon after penetrated a dense swampy thicket, where, of course, I did not choose to follow him.

I suffered terribly from heat and mosquitoes as the river sank with the increasing dryness of the season, although I made an awning of the sails to work under, and slept at night in the open air, with my hammock slung between the masts. But there was no rest in any part; the canoe descended deeper and deeper into the gulley, through which the river flows between high clayey banks, as the water subsided, and with the glowing sun overhead we felt at midday as if in a furnace. I could bear scarcely any clothes in the daytime, between eleven in the morning and five in the afternoon wearing nothing but loose and thin cotton trousers and a light straw hat, and could not be accommodated in Joaé Aract’s house, as it was a small one and full of noisy children. One night we had a terrific storm. The heat in the afternoon had been greater than ever, and at sunset the sky had a brassy glare: the black patches of cloud which floated in it being lighted up now and then by flashes of sheet lightning. The mosquitoes at night were more than usually troublesome, and I had just sunk exhausted into a doze, towards the early hours of morning, when the storm began; a complete deluge of rain, with incessant lightning and rattling explosions of thunder. It lasted for eight hours; the grey dawn opening amidst the crash of the tempest. The rain trickled through the seams of the cabin roof on to my collections, the late hot weather having warped the boards, and it gave me immense trouble to secure them in the midst of the confusion. Altogether I had a bad night of it; but what with storms, heat, mosquitoes, hunger, and, towards the last, ill health, I seldom had a good night’s rest on the Cupari.

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