CHAPTER XIX

UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA

It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America. Besides, it was fourteen months since I had done any real wandering, and to have returned at once to civilization from the easy experience of my Kinetophone days might have left me with as great a longing for the untrodden wilds and the open road as when I had set out three and a half years before. I am not merely one of those whose chief desire in life is to go somewhere else, but I have a horror of going by the ordinary route. There was one way home which no one seemed to have followed, one which even Brazilians considered impossible; and the first leg of that journey was to push on up the Amazon to Manaos.

On the morning of May first, therefore, having added six hundred grains of quinine and a roll of cotton bandages to my equipment, I boarded a _gaiola_, or “bird-cage,” as river steamers are known in Amazonia, and struck south. The journey could have been made direct by ocean liner in less than half the time, and these flimsy native craft not only charge the same fare, but sell tickets as if they were conferring a special and individual favor; but they wander in and out of the river byways and give glimpses of Amazonian life which passengers on the big steamers never suspect. The _Andirá_ was perhaps a hundred feet long, its two decks heaped and littered with boxes, bales, casks, trunks, and huge glass demijohns incased in rattan, until one could barely squeeze and scramble one’s way along them. On the open deck aft stood a long dining-table flanked by wooden benches, while ten small, stuffy four-berth cabins stretched along either side of the boat close to the boilers. These, of course, were merely dressing-rooms and places to stow one’s baggage, for everyone slept on deck. After a very Brazilian dinner, with the big jolly captain, of pure Portuguese ancestry, at the head of the table in the family manner, there was a scramble for places to tie hammocks, and the space ordinarily allotted being all too small, the entire after deck, except the table itself, was soon festooned with a network of redes in all colors.

“_Todo é à vontade, senhores_,” said the captain, “_Aqui nada está prohibido. A casa é nossa: nem uma saia á bordo_;” and with nothing prohibited and not a “skirt” on board we fell quickly into pajamas and slippers, from which most of the passengers did not change again during the trip. Behind us, without background, Pará lay flat across her yellow water, only her reservoir and the twin towers of the cathedral standing a bit above the general level, ugly with ships and warehouses, in the foreground, scores of the vessels rusting away because rubber had lost its spring. Slowly it receded to a line on the horizon dividing a light-blue from a light-yellow infinity, then faded away into nothingness.

Even this smaller mouth of the river was very wide. The mainland on the left was already growing indistinct, yet on the right the Island of Marajó was only a distant faint line. As we drew nearer, this, too, seemed covered with dense forests as far as the eye could see, with many slender palms which I took to be the _carnauba_, though they turned out to be the _burity_. Toward three o’clock we put in at a port on the island, a bucolic, peaceful cove with a cool-looking two-story farmhouse, a group of cleanly white women and children gazing down from the deep shade of the upper veranda. Men in pajamas and wooden _tamancos_ wandered down to the boat, from which we, similarly clad, strolled ashore. The lower story of the house was a well-stocked shop, an iron gate shutting off the wide stairway to the balcony above, where the women and children lived in almost Oriental seclusion. Beside it stood a large _cachaza_-mill grinding up sugar-cane and turning it into rum in 25-liter demijohns, more than a hundred of which were already on the wharf, waiting to be carried aboard the _Andirá_. A group of reddish-gray cattle with the suggestion of a hump were grazing in the grassy yard beyond the distillery.

The Island of Marajó, several times larger than the British Isles, with great plains stretching from horizon to horizon, has long been famous for its cattle. Once they were so numerous that they were killed only for their hides; then came an epidemic which nearly wiped them out. Emperor Dom Pedro took a hand, made the island a breeding-place, improved the stunted and decreasing native stock by the importation of zebu bulls, and now the island was estimated to have forty thousand head, furnishing meat to most of the Amazon Valley. The zebu in his heavy hide, with its black, sun-proof lining, not only endures the climate easily, but is indifferent to the _carrapatos_, or ticks, and all the other insect plagues to which animals from the temperate zone are subject; he eats any food, crosses with any species of cattle, bequeathing all his good qualities with even a fraction of his blood, furnishes both meat and milk of a fairly high grade, and as a draft-animal is noted for his strength and endurance. The only great _plaga_ left were the alligators, which every year kill much stock. When the waters are low the cowboys of Marajó have “bees” of driving alligators into shallow places, where they are dragged out by the tail, unless they succeed in clinging to one another until the hunters’ strength is exhausted, and killed with axes. Water-buffaloes were also once introduced, but they proved inferior and did not breed well with cows. The pet of this particular estate was a magnificent zebu bull that had come from India by way of England and Rio, at a cost of more than $6,000, and which strolled about with the same dignified regal tread of the sacred bulls of Puri and Benares to whom he was closely related. He ate anything, according to the _fazendeiro_—sugar-cane, _melgaço_, or crushed pulp, bread, _farinha_, soap, hats, clothing, shoes—but, continued his fond owner, he had a lordly way of choosing only the best, which again carried my mind back to long rows of East Indian shopkeepers shivering with apprehension lest one of the holy animals wandering past discover their most cherished wares.

The estate-owner was in close touch with the world and its doings and had traveled widely in Europe, though not in Brazil. I could scarcely maintain a seemly countenance when he told me in great detail, with much eloquence and wealth of gestures, the story of Edison, almost word for word as I had written it a few days before for the chief daily of Pará. But gradually the conversation turned to politics, as it usually does when men meet in Brazil, unless religion happens to get the right of way. His heartfelt remarks about “this calamity of a government” showed that he and his like were as fully aware of the knavery of their politicians as any foreign observer; the trouble was, being talkers rather than doers, they had no notion where to begin in an effort to improve things.

At the first symptoms of night we pushed on up the reddish-yellow river. I had already made it a practice to give myself an occasional hour of exercise on the slightly curving roof of the steamer, and as there was but slight room for walking, I indulged in a modified form of calisthenics, to the unbounded astonishment of my fellow-passengers. The Brazilians not only did not exercise, except with their tongues; they did not even read, though there were excellent electric-lights over the hammocks. Even the most nearly educated among them start out on a trip of a month or more on one of these _gaiolas_ without a page of reading matter. While they were wondering amusedly at my exercising I could not but ask myself what on earth they did with their minds during those weeks of forced inaction. They seemed to endure the voyage in a sort of coma, sleeping audibly by day in their hammocks, though often making the whole night hideous with their card games.

We stopped during the dark hours at a couple of _fazendas_ to pick up sealed demijohns, and in the morning, a brilliant Sunday, entered the Strait of Breves. This is a narrow and deep section of the river between Marajó and the mainland, with endless dense forests, sometimes not more than five hundred yards away, on either side, so winding that often the exit was apparently closed ahead and one was at a loss to know how the boat could proceed. The stream was so placid that the metallic reflections were almost painful to the eyes, and so clear that the virgin forest, from its slender little palm-trees to its liana-wound giants, seemed to stand upright, in reversed positions, above and below the surface, with not a suggestion of land visible. Tucked away here and there in the edge of the water-rooted wilderness was a single house or hut built of jungle materials and standing on stilts, with no apparent soil, but only board-walks above the water. The dwellings were generally new and fairly clean, as were the inhabitants in their newly-washed Sunday clothes, at least from a distance. Now and then a compact little island dense with forest jungle, lordly palms, and majestic trees with great buttresses, slipped past. Natives in their _ubás_, long, slender, dugout canoes sitting low in the water, glided along the roots of the forest, often all but swamped in our wake, but always saving themselves by skilful canoe-manship. Women and children were equally water-birds and drove the steed of the Amazon as fearlessly and unerringly as the men. They sat tailor-fashion on the very nose of the canoe, now and then crossing the stream, plying their round or heart-shaped paddles—on some of which were painted fantastic faces—in a languid yet energetic manner, appearing always on the point of falling off, though to go overboard anywhere in the Amazon is to risk being devoured by alligators, _parainhas_, and a dozen other _bichos_. Woods, trees, _ubás_, houses, even the women combing their hair inside them—for they generally had no walls—showed exactly as plainly below the water as above, colors and all, so absolutely mirror-smooth was the constantly curving strait. No doubt after twenty-five years in an Amazonian pilot-house, as was the case of our captain, all this would become deadly monotonous—the endless, dark-green, impenetrable forest unrolling like a stage setting on either side day after day and year after year, to doomsday and the end of time—but at least the first trip on a brilliant day is a memory not easily lost.

It is natural to see only a dreary sameness in the endless film unrolling at a steady ten-mile pace on either hand, but in reality the differences are infinite, the countless tree-forms alone the study of a life-time. The uninitiated may journey for hours in these Amazonian wildernesses without detecting a sign of animal life where every square yard has its sharp-eyed denizens. Though food abounds everywhere, the unschooled may starve in the midst of plenty, as the moss-covered bonds and rotting bones of more than one escaped prisoner from the rubber-fields have borne witness. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, to the newcomer is the apparent absence of bird life—unless there still lingers in his mind’s eye that terrifying picture of our school-day geographies—a rope of monkeys swinging from a lofty branch, the lowermost playfully tickling an alligator under the chin.

Early in the afternoon we slid up to an empty sheet-iron _barracão_, and then wandered on again, the only reason for the stop evidently being that the captain wished to buy a native straw hat, especially well made in this region. The only ones on hand were too small for him, so he ordered one for the down-trip some two months later. As long as the boat was moving we were perfectly comfortable. In my steamer-chair under the prow-awning I watched life slip lazily past, forgetting even that I was suffering for lack of exercise. In the tropics a man seems to have as much energy as elsewhere; but he is prone to form plans and when the time comes to execute them to say to himself, “Oh, I think I’ll loaf here in the shade another half hour,” and before he is aware of it another wasted day is charged up opposite his meager credit column with Father Time. Whenever we halted in a windless corner of the river to take on demijohns or leave a few of the things which civilization exchanges for them, the heat was intense. One was often reminded of the fact that Pará is nearer New York than it is to Rio, for most of the supplies of this Amazonian region seemed to come from “America,” as its inhabitants call the United States. The people of the Amazon Valley, for instance, where cows are few and generally tuberculous and children the one unfailing crop, consume great quantities of American condensed milk. We signed a “vale” for a milreis whenever we wanted milk with our morning coffee, and were handed a small can of a very familiar brand. Too lazy even to filter water through a cloth, we drank the native yellow-brown Amazon, containing everything from mere silt to tiny “jacarés” (alligators), as the Brazilians called them. Passengers, crew and riverside inhabitants were equally easy-going and contented with life. Neither the captain nor his _immediato_, a pleasing, well-mannered man of Portuguese father and Indian mother, thought it necessary to assume that fierce outward demeanor with which Anglo-Saxon commanders so often seek to maintain authority. Ours was a family, a sort of patriarchal rule which, in the end, seemed to bring as effectual results as when nothing is left to individual judgment.

Pinsón went twenty leagues up the Amazon before he discovered that he had left the ocean, if we are to believe old chroniclers. It is indeed the “sea-river” or the “fresh sea,” as the Brazilians call it, for in most places it broadens out until the endless tree-line takes on the wavering blue of great distance. Day after day the pageant of magnificent trees of many species, their trunks often totally hidden by the dense smaller growth and the lianas that draped them as with winding sheets, crawled ceaselessly northward, though at times it receded to the dim horizon. Rain and dull skies seemed to have remained behind in Pará, yet there was a vapid breath to this prolific creation, a superabundant luxuriance about us, which made the daily consumption of quinine seem a wise and foresighted precaution. Even in the hushing heat of noonday one seemed to feel fever ramping up and down the land, throttling man even as the vines and fungi sapped and choked the mammoth trees; by night, when the vampires winged their velvety flight in and out of the shaded depths from which came the incessant night sounds of the tropics, mingled now and then with the gentle murmur of the great river, it was as if Death himself were striding to and fro questing for victims.

On the third or fourth day we caught glimpses of low, wooded hills, or ridges, and as these always give footing for _castanhas_ along the Amazon, we were not surprised soon after to come upon sheet-iron warehouses and huge heaps of “Brazil nuts.” The “Pará chestnut” grows on a tree averaging more than a hundred feet in height—so high that it is never climbed for its fruit—and clustering fairly well together on slight tablelands on both sides of the Amazon. The nuts ripen during the rainy season, from January to March, and fall to the ground by hundreds. In its native state the “nigger-toe” is about the size and shape of a husked cocoanut, but with a shell so hard that a loaded cart passing over it will not crack it. Strangely enough, monkeys have a way of breaking them open, as they have of picking them from the branches; but puny and un-inventive man, at least of the Amazonian variety, not only waits until the nut falls of itself, but requires the aid of tools to open it. Broken with an ax or a hammer, each shell yields from twenty to thirty nuts set tightly together like the segments of an orange. A man of experience and average industry can harvest about three bushels of “Brazil nuts” in a day. Many Amazonian families make a journey to the _castanhaes_, or “chestnut-groves,” their annual _pándego_, or “blow-out,” and though many die every year of an intermittent fever called _sezões_, and immorality is rampant, whole villages, men, women, and children, take to the hills to camp out during the “chestnut” season, on the proceeds of which the survivors frequently live the rest of the year. _Caboclos_ in palm-leaf hat, cotton trousers, and a piece of shirt, were even then arriving at the warehouses with canoes level full of the nuts, an empty basket set down into them to give room for the paddler’s bare feet. Paddle and shovel are the same word in Portuguese (_pá_), and to these dwellers on the Amazon the same implement serves both purposes, for with the flat round paddle they shovel the nuts into the basket when they have reached their destination. The basketful is then dipped into the river and sloshed about until the worthless nuts, being lighter, float away, and the rest, well washed, are piled in heaps in the warehouse. Here they were worth about 20$ a hundred kilograms, at war-time rate of exchange less than five cents a quart. Wholesalers buy them from the warehouse-keepers, and at least four fifths of them go to the United States. At home they are not dry and sweet, as in the North, but taste not unlike a damp, sweetish acorn, and native consumption is not so great as might be expected.

One afternoon the captain came back on board with a _sapucaia_, a larger and better kind of “Brazil nut” than the one we know. These are rarer than the _castanha_ and grow on a more bushy and shady tree than the tall, graceful, arm-waving _castanheiro_. Unlike the familiar species, this one must be planted, the nut being merely thrown on top of the ground near water; and the fruit should be picked, for if the nuts fall out while the shell is still on the tree, that limb will not produce again for years. All this extra work, added to its scarcity, makes the _sapucaia_ unknown in foreign lands, though at home it sells for several times as much as the common variety. The shell is about the size of a squash, rather uneven and angular in shape, with a _tampa_, or tight-fitting sort of trapdoor in the bottom, which opens when the nuts are ripe and lets them fall to the ground. In each shell there are thirty to fifty nuts, larger than the ordinary “Brazil nut” and shaped like fresh dates. Inexperienced visitors to Amazonia often mistake the _castanha de macaco_, or “monkey chestnut,” for the real article, though it grows on the trunk rather than the branches and has no edible qualities.

Once, soon after midnight, we took on board at Parainha a white woman with a long stairway of children, yellow and sun-bleached country gawks, the eyes of all of them running with open sores of what was probably trachoma. They were going up the Juruá to the end of the _Andirá’s_ run, near the Bolivian border, to begin life anew. The woman’s husband, a Portuguese, had for years been manager of a large _seringal_, or rubber-field, which he had made a very paying concern for the owner, who lived in Pará, Rio, and Paris. Foolishly, the Portuguese, either ignorant of or unattentive to Amazonian conditions, had let his wages drift without drawing them, until he had more than twelve contos to his credit. Then one day some workers on the _seringal_ came to the house and said, in the matter-of-fact tone of the Amazon wilderness, “We are going to kill you.” The manager asked permission to send away his wife and children first, but the assassins did not think it worth the trouble, so they shot him where he stood, with his family clustered about him. Not one of my fellow-passengers seemed to have the least doubt that the owner had instigated the murder, in order to get out of paying the back salary. “Perhaps he had gambled himself into debt, or had nothing more to spend on his French mistress,” they languidly explained. The papers of Pará had reported the case and it was perfectly well established, yet justice is so unknown up the Amazon that no one had been arrested and the widow and orphans had finally been driven off the _seringal_ by the owner himself, who had paid part of their fare up the river to be rid of them. He continued to live as usual, with a new manager, for such things are so common along the Amazon that no one appeared to think twice about it, any more than of a man dying of fever or snake-bite. To each new group of passengers, or to anyone who showed interest in hearing it, the woman repeated the story over and over in exactly the same words and gestures, after the manner of people of sluggish intelligence, like a piece she had learned for public recital, all in the same monotonous tone in which she might have spoken of the failure of the mandioca crop. She was of too primitive a type to have been able to decorate the story. Some one had advanced the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars to get the family up the river, where, no doubt, they are still working it out as virtual slaves to some other tyrant in Brazil’s national territory of Acre.

A contrasting type was our _seringueiro_, or owner of a rubber-field far up in the interior. He wore a goatee and mustache, cotton trousers and undershirt, the latter always open and disclosing his caveman chest; and he was almost childlike in his gaiety, with constant jokes and puns, whether winning or losing at cards. Yet beneath it all one could see that he was full of tropical superstitions and above all of the lust for money,—or, more exactly, the lusts which money will satisfy, for the Brazilian is rarely a miser—and that he would rob, or hold in slavery, or assassinate by his own hand or another’s, far up there in the unruled wilderness where he was going, not only without compunction, but almost without realizing that he was doing anything amiss.

At times the river opened out like a vast sea, and one wondered not how we were to get through, but how we were to find our way. All the jungle trees had wet feet, and every now and then pieces of forest or patches of bushy wilderness came floating down the river, though I could make out none of the _giboyas_ (boas), deadly serpents, or jaguars of popular fiction riding upon them. Sometimes, in the refulgent western sun, the procession of trees took on a sort of early-autumn tinge, as if winter were leaving its accustomed track and was about to spread its blighting trail across this ocean of vegetation. A fine day, like a great man, dies a glorious death; a rainy one slumps off from dullness to darkness, you know not when nor care, like the invalid grouch or the malefactor, and on the whole you are glad that he is gone and that night has come. Yet there was a certain lack of color in Amazonian sunsets. It was as if nature had so many materials at her disposal that she was careless in the use of them. One evening a big ocean liner, gleaming with lights, slowly overhauled us and pushed on into the darkness beyond. Gnats similar to those that had made life miserable during my tramp across tropical Bolivia, and here called _puims_, gave us occasional annoyance, though by no means as much as two “Turks” deeply marked with long Amazon residence who persistently kept the most horrible of American phonographs squawking far into the night. My chair and hammock were forward, however, where it sometimes grew so cold in the wind that I had to wrap the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock about me.

On such a cool, black night we halted at the old city of Santarem at the mouth of the Tapajoz after midnight, so that no one went ashore. In the morning we crossed the river and entered first the _paraná_ and then the _igarapé_ of Alenquer. A _paraná_, in Amazonian parlance, is a narrow arm or branch of a river which comes back into it again; an _igarapé_ is a blind tributary, pond, pool, or lake. Here the narrow stream ran between unbroken avenues of trees, among which one with an almost snow-white leaf was conspicuous. Rarely was there a bluff or high bank, but for the most part a deadly flatness, often with a reedy swamp in front and densest jungle-forest behind. Ocean liners go direct from Santarem to Obidos and never see this _igarapé_. We slid almost into the dooryards of brown, half-naked families in the scarce mud huts along the flooded way, startling them as we might have Adam and Eve about the time of the apple episode, and at ten in the morning went ashore in Alenquer, a typical small town of Amazonia.

There were perhaps a hundred buildings clustered together on a bank of the narrow branch, everything as deadly still as only barefoot, grass-grown towns can be, though the place was cleaner and more comfortable than one would have expected up a little side-arm of the Amazon in the sweltering wilderness. It carried the mind back to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the lowlands of Bolivia; there was the same forest of cane chairs and settees in the wide-open houses, the same hammocks tied in knots on the walls and soon to be spread again for the siesta, the same atrocious pictures in hideous frames, the same garden-like patios behind. Here, perhaps, there were more signs of comparative wealth, though far more leaning on the elbows than work. The country roundabout was partly flooded and the greenest of green, with some low, wooded ridges in the near background. Cacao grows wild in the forest about Alenquer.

I came upon an unusually good school building for a town of this size and situation, with more signs of energy than in the cooler but more negro parts of the country. Almost all the children had more or less color, but it was more apt to be of Indian than of African origin. School “kept” from 8 to 11:30, with none in the afternoon, “and even from ten on we get little done in this climate,” according to the principal. His assistants were all women, rather weak and unintelligent looking for the most part, all with some Indian blood. This was a state school with no municipal income, and “teachers are required to be graduates of the normal in Pará, but we are rarely able to get any, so we have to substitute.” The principal himself was the only one who fulfilled the legal requirements. The fact that salaries had kept dropping, until now they were less than half the 350$ a month they had been two years before when rubber was high, with lower exchange and higher prices, and that no one connected with the school had been paid anything in twenty-eight months, may have had something to do with the lack of candidates. The teachers made arrangements with the fathers of families to keep body and soul together. Women and men received the same pay—when there was any—“naturally,” said the principal, “seeing they have to do the same work.” As in all Latin-America, the teaching was mere tutoring, crude and primitive compared with the imported American furniture. Boys and girls sat in separate rooms, and the entire roomful rose in unison and gave the military salute when a visitor entered. Otherwise there was the usual Latin-American lack of order and attention and nothing could induce the teachers to resume their task as long as the visitor remained. The summer vacation was from November 1 to January 15, but the principal complained that a large proportion of the pupils were even then away, for many whole families migrate to the _castanhaes_ from February to April or May to pick up “Brazil nuts,” and the school fills up again only in June or July. There is a state law requiring the attendance of boys from six to fifteen and girls from six to twelve; but law in Brazil, sighed the principal, is “largely made to laugh,” except those parts of it that bring income to politicians, which are sternly enforced. Compulsory attendance of female pupils was set low because girls on the Amazon marry early. Mothers of twelve or thirteen are so common as scarcely to attract attention. Among our passengers was a bright young dentist from Ceará who had been born on his mother’s twelfth birthday. He had fifteen brothers and sisters, all living, and his mother, according to his statements and the photograph he carried, was a comely woman of thirty-two in the prime of life, without a sign of wrinkles or graying hair. In the interior of the Island of Marajó girls often remain naked until puberty, the time of marriage, and there are many jokes on the awkwardness of brides in their first clothes.

The captain had spent his boyhood in Alenquer, so we tarried some two hours while he visited and had dinner with relatives and old friends. The “Amazon River Steam Navigation Company,” to which the _Andirá_ belonged, was a British concern, with a federal and state subsidy and a generally tangled ownership and management; but the captain had none of the Anglo-Saxon vice of punctuality. Toward sunset that evening we stopped at a huge pile of cordwood partly under water, in front of a _fazenda_ house on stilts to be reached only in boats, where we could have paddled right into the thatched servants’ quarters. But the smallest boy or girl along the Amazon can handle a canoe with an ease and grace suggesting that the _montaría_ has a mind and a will of its own; and no one ever thinks of walking, even to the next-door neighbor’s. In “summer” and non-flood time life is said to be pleasant on the broad, open campos which were now reedy swamps. We remained several hours, while the negro-_caboclo_ crew of half a dozen carried the wood-pile aboard on their shoulders. Before the war these _gaiolas_ usually burned coal, but that had risen in price to the height of a luxury. Some of the time it rained in torrents; the sky was heavy and dark, and it grew distinctly chilly even in this sheltered corner. The last sticks of wood were left in a hurry and with a whoop when a fine _jararaca_ of the deadly white-tailed variety was found sleeping under them.

About dawn we emerged from the _paraná_ upon the “sea-river” again, with a horizon so broad that we could not make out its dirty-yellow end in some directions. That afternoon, or the next, we halted before the house, its yard flooded and backed by dense humid cacao-woods, of two energetic young Portuguese. They were courteous fellows, though knowing well how to drive a bargain, and had considerable education, as do many settlers along the Amazon, where “doutores” in eyeglasses are often found. The ambitious often come here to risk death and work for a quick fortune, while the more languid drift through life in their safer birthplaces. I tramped for an hour in the damp, singing silence and heavy shade of the _cacaoaes_, everywhere damp underfoot and fetid with decay. The cacao-pod, about six inches long and half as many across, grows on the trunks and lower branches of its bushy dwarf tree, with a very short stem. Slashed open, the pod yields about sixty seeds, which are put into a long tube of woven palm-leaf, like that used by the Indians to squeeze the poison out of the mandioca, which is suspended and compressed by a weight attached to the end until all the pulp turns into _vinho de cacao_, a white liquid not unpleasant to the taste and so harmless that it might be sold even in our own model land. Then the seeds are laid out to dry a week or two in the sun before being shipped to Pará, and on to New York, where they are toasted and ground for our cocoa and chocolate. The Portuguese brothers sold us two huge turtles for our ship’s larder, as well as five pigs and ten chickens to be resold higher up the river; but luckily, negotiations to buy some cattle for the Manaos market fell through for that trip. There were said to be unlimited “Brazil nuts” in this region, but it was so nearly sure death from fever to spend a week in the _castanhaes_ that they were never gathered. Death is a most commonplace and unexciting visitor all along the Amazon. A friend comes on board, and in the course of a conversation with the captain or some other old acquaintance says casually, “Oh, by the way, my brother João died last Thursday. Do you think the cacao harvest will be as large this year?” It is the same with the loss of time. Speaking with a yawn of some place far up the river, the Amazon traveler says idly, as he shuffles his cards, “_Num mez ’stou lá—ou dois_—In a month I’ll be there—or two.”

It was eleven that night when we anchored before Obidos, where the Amazon crowds itself four hundred meters deep between banks only a mile apart, one of the few places in which one shore can be seen from the other. The captain promised to give me a warning whistle, so I went ashore. It was a checkerboard town of considerable size, built up the slope of a ridge, and now, at midnight, a splendid example of what a city of the dead would be,—the wide streets deep in grass, the houses tight-closed, for the Brazilians are deathly afraid of air, even in this climate, and not a sight or sound of a human being in all my walk about the town. Horses, cows, and donkeys were grazing in the streets and on the big grassy praça, however, thereby outwitting the blazing daytime sun; but they were so silent that I ran squarely into them in the jet-black, comfortably cool night, its dead silence broken only by the creaking of a few tropical crickets.

I was awakened toward dawn as we drew up before a ranch-house and a cattle-pen in a narrow creek. Here we wasted some time until daylight, and then began loading fat young cattle by the crude and cruel Amazonian method of lassooing and dragging them into the water, then hoisting them up the side of the iron hull by the winch and the rope about their horns, with many bumps and scratches and much bellowing and eye-straining on the part of the helpless brutes. All this meant nothing to the natives, however, being all in the day’s job, as was the packing away tightly together of the cattle on the deadly slippery, iron lower deck, where the sun poured in mercilessly a large part of the day and where the animals would stand as best they could, probably without food or water, for the four or five days left to Manaos. They cost an average of 100$ a head here, and would sell for nearly three times that at their destination. Slowly and leisurely all this went on, as if we had all the rest of our lives to spend on the Amazon, and it was sun-blazing ten o’clock before we pulled our mud-hook. There were countless floating islands now, and big patches of coarse, light-green grass on their way to the distant Atlantic. All day we slipped along, usually with a dugout canoe or some other species of _montaria_ creeping along the extreme lower edge of the forest; now a family gliding easily down to their stilt-legged home, again boatmen bound for the rubber-fields paddling desperately against the powerful current, as they had for weeks past and would for a month or more to come, beneath these same heavy gray skies. These Amazon watermen have a means of keeping dry that is simplicity itself and which might be recommended, with reservations, in the North,—they all carry a small bag made of native rubber, and when it comes on to rain they pull off their clothes and put them in the bag!

The greatest product of the Amazon itself is the _pirarucú_, a mammoth species of cod that dies in salt water, which sometimes attains ten feet in length, and has no teeth, but a bony, rasp-like tongue. It is harpooned in much the same way, on a smaller scale, as the whale, and is a game fighter, more than one expert Amazon fisherman having been known to make a _pirarucú_ tow him and his canoe home. It is the chief food of the Amazon Valley and immense quantities are dried, salted, and shipped from Pará, looking like boxed sticks of brown cordwood and not unlike that in taste. _Pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_ make up most Amazonian meals, as they did on board the _Andirá_. We landed boxes of this staff of life even at towns where the _pirarucú_ abounds, the lazy inhabitants preferring to get it from Pará to catching and salting it themselves. The largest fish of the Amazon, but much less common, is the _peixe-boi_, or cow-fish. This is said to grow as large as a yearling calf, is caught with harpoons and killed by driving stakes into its nostrils, yielding a white meat not unlike pork in taste.

We sailed out upon the vast river again and took four hours to cross it, stopping at the village of Jurity to leave a mailbag and dragging easily on. Now and then a cloth was waved from some ranch along the river, the boat whistled, and faintly to our ears was borne the shout of a man, “_Ha um passageiro para Manaos!_” The captain, who seemed to know everyone on the river by his first name, made a trumpet of his hands and shouted back, “_O, Manoel! Na volta de Faro, ouvistes?_” And that night we did pick him up on our return from Faro up the Yamundá.

One day the talk on board ran to _garzas_, the bird that furnishes what we know as aigrets. A native passenger, once engaged in gathering them, said that it took about seven hundred birds to give a kilogram of feathers, even of the larger and cheaper size. They grow only along the back and tail, and a kilogram of the largest feathers would number about a thousand, the smaller and more valuable ones, of course, in proportion, and would sell for 1$500 a gram in Manaos. In other words, a pound of ordinary aigrets would bring the gatherer about a hundred dollars at the normal exchange, and small ones as much as twice that sum. Time was when a kilogram of small feathers sold for five contos, say $1,600, “but for some reason we do not understand the demand in the United States has ceased,” said the former hunter of _garzas_, “giving the market a great slump.” I explained the reason for this, and after musing for some time he admitted that it was rather a good law, not because he recognized any cruelty to the birds, but because in time the species would become extinct and another means of livelihood be cut off. He claimed, however, and was supported by others on board, that it is not necessary to kill the birds. He knew a man who had a big _garzal_ with thousands of them, and guards to see that no one killed any, and every morning he went out and picked up the drooped feathers, getting some eight kilograms a year, and from year to year, too, instead of only once. He made it a rule to shoot anyone he found on his property with an aigret in his possession. Then there was a Spaniard who had devised a system of putting the birds into a heater at night, where several feathers loosened enough to be pulled out in the morning. Dealers, however, I recalled, thought little of “dead” aigrets and, as in the case of diamonds, the whims of pretty woman force man to the roughest of exertions to supply her demands, for real _garza_-hunting is no child’s play. This man had known an American living in Obidos who used to have himself rowed far up to the source of this or that tributary of the Amazon, and then paddled down alone, arriving sometimes half a year later with eight or ten kilograms of feathers, but half dead from his struggle with the jungle. We frequently saw some of the birds in question from the decks of the _Andirá_, tall, slender, graceful, and generally snow-white, though there are species in other colors. A house dealing in aigrets has to pay the State of Pará a license fee of 5,500$ a year, and ten per cent. ad valorem, while the _municipio_ collects 6$ an ounce for all feathers taken within its confines—which are generally elastic. “So,” concluded the ex-aigret-hunter, “as usual the politicians skim off most of the cream.”

On the morning of May 7 we drew up near a grass hut, flying the ugly green and yellow flag of Brazil and standing above the water on stilts. This, according to the captain, corroborated by several passengers, had cost the taxpayers twenty-five contos—with free material close at hand, and labor low in price, the actual cost of the building was probably not one fortieth that amount. From it a _fiscal_ of the State of Pará came on board to see what we were carrying out of the state, all of which must pay export duty, for we had reached the boundary line between the two immense states of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, including nearly half the territory of mammoth Brazil. It was near here, at the mouth of the Yamundá, that Francisco Orellano claimed he was attacked by amazons, thereby giving its present name to the river of which his trickery and bad fellowship made him the discoverer. “_Provavelmente estaba com o miolo molle_” (He probably was with the brain soft), said one of the passengers; but seeing how the Indian women of the Amazon basin work on a basis of complete equality with the men suggests that perhaps there was something besides an equatorial sun and a troubled conscience to make the treacherous Spaniard fancy he had been pursued by female warriors. When he came back from Spain to conquer his great river he could not find it, but lost himself up a branch of the Tocantins.

That afternoon we went ashore in Parantins, first city in Amazonas, so that at last I had seen everyone of the twenty states of Brazil, and only the national territory of Acre, once a part of Bolivia, remained. The city, just a little patch of red-tiled roofs in the endless stretch of forest, stands on a bit of knoll jutting out into the Amazon, here spreading away five miles or more to a flat, wooded, faintly discerned shore and to the east and west running off over vast horizons on which ships disappear “hull-down,” as at sea. Its slight elevation makes Parantins breezy, though out of the breeze it is melting hot. I dropped in upon several _caboclo_ families and found them instantly friendly, though shy and modest, frank without knowing the meaning of that word, most of all content to drift through life swinging languidly in a hammock and gazing with dreamy eyes out across the broad, sun-bathed Amazon. The houses had no particular furniture, except the hammocks, swung or tied in a bundle on the mud walls, according to the hour, though almost all contained a little hand-run American sewing-machine. One house without a chair had two of these, and all had the crude lace-pillow on which the women of North Brazil while away their time making lace with a great rattling of _birros_.

Bounded on four sides by the ways of bygone generations, the people of these contented Amazonian villages have little more than an idle curiosity in the ways of the great outside world. Seeing nature about them produce so abundantly and without apparent effort, it is small wonder they are hopelessly lazy from our northern point of view. Sometimes the thought comes even to the indefatigable American that perhaps the secret of life after all is this contented waiting to be overtaken by mañana, rather than a constant striving to outstrip the future. Yet how the whole world, even these most distant little backwaters, has changed in the first two decades of the present century, with its persistent flooding of commerce and invention! All this makes life more convenient, perhaps, but it gives the world a deadly monotony, as if one sat down everywhere to the same trite moving-pictures, killing anything national and characteristic by imported imitations from the world’s centers, vastly increasing the price, while greatly lowering the value, of living, destroying the excellence of local native production, taking away its incentive, and making the vocation of traveler a drab, uninspiring calling, enormously descended since the glorious days of Marco Polo, or even of Richard Burton.

We passed, with much whistling and individual greetings, another _gaiola_ of our line, the _Indio do Brazil_, so named, strangely enough, not for the aborigines in general, but for a former senator from the State of Pará, of whom this was the family name. I had just rolled into my hammock when we stopped going forward and took to hunting about in the dark, silent night for another wood-pile. The river was still and smooth as glass; the light of a house on the shore-edge showed the faces of a numerous white family peering out upon us, but it was so dark that we slipped back and forth and frittered away much time before we located the wood-pile and tied up before it. The owner came on board to gossip as long as the ship remained, a chance not to be lost in these isolated regions, and the constant chatter, added to the customary uproar on board, made sleep out of the question until we were off again. There were always new excuses for wasting our—or at least my—time. Early in the afternoon we put out of the sea-broad river into a _paraná_ as straight and narrow as the Suez Canal and suddenly anchored in the weeds, a thousand miles from nowhere, to cut grass for the cattle!

In the sunset of May 8 dwellings grew more numerous in the dense vegetation along shore, and at dusk the prettiest _fazenda_ we had yet seen loomed up on a fine grassy plateau dotted with magnificent trees, the haystack mango and the imperial palm most conspicuous among them. The buildings were comfortable and roomy; there was a big barn for the cattle, which the natives aboard did not know were ever housed, and an unusual air of comfort and intelligent cultivation. I was not surprised, therefore, to find it had all been built by an American, one of the many Southerners who came down after the Civil War and settled along the Amazon. At the age of sixty he had shot himself, rumor having it that he had grown despondent because his children by a Brazilian wife were growing up as worthless as the natives. His estate was on the edge of Itacoatiara, last of the four principal ports on the way from Pará to Manaos, where we went ashore while the captain visited more relatives and where most of the unusually white population stood on the bank above to greet all who landed. Here we received many more passengers, among them a group of prisoners down on the lower deck with the cattle. The captives had been sent here from Manaos to be tried, but were now being sent back because the judge, a life appointee, but of what was now “the opposition,” had not had his pay for a year and claimed in the current number of the local sheet, which was almost entirely taken up with his case, that he “had neither clothes nor shoes necessary to uphold the dignity of appearing in public in such a high position.” As a matter of fact, he was well known to be a man of independent wealth, but this was an approved Brazilian way of “getting back at” his political enemies. The prisoners were so mixed up with the other deck passengers, in hammocks and on the bare deck, smoking and sleeping among the freight, pigs, cows, turtles, sheep, and the soldiers sent to guard them, similarly dressed in undergarments and the remnants of trousers, that they were indistinguishable. I went down with the officer in charge, who could not tell which were prisoners and which were soldiers or deck passengers. He found one of his soldiers among the rubbish and told him to go and point out the prisoners for my benefit; but even the soldier could not tell them all, and after a long search one was still missing. The officer put his toe against one fellow lying prone on the deck and asked, “Are you one of the presos?” “_Não s’nho’_,” the man replied, crawling to his feet, “I am one of the soldier guards.” We had about given up finding the missing men when a fellow lolling most comfortably in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, spoke up with obliging and cheery friendliness, “I’m one of them, capitão,” at the same time tapping himself proudly on the hairy chest showing through his open undershirt.

The night was so dense black—nights on the Amazon always seem to be jet black, even when the sky is clear and the stars are out in myriads—that the pilot could not find the river and finally ran crashing squarely into the forest-jungle, where it was decided to anchor until daybreak. It turned so chilly on the prow, even though I was considerably dressed and covered with the thick sides of my hammock, that I took to shivering as if my old Andean fever had overtaken me again. Heavy rain poured all the morning, turning the world an ugly gray and so cold it was hard to believe we were almost on the equator. These bitter cold spells are common along the Amazon. In mid-morning we thrust our nose into a farmyard again and changed from a ship to a grass-cutting machine. The rain continued in an unbroken deluge, and early in the afternoon we came out of a _paraná_ upon the Amazon proper, so broad we could not see across it and differing from the ocean only in color. The rain decreased, but the chill continued, and at three o’clock we reached the mouth of the Rio Negro and left the Amazon behind. For there onward the main stream of what the aborigines called the Maranhão, and which I had seen rise high up on the Peruvian plateau, is known as the Solimões from where it enters Brazil at Tabatinga. The two rivers, both of immense width at this point, joined but for some time did not mingle together, the yellow of the Amazon remaining perfectly distinct from the “black” of the Negro, as black as any deep, clear water without a blue sky to reflect can be. Here and there patches of the two waters mixed and for a long time flowed northward perfectly distinct in color, then, like the population, united to form the nondescript hue of the main stream.

More and more huts and houses appeared along the shore, a bluff of dark-reddish soil, as the few scratches showed, the rest being virgin forest flooded up to the lower branches of the trees. The hut of many a poor _caboclo_ was inundated, and some were standing disconsolately ankle-deep in the water, holding the baby in their arms. Others had let go the solid earth altogether and, thrusting a few logs in raft form under their huts, floated off comfortably as you please, swinging as domestically and calmly in their hammocks as if they were lodged in the “Café da Paz,” their few possessions on crude shelves above them and only the black, fathomless river and a few logs laid far apart for floor. Huts, generally on stilts, became almost continuous, all, for some reason, built out over the water instead of up on the top of the bluff out of the wet—if it were possible to get out of the wet in such a climate. But the _caboclos_ of the Amazon pay little attention to rain, water being their native element, and many now appeared, male and female, paddling homeward at the same calm, even pace in the downpour as in the finest of weather. Farther on a few huts had broad dirt steps cut up the face of the bluff from the water’s edge. Then dimly across the black sea there began to paint itself a faint line of ships at anchor, with gaps in it, like an army just after a machine-gun attack. As we drew nearer, the _chacaras_ and “summer-houses” of rich _Manaoenses_ appeared, nicely arranged along the top of the bluff where they could escape from the dreadful urban rush of Manaos. Then gradually, out of the unbroken wilderness ahead, a modern city began to appear around a densely wooded point, finally disclosing itself in its entirety through the wet atmosphere. Piled up on a low knoll and part of another, looking, already as complete as many an old European city, the yellow-blue dome of the imposing state theater bulking above all else except the brick tower of the cathedral, Manaos was utterly exotic in this Amazonian wilderness; it was like coming upon a great medieval castle in mid-ocean.

Our rubber-estate owner from the Acre, who had lived in an open undershirt all the way from Pará, suddenly appeared on deck resplendent in a white suit with broad silk lapels, a gay silk waistcoat with six American $2.50 gold-pieces as buttons, a diamond scarfpin resembling a lighthouse, and four diamond rings on his fingers. We swung in toward the big Manaos brewery—looking not unlike the Woolworth building through this hazy humidity—in its hollow between the two knolls, and at length tied up to one of the many buoys, each marked with the cost of its rental per day, floating half a mile or more out from the city. For though we might have anchored in an ocean port, the Rio Negro averages forty-five fathoms in depth directly off the wharves. From these several boatloads of officials soon put out, followed by boatmen, baggage-carriers, and hotel runners with the first news of the outside world we had heard in ten days. There were as many formalities as if we had arrived direct from Europe, both the port doctor and the customs officers having to be satisfied before any of the rowboats, of which there were at least three for every passenger landing and which without exception were manned by European white men, could approach the gangway. I embraced the captain, the _immediato_, and a few fellow-passengers—male only—and bade them contentment, if not speed, on the much longer journey still ahead of them.

Manaos, a thousand miles up the Amazon and nine above the mouth of the Rio Negro, though only twenty meters above sea-level, is a real city more than half a century old. By reason of some peculiar lay of the land it is less troubled with rain, and in consequence is less sloppy, than Pará. The chief objection to the place during my first two days there was that it was so cold; after that it was nearly always brilliant with a slashing sun and humid heat that seemed to multiply through the hot thicknesses of the night, until for the first time I was conscious of feeling my energy in any way curtailed by the climate. Great heat and constant humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that man cannot hold his own against nature, Manaos was not only jostled on all sides by the impudent jungle, but right in town there were many patches of rampant wilderness and immense beautiful trees that seemed to be forces of occupation from the surrounding forests. Much split up by hollows, it had _igarapés_, or tropical creeks, so covered with fresh-green water-plants, often in blossom, that one could not tell them from solid ground, while many a swamp musical with bullfrogs, and innumerable mosquito incubators, were within a short stroll of the European center of town. Manaos has fewer unpaved streets than its rival at the mouth of the river, and being on rolling ground, while Pará is flat, it boasts a few more scenic beauties; but the visitor constantly has the sensation of watching an unequal fight between the exotic city and the mighty wilderness that surrounds it.

Time was when Manaos was much more of a city. The high price of rubber had perhaps forever gone, and the “Rubber City” gave signs of disappearing again into the jungle from which it had risen. As the Italian proprietor of the “Rotisserie Sportsman” I sometimes patronized said weepingly, “I would have done much better to have gone to hell than to have come to Manaos.” Every down boat for months had been crowded to utmost capacity with passengers of all classes and origins fleeing the poverty that had settled upon Amazonia. So swift had been the depopulation that I could much more easily have rented a large house than a single furnished room; so scarce were “distinguished foreigners” that the arrival of a stranger attracted as much attention as in a village, and I might myself have called on the governor of the largest state of Brazil, had I brought with me the heavy black costume of formality which a local editor was so astonished to find me traveling without. Yet news of this ebbing tide did not seem to have spread far. The booming of a certain section of the world is like setting a heavy body in motion—once it has gained momentum it is hard to stop—and a considerable number of immigrants were still coming to Manaos expecting to make a quick fortune because a description of it in “boom days” years before had at last reached their local papers. Even when these hopeful fortune seekers met returning victims, they often refused to believe them, taking their pessimism to be canny competition, and persisted in pushing on to be disillusioned in person.

Yet it still had all the outward concomitants of a real city. For almost the first time in Brazil I had my clothes washed properly, and in hot water. John Chinaman, virtually unknown in the rest of the republic, did it. Even the chief places of amusement for money-oozing rubber-gatherers were still open, though the more aristocratic of the inmates had gone back to France or sought more promising pastures, leaving the field to stolid, vulgar, Polish and Russian Jewesses. As in all Brazil, there was no attempt to bolster up waning commerce by selling better things more cheaply; on the contrary, the rare victim was expected to make up for the absence of his fellows. Restaurants and hotels habitually made one thousand to fifteen hundred per cent. profit on their food. A kilogram of beef cost a _milreis_ in the market, or even less after the day warmed; and this was cut into from ten to fifteen so-called beefsteaks that sold as high as two milreis each in the restaurants, even of workingmen. In the market three oranges cost 100 reis; on the restaurant table across the street one cost five times that; a _mamão_ selling for 300 reis was cut into five or six pieces at 500 each. But the Brazilians, too indolent or too proud to go into the restaurant business themselves, continued as usual “fazenda fita” and paid whatever was demanded by their exploiters; or, if they could not pay, they remained away hungry in the darker corners of their homes.

Manaos is a white man’s city, if there is one in Brazil. Not only are the shops mainly in the hands of Europeans or “Turks,” but virtually all manual labor is done by barefooted white men,—Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian for the most part. The _boínas_ of the Pyrenees are frequently seen on the heads of carters and carriers; the laboring class, both male and female, is largely from the Iberian peninsula,—Portuguese women of olive-white complexions darkened by the grime of a life-time, with huge earrings dangling against their necks, and men who would look perfectly at home in any Spanish _pueblo_ or Galician mountain village. Many of the customs of Rio have been imported, too,—the bread-man’s whistle, the vegetable peddler with his two baskets, the stick-clapping, walking clothing-stores from Asia Minor. Yet, according to the American of most standing in Manaos, eight months a year is as much as any white foreigner should live in the place. He knew many a bright, well-educated young Englishman, who had been sent out hale and hearty, to remain so physically, but to become so childish in mind that he had sometimes wondered whether there was not something in the German claim that the British are degenerating. Is civilization, after all, determined by climate? “After a white man has lived steadily for twenty years in the tropics, the less said about him the better, as a general rule,” asserted this exiled fellow-countryman. Energy depends, in his opinion, on variable climate; the monotony of perpetual summer saps ambition; bracing Europe and North America must forever remain breeding-, or at least feeding-grounds for the rulers of tropical lands.

Strangely enough, there are no classes in Manaos street-cars, and one may ride even without socks. The tramway and electric-light system is English owned and is so British that the cars run on the left-hand track; yet its intellectual motive power was furnished by a man from far-off Maine. I had not spoken a word of English since leaving Pará, and naturally lost no time in finding an excuse to make his acquaintance. He had brought with him his native adaptability. It has always been a great problem in Brazil to get street-car fares into the coffers of the foreign companies operating them. Cash registers are of little use, for they respond only to actual ringing. It is more common to require the conductor to carry a booklet of receipts and hand one out whenever a fare is paid. But the difficulty is to make people demand the receipts, for the usual Brazilian way is to wave a hand backward at the conductor, as much as to say, “Oh, keep the money! The company is rich, and they are foreigners anyway.” Years ago some street-car manager thought up the plan of making each receipt worth two reis to charity, the company once a month paying to the nuns’ hospital that amount for each one turned in to them. This system, widespread in Brazil, was in vogue in Manaos when the man from Maine arrived, but it was not working perfectly. The new manager knew that charity to others is a far less potent motive with Brazilians than possible personal fortune and the universal love of gambling. He withdrew the charity clause, therefore, gave each of the receipts a number, and on the second day of every month the Manaos tramway company holds a lottery drawing, with the first prize 100$ and the rest in proportion. It is a rare _Manaoense_ who does not demand his receipt for fare paid nowadays.

The only other American resident of Manaos was Briggs. It was doubly worth while to call on Briggs, for in addition to the good fellowship which quickly arises between compatriots exiled in far-off lands, free beer was unlimited to those to whom Briggs took a liking—and for those who have to pay for it, beer is a rare luxury in Manaos. Briggs was the man who made Manaos endurable, who kept it cool and quenched its thirst, a man who always made one think of ice and iced drinks, though there was nothing icy about him. He was dictator and commander-in-chief of the ice-plant at the tall Manaos brewery, native owned but, strangely enough, run by a German. I hesitate to admit, failed, in fact, to compute, the number of times I might have been seen emerging from Briggs’ sanctum wiping from my mustache the circumstantial evidence of a glass of beer.

Of other amusements and pastimes there were still a few automobiles for hire and a rare surviving café chantant, or—well, when the semimonthly steamer from Rio came in with the list of prizes in the national lottery a government band sat before the lottery agency and played all the morning, while firecrackers were exploded and the lottery winnings were paid. That was the Manaos idea of industry and “combatting the present grave crisis.” The zoo was gone, of course, and the imposing state theater, the _azulejo_ dome of which rose high above all else except the cathedral tower, had not been opened for more than two years and was a dried-mud ruin within. It was not as in the “good old days” when a _carregador_ got a fortune for carrying a _seringueiro’s_ trunk across the praça, and spent it to hear imported opera sung in the proud theater at the top of the knoll. There were still dramatic companies direct from Europe, changing every night as they made the rounds of the three theaters under one ownership—but they came on reels that fit into a lantern. The plot of the story they told was never a mystery; it consisted succinctly of the adventures of two men and a woman or, in contrast, of two women and a man. These original and refreshing themes, presented nightly under a new title and disguised in a new near-Parisian costumes, continued to attract such stray coins as still remained in Manaos, not to mention those to whom there are no earthly barriers. I had often told myself that what Brazilian theaters needed was a turnstile at the entrance, and was surprised to find that the cinemas of Manaos had exactly that thing. But system and strictness lead haunted lives in Brazil. I stood at the door of the principal cinema one evening and counted just as large a percentage of “deadheads” as even the Kinetophone had ever attracted. For instead of having a register on the turnstile and requiring the door-keeper to turn in a ticket for every click of the stile or pay the price of one, he was allowed to use his own judgment as to who should go in free—and the judgment of a Brazilian door-tender! In short, Manaos was entirely an exotic city, which even the few _caboclos_ and Indians paddling down to market in their canoes do not tinge with the local color and things native to Amazonia.

I had come up the Amazon with the faint hope of being able to make my way overland from Manaos to the capital of British Guiana. Such a trip should be wild enough to allay any craving for the wilderness for some time to come, and even if one could scarcely call plunging along jungle trails taking to the open road, the effect would be about the same. Even in Manaos, however, no one knew whether or not it was possible to reach Georgetown by land. Launches and _batelões_, a species of Amazonian barge, sometimes went up the Rio Branco to the frontiers of Brazil to bring down cattle, but they could go only at the height of the rainy season, when the Rio Branco was flooded, and the last one had made the trip in August, nearly nine months before.

“He who has no dog goes hunting with the cat,” the Brazilians say, so I turned my attention to the possibility of making the journey through my own exertions. That, too, it seemed, was out of the question. Even had I bought a canoe and hired a crew, it would have required at least two months of constant, laborious paddling to bring me to the Guianese frontier; and as to walking, that would have been as impossible in this Amazonian wilderness as on the open sea. My hopes had reached their lowest ebb when word reached my ears that heavy rains in the interior were rapidly raising the Rio Branco, and that if they continued, the first _batelão_ of the season would set out for what is known as the Brazilian Guyana on May 25. I settled down to endure with as much patience as I could muster a wait of half a month, and in all likelihood more, in such a climate and surroundings.

On the morning of May 20, however, I was still sleeping soundly when the barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ I had subsidized—at nothing a day—to look after my traveling interests put his head in at the door and said that the boat I awaited was leaving not on May 25, but at once—and would I please kindly, senhor, give him or his brother, and not some common fellow, the pleasure of carrying my baggage down to it. I knew, of course, that the tropical sun had addled the poor fellow’s wits, for though it is a common thing in Brazil for boats scheduled to sail on May 25 to leave on May 30, or next month, or next year, no one had ever heard of such a one going out on May 20. However, I could not throw anything at a man whom I had not even paid a retaining fee, so I went over to the Armazen Rosas to inquire. It was as I had suspected; the sun had been too much for the poor fellow. On the board before the warehouse, and in all the morning papers of Manaos, the _Macuxy_ was still advertised to leave on May 25. I was about to return to my bed in disgust when I recalled that I was in Brazil, and entered the _armazen_ to verify the chalked figures. _Não, senhor_, the launch would leave that very evening. The owner had just arrived in town and had decided to sail at once. The fact that several people who had been waiting for weeks might be slightly discommoded if the craft sneaked away without them, with no other for a month or two, did not trouble him in the least. If they happened to find out about the change in plans by looking at the stars and refusing to believe the chalked board and the newspapers, well and good; but the launch was going primarily to bring down beefsteaks on the hoof for Manaos, and passengers were merely endured as a necessary evil.

It was seven o’clock of a dark tropical night when I ate my last Brazilian “ice-cream,” and two hours later that we began to crawl away from the wharf—good-by for no one knew how long not only to ice-cream and ice-cold beer, but to electric lights and street cars, to paved streets and to reading by night. The announcement had read that the “Launch _Macuxy_ leaves for the Rio Branco,” which was true enough, but I quickly discovered that passengers left rather on the _batelão_ hitched beside it, a huge, unwieldy, three-story cattle-barge or scow, with no motive-power of its own. In the hold and on the lower deck were piled wood for the launch’s boiler, freight, baggage, cattle, pigs, chickens, _rancho_, or an unspeakable native kitchen, the third-class passengers, who paid half-fare, and whatever else chanced to be on board. The wide-open, roofed, upper deck was reserved, first of all, for the captain and the owner in a commodious cabin, then for the first-class passengers with their two “staterooms” back of this. These had nothing in them but chains, cans, iron-castings, and all the other odds and ends of ship’s junk, on top of which we put our baggage and changed our clothes. Everything else took place on the open deck, three fourths of which consisted of a long row of hammock-hooks on either side of a beam down the center, under which were a long, narrow dining-table, a cupboard, a crude water-filter and one glass, neither of which was usually available for use, and one dirty tin wash-bowl. Much baggage was piled along the open sides of the craft, far aft were two tiny partitioned-off places, one a kitchen and the other divided into two places of convenience, of which one had been turned into a shower-bath by letting a pipe in through the ceiling above and boring a hole in the lowest corner of the floor as an exit for the river-water. The shower was “not working yet, because this was the first trip of the year, but it would _amanhã_.” Meanwhile I dipped up pailfuls of the Rio Negro and threw them over me, then tossed most of the night in my hammock, as is generally the case when one takes to such a bed after a long respite.

We were by no means crowded,—one non-Brazilian besides myself, a dozen men, and some women and children—but I left the complete inventory to the long unoccupied days ahead. All swung their hammocks diagonally across the _batelão_ from the central beam to the outer roof-rail, and spent their nights and most of their days in them. Close against our side of the boat—so close that it was constantly spitting sparks and cinders into our hammocks—was the little launch-tug _Macuxy_, constantly puffing and snorting like a Decauville engine up a stiff grade and furnishing our only motive power. The two craft were so balanced that the launch seemed to steer easily with the heavy _batelão_ alongside, as is the custom everywhere on the upper Amazon, where a barge is often put on either side of the launch, but where no boat is ever towed. May is the usual time for a flock of these craft to set out from Manaos through all the river network of upper Amazonia, taking freight to the settlements that cannot be reached in the dry season and bringing down rubber, “chestnuts,” and, in our case only, cattle.

All the first day we plowed the black waters of the Rio Negro without seeing a human being or any sign of human existence. There was a constantly unbroken line of dense-green forest, with trees of all sizes from small to gigantic, half-hidden by lianas and orchids, and all so deep in the water that they seemed to be drinking it with the ends of their branches. The trees were often completely covered with plants from which bloomed myriads of pinkish flowers like the morning-glory, retreating toward noon from the ardent tropical sun. There was no visible sign of bird or animal life, though there must have been much of both farther inland. In general the country was low and level, but with an occasional hill or low bluff masked in dense forest. Now and then there were small islands, also thickly wooded down into the very water, though we saw none of the floating bits of jungle that were so numerous in the Amazon proper.

There are places in Amazonia where steamers have to stop and cut their own wood. Luckily we were not reduced to that extremity, for there were rare inhabitants along this route to gather and pile it at the water’s edge. At that, it took four or five hours to load enough for a day’s run, the Indian and _caboclo_ crew tossing it stick by stick from one to another along the gangplank, the last man, being more nearly white and therefore the most intelligent, counting them in a loud voice, the captain setting down each fifty in a book. For wood is sold as well as loaded by the stick along the Amazon, sticks a meter long, but ranging in size from cordwood to that of a baseball bat, and costing here from 35$ to 60$ a thousand.

Our meals were tolerable, for the region, built up about the ubiquitous _pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_, with wine and condensed milk for those who cared to pay for them. The greatest drawback was the service. Three or four of the most disreputable urchins that could be picked up in Manaos put everything on the table at once, then wandered about for some time looking for the bell. Even when that had been rung, courtesy required us to wait for the captain and the owner, by which time everything was stone-cold. As in all Brazil, the diet was suited to hearty men in the prime of life engaged in constant manual labor, rather than to a sedentary life of forced inactivity that made us envy the crew their wood-tossing at which caste did not permit us to help. I know no country whose national cuisine seems less to fit the character of the people and the climate than Brazil.

Toward dark we sighted the first bare spot of the trip, a tiny clearing of four or five acres called Conceição, with a big tree here and there and—what was more surprising—big granite rocks, the first native stone I had seen since my journey into the interior of Ceará. There was a thatched house, but no one showed up, so we set out the freight we had for the place,—a huge piece of machinery something like a locomotive piston, hoisting it with a derrick and standing it upright on a rock protruding from the water, and sailed away. Next day, or the next, or some time later the people who lived there could find the thing and know what it was for, though it was hard to guess how they would transport it to wherever it was needed. Later, in the dimly moonlighted night and the densest wilderness of endless forest and water, we slowed down to a snail’s pace and began whistling ear-splittingly, evidently calling for someone in the untracked forest sea. For a long time there was no answer. Then, far off through the ankle-deep trees, appeared a light. By and by we could make out that it was moving toward us, and at length a canoe paddled by an Indian, with a near-white man sitting in caste-rule inactivity in the stern, slipped noiselessly out of the weird night, the man boarded us, and we were off again.

Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, two hundred and ten miles above Manaos, we turned from the Rio Negro, which goes on northwestward to Ecuador and Colombia, into the Rio Branco, stretching almost due north. This seemed a more sluggish river, gray in color with a slight brownish tinge, much like the lower Amazon, though quite enough unlike the Negro to warrant its name of “White River.” Born near the junction of Brazil, Venezuela, and British Guiana, it is some 420 miles long from the mouth to where two forks split it apart. In this land of water it was astonishing that there was not always water enough to float even these slight-draft river-boats. The name Guyana is said to mean flooded-country, and includes all that region between the Amazon and the Orinoco, so that there are not simply three Guianas, belonging to European powers, but five, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.

It is estimated that the immense State of Amazonas, largest in America, has only 150,000 inhabitants, of whom half are wild Indians. It was not until late that afternoon that we came upon a hut on stilts, made entirely of woven grass, yet with the exotic touch of a sheet-iron door in one end, reached only by a crude ladder of two rungs. The inhabitants had grubbed an acre out of the dense jungle on a little nose of land where another small river flowed in, the ground being then about six feet above water. They were almost entirely of Indian blood, but the men wore trousers, jacket, and straw hat, and the women a loose single gown. As in most of Amazonia, they were a curious mixture of shy, naïve backwoodsmen and crafty traders. We left two letters and sent the crew ashore to dig six enormous turtles out of a captive mud-hole, each man carrying one upside-down on his back across the narrow sagging plank, eyes, ears, nose and his entire body smeared with the soft yellow mud that oozed from every crevice of the cumbersome animals. They were to furnish us food on the way up the river; meanwhile the crew laid them helpless on their backs on the lower deck. These mammoth Amazon turtles will live thus for days without food or drink; or even for weeks if left upright and wet now and then with fresh water.

About the hut was a small forest of mandioca stalks and banana plants, and under it some “freeman” rubber, the usual large brown balls with a hole through the center, resembling a bowling-ball, but which had been gathered and smoked as the spirit moved them by semi-wild Indians, in distinction to the “slaves” of the regular rubber plantations. The _cabra_, or Indian-negro, owner sent this, too, on board, sold us bananas and chickens, and took coffee, sugar, and soap in payment. There are two trees that furnish rubber. The better kind, called _borracha_, is procured by tapping the glossy-smooth rubber-tree, and the other, a much coarser and cheaper stuff called _caucho_, as full of holes as Gruyère cheese, is obtained by cutting down another kind of tree. All dry lands of moderate altitude along the Amazon produce the _caucho_ tree, of which a full sized one yields fifty liters of milk or twenty kilograms of _caucho_, inferior, but commanding a good market. When your rubber quickly loses its stretch, the chances are that in some of the many links from producer to consumer the _borracha_ has been replaced by _caucho_.

There were said to be rubber trees of both varieties in considerable abundance in the forests on either side of the Rio Branco, but in most of the region the _bugres_, or wild Indians, made regular exploitation difficult. On the night of May 23 I slept north of the equator for the first time since walking across it in Ecuador, thirty-two months before. The sun laid off most of that day, and it grew so cold that I had to put on double clothing and wrap myself in my hammock. The trees no longer stood ankle-deep in the water, sipping it with their branches, for the bluff banks were from six to ten feet high, with a reddish soil. Since leaving Manaos we had passed two other craft, smaller launch-barges, and perhaps half a dozen canoes creeping along the lower face of the forest. Otherwise there was no evidence of human life along the way, except two or three huts in tiny clearings every twenty-four hours. The first white men to enter the Rio Branco were the Carmelite missionaries who, in 1728, founded towns and began catechising the Indians. Seventy years later an insurrection destroyed most of their settlements, and though half a century ago some villages along the Rio Branco were reported to have as many as “320 souls and 40 fires,” to-day a hut or two at most represents most places marked on the map.

But if there was little human interest along the shores, there was no lack of it on board. First and foremost among my fellow-passengers was Dr. R—— of Sweden, a professional bug-chaser past middle life, whose mild blue eyes blinked harmless innocence, and whose graying hair stood up in pompadour mainly because it was never combed. He had spent so many months pursuing bugs along the Amazon that he had become acclimated to the pajamas and sockless slippers of all male travelers in the region, and was just such a patient, plodding fellow as men of his profession must be, carrying their own enthusiasm with them, and was ferocious only in the pursuit of insects and an ostrich-like appetite. He spoke English with difficulty and Portuguese scarcely at all, so that we soon took to conversing in German, and I became unwittingly his unofficial interpreter. Never have I known a man more splendidly fitted for his calling. Bugs of every species and description had such an affinity for him that he did not need to seek them; they sought him, and if there was a single insect in the region, from a lone mosquito to the rarest species known to entomology, it was certain to apply to the doctor for a passage to Sweden, even though it was forced to crawl inside his pajamas to make sure of the trip. With rare exceptions the touching request was always granted, for the doctor was never without a large pill-bottle filled with some sort of poisonous gas, and never a meal did we eat that he did not jump up from table a dozen times to snatch out the cork of his inseparable companion and slap the open mouth over some intruder on some part of the ship’s, or his own, anatomy.

Rough living in Amazonia is at least mitigated by the outwardly gentle, pleasant, and obliging manners of the inhabitants. It is the religion of the region never to complain of hardships or lack of comfort, for growling at all these things would make them and those suffering them unendurable. Hence there was never any outward evidence of anything but contentment and satisfaction, even in the face of the most primitive selfishness on the part of the two masters of the ship. Captain Santos was a spare but rather good-hearted Portuguese long resident in Amazonia, who frankly considered his passengers an unavoidable nuisance. Colonel Bento Brazil, the owner, was a “legitimate son of the Rio Branco,” that is, born in the region, though pure white and much traveled. Dressed in the thinnest of white pajamas night and day, he looked the picture of hardiness even at fifty, which commonly means old age in North Brazil. At times he was curiously swollen with his own importance, seeming to feel the deepest scorn for such simple persons as the Swede and myself; at others he displayed boyish curiosity about the simplest things. He was careful in the exact degree of greeting he gave those we met along the river, running all the gamut from an affectionate embrace of a fellow estate-owner to a motionless word in answer to the hat-off greeting of some _caboclo_ far below his own caste. All the best things on board he considered his own; he hung his hammock in the choicest place and kept the good shower-bath locked, leaving the one with a spout in the roof to the passengers—though the captain always loaned me the key to the better one—at every meal he had six eggs, special fruit, and many extras, while the passengers beside him could get nothing but the regular rough-and-tumble fare. His constant selfishness was probably unconscious, for it is every dog for himself on the Amazon; nature is too primitive and cruel to allow much else, and like the backwoods estate-owners of Peru and Bolivia, these kings of the jungle grow unwittingly autocratic and self-centered by living constantly among dependents.

There were two typical Amazonian women of the well-to-do class on board, one about fifty and the other nearing thirty. They corresponded in rank to the half dozen Brazilian men on our upper deck, fairly well-educated _fazendeiros_ of some means and of that peculiar mixture of world-wisdom and rusticity common to the region; but, of course, being of the less important sex, they were treated as a lower type of creation, as is the Amazonian custom, and had the modest, almost apologetic, reserve of the aboriginal women. One of the two bare little cabins that might have been staterooms had been cleared out for them, and here they preferred to eat seated on the bare floor, rather than come to table with strange men. They never spoke to any male on board, except an occasional unavoidable monosyllable, and their every look suggested densest ignorance, superstition, and slavery to custom, a composite of the woman-beast-of-burden of the American Indian and the Arabian seclusion brought to Portugal by the Moors. One might pity them, but any advance, even to make the trip a bit more pleasant for them, would certainly have been misunderstood as something reprehensible. At night, like everyone else, they swung their hammocks on deck, taking the off-side, and separated from the men only by distance, but at daylight they quickly crawled again into their little room and rolled about the bare floor the rest of the day, never making the slightest physical exertion they could avoid. In the morning they crowded together into the miserable little “bathroom” aft and held the place two, and even three, hours, after which, their greasy tresses dripping, they raced back to their room. Evidently they squatted on the floor and poured water over each other from the tin can the younger one carried. The most noticeable part of the whole performance was that, in common with all the women of Amazonia, as far as my experience carries, the longer they bathed the less washed they looked. Whether it is due to the mixture of Indian and Portuguese-peasant blood, with long generations without soap behind them, or to the greasy Brazilian food oozing through their pores, every native woman I met along the Amazon gave me an instinctive desire to avoid the slightest personal contact with her. Yet men of the same class, and largely the same customs, did not awaken this feeling.

The near-Indian servant girl of the pair aroused the same sensation, though she, too, spent hours in the “bathroom”; even the little daughter of the younger woman had this general repulsiveness of her sex. She was a cunning little thing of four, with wavy locks and penetrating black eyes; yet somehow one would have hesitated far longer to touch her than her twin brother. Both were bathed together by the Indian girl every morning, and for the next hour or two they scampered about the deck in the costume of Eve before she came across the fig-tree, after which they were each dressed in a short, thin chemise. Yet though they were companions in many things, the boy by comparison was “spoiled,” mean, selfish, quarrelsome, screaming whenever he was crossed, bawling for everything he wanted until he got it, pounding, biting, and scratching the Indian girl with total impunity, while if the little girl committed the slightest fault, she was pounced upon by all three of her guardians. This Brazilian custom of petting and spoiling the boys, while bringing the girls up sternly as somewhat inferior beings, accounts for many of the chief faults of the male character. In perhaps no other country on earth does one more often meet men who need nothing so much as a good man-sized trouncing, or where a plain frank word is so certain to arouse childish, irresponsible resentment, if not actual attack.

That was all there were on our upper deck, except a white Brazilian steward who seemed to be chronically suffering from the recent death of his grandmother and the obsequiousness of his low caste, and the three Indian boy waiters, with minds as ingrown as their generations of grime, who did not even own hammocks, but curled up through the cold nights on a wooden bench or the bare deck in the same two ancient blue-jean garments they wore by day. On the lower deck were a few third-class passengers, indistinguishable from the deck-hands, who ranged from burly negroes to muscular Portuguese with almost as simian features, living as best they might on the bare spots and barer food left over from the upper world.

The river was often mirror-clear, incessantly reflecting flat, wooded tongues of land jutting out into it as far as we could see, ever more blue with distance. At rare intervals there was the splash of a big fish springing out of the water; otherwise the almost unbroken silence of primeval nature. Early in the afternoon of the fourth day we stopped at a typical hut and clearing on the bank to unload bags of rice from Maranhão, sacks of sugar, salt, and coffee from farther off, an American sewing-machine and varied merchandise from New York, by way of which had come also a box of Swiss milk. Among the things imported from abroad into this land of unlimited timber were complete doors of matched American lumber, threshold, lintel, lock and all. Unwashed and uncombed half-Indians of jungle dress and manner watched us at close range, a weather-beaten female keeping modestly in the background. The Dipper, which for several years I had lost below the northern horizon, was now well above it. The cool, moonlighted trees and river still slipped slowly but incessantly by us into the south, but the river was getting so low that it began to look as if we would soon run out of water.

At dawn of May 25 we found ourselves anchored at Caracarahy, four hundred and sixty miles above Manaos, with the first open camp I had seen in Amazonia, its tufts of bunch-grass quite green, and the joyful sight of a _serra_, or range of hills, dimly visible to the north. Yet the campo broke easily into dense woods in any direction. There were a few scattered _barracões_, or thatched warehouses, and three or four huts of natives. The place exists merely because there are falls above, this being the beginning of rising and rocky country, around which all goods must be transshipped. Here were twenty-four kilometers of _cachoeiras_, or rock rapids, which may be passed in three ways,—in high water by the Furo de Cojubím, a _paraná_ or natural canal flanking the falls, but which in the dry season is a mere succession of mud-holes; secondly, in certain seasons by dragging freight in small boats up over the rock falls; lastly, by a _picada_, or trail cut through the dense forest. I went ashore with the bug-catcher while the captain investigated. On the boat we had rarely felt a mosquito or any other form of insect pest, but the moment we landed we were in swarms of them, especially annoying tiny flies. Later we were to find that the grassy campo was alive with _mucuims_, an all but invisible red bug especially active in dew-wet grass, which conceals itself in the pores of the legs and sets them to itching fiercely a few hours afterward, keeping it up for days.

We returned on board, to hear the bad news that the early rains had slackened and that it would be impossible now for the smaller boat that was following us to pass through the canal and carry us on up the river. The water must be six feet higher, and as Colonel Bento Brazil put it laconically, “We may have to wait a month or two, or it may fill up from one day to another.” There were big cattle pens here, and cowboys who tended the cattle in shipment as they grazed on the campo before being jerked aboard the _batelões_ and carried off to Manaos, which is reached in high water on the down-trip in forty-eight hours. Late that evening the captain began filling our barge with the maltreated brutes, which, after a hard drive across the country, were swung by a winch cable about their horns from the shore corral to the boat, often breaking a rib as they struck it and now and then a leg as they were lowered into the hold. No wonder Amazon beefsteaks are tough! Cattle for the Manaos slaughter-house are almost the only down traffic from this Rio Branco region, which produces little else, being high open campo and almost the only place in the entire State of Amazonas that can do so to advantage. Here they sold for from 60$ to 100$ a head, and in the rainy season can be transported to Manaos for about 60$. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Portuguese established cattle-breeding stations here, so that even to-day the great territory drained by the Rio Branco is known as the “Fazenda National” and is federal property.

Even here there was no definite information as to whether one could cut across through British Guiana. All I learned was that, if I could reach Boa Vista, there were two or three ways of making toward the estate of an Englishman over the boundary, but even he seemed to be more closely in touch with Brazil and Manaos than with Georgetown. In the morning there appeared on board a lively little man native to the region, whom everyone called “Antonino.” He was dressed in slippers and the modified pajamas all males find most convenient in Amazonia, had not shaved for two or three weeks, and had the general appearance of a backwoodsman with a little plot and a few cattle of his own, who might be able to write his name with difficulty. In reality, he was the owner of a large _fazenda_ far up the river on the edge of British Guiana, the boundary being a stream at his front door. Beneath his lack of shave he knew Europe well, though little of Brazil, and had an astonishing knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. What was still more important, he was going to walk or wade the twenty-four kilometers around the _cachoeira_ next morning to his own barge-launch waiting above the falls to take him back to his ranch. I bequeathed my steamer-chair to Captain Santos, packed my valise to the screaming point, with even my private papers and twenty pounds in gold, and handed it over to a pair of Antonino’s Indian employees in a canoe half-roofed with thatch, who rowed away into the evening toward the falls.

Next morning I was disappointed to find that Antonino had hired “horses,” as they called the wabbly, starved, and degenerate descendants of those noble beasts that awaited us, eaten by vampire bats and beaten stupid by their unconsciously cruel Indian-Portuguese owners. I should much rather have walked, the cruelty of getting astride such miserable animals aside, for my greatest immediate desire was physical exercise. A broad-faced, independent Indian “guide” set off with us across open, bunch-grass country, everywhere lively with birds, the long scissors-tailed _tesoura_ most conspicuous among them. Mammoth ant-hills stood higher than horsemen above the thin, tufty grass. Soon we entered a wide road cut through a dense forest by the state government, at a cost to taxpayers of 2000 contos! Yet it had never been more than a poor clearing with a barbed wire fence on either side, and now it was half grown up to jungle again. In the mass, an Amazon forest is deadly monotonous; in detail there was an incredible mixture of species, with the same plant rarely half a dozen times in the same spot, and all showing a striking adaptability to environment. The great trees stood always erect, as if striving, like good soldiers, to touch with the crown of the head an imaginary object above them, spreading out at the top like a parasol to catch as many of the sun’s rays as possible, wasting no branches farther down, where the sunshine never penetrates. There were many rivulets and mud-holes, with a jungle not unlike that of tropical Bolivia, except that the growth was thicker and greener, with more beautiful palms. Antonino, who had chosen the best animal, got out of sight ahead, the Indian urging me to hurry; but as I saw no need for that, I spared my wreck of a horse. Suddenly, toward noon, we heard a distant boat-whistle, followed by half a dozen shots from a revolver. The Indian redoubled his urging and I strove in vain to give my miserable steed new life. Then more whistles sounded, and the Indian said dejectedly, “There, the launch is gone.”

“Impossible,” I answered. “As it belongs to Antonino it must wait for him.”

But we soon came upon the horse Antonino had ridden, tied to the rail-fence of a cattle-corral in the woods, and I concluded that my new companion had proved a true Amazonian in thinking of himself alone. After taking down several fences and putting them up again, we came out on a little nose of land above the river—and found Antonino looking hopelessly away up it.

It turned out that Antonino, loving to boast, like most Latin-Americans, really had not the slightest ownership in the boat we had hoped to catch, and here we were apparently stranded at the Bocca da Estrada, with one small, ragged, thatched roof on poles under which to wait for days, if not weeks. Anyway, the baggage we had sent by canoe had not arrived. Antonino professed to think that the launch had stopped just a few miles up the river to overhaul its engines, but this sounded like another bluff to save his face. I quenched my thirst with a dozen gourd-cups of yellow river water, squeezing into it the juice of wild lemons, swung my hammock, and prepared for whatever might be forthcoming. It is fatal to lose one’s temper in Amazonia. A chunk of cow that had been torn off the still palpitating animal that morning had swung unwrapped from the Indian’s saddle during all the sixteen miles. This we washed, spitted, and thrust into a fire. From it we slashed slabs still oozing blood with the Indian’s _terçado_, as Brazilians call a machete, and these being too tough to bite, we cut off each mouthful below the lips with the huge knife in approved South American cowboy fashion, after dipping them in coarse rock-salt, tossed handfuls of dry _farinha d’agoa_ into our mouths with it, and washed it all down with river-water tempered with the fruit of the wild lemon tree that shaded our ragged roof. Our total resources were not enough for three meals, and how long we might have to wait no man knew. To add to the pleasure of the situation, we had struck a veritable colony of _puims_, as the Bolivian _jejene_, or tiny gnat of bulldog bite, is called in Amazonia, which quickly brought back memories of the tattooed skin with which had I emerged upon the Paraguay sixteen months before.

But, strange to say, Antonino had partly told the truth. About three o’clock the canoe arrived with our baggage and two sweat-dripping Indians, and we piled in the rest of our belongings and started on up the stream as if we really believed the tale that the launch was waiting not far above. I wished to add to our speed by paddling, but there were only three _pás_, and the Indians laughed at the thought of a civilized man doing so. In all Amazonia, with labor so badly needed, the man above the laboring class suffers most of all for physical exercise, and the development of the region is under the tremendous handicap of the ancient Iberian caste system. The Indians surely shoveled water behind them, however, though even so we made little headway against the swift current. If one of us spoke to them, they instantly stopped paddling to listen; hence motionless silence was our only salvation.

Then all at once we rounded a point, and there, sure enough, was the craft we were pursuing, barely a mile ahead. We quickly lost it to view again, and I waited anxiously until another bend disclosed it barely a stone’s throw away and tied to the bank! I should have been less worried had I known that it would not move an inch forward for another twenty-four hours.

We found her a battered old German launch attached to the most ancient wreck of a barge that I had ever seen afloat. They were anchored to a tree before the only dwelling in the vicinity, the home of a part-Indian family of countless children and innumerable hangers-on, who lived in a clearing with several primitive thatched huts. Among them was a youth who had been blind from birth, yet who went anywhere in the vicinity, through the dense forest or across the river in a dugout log, and did the same work as the rest of the men, even to splitting wood in his bare feet. Even here in the far wilderness the women were Moorish in their attitude. When a little gasoline launch, with two thatched barges on either side all but concealing it, arrived after a twenty-four hour trip around the falls with a crowd of men and women packed like sardines, these all came ashore for a full breath and to straighten out their kinks. Barely once did they speak to us men, yet when they were ready to leave, every woman and girl of the party went entirely around the circle, limply shaking hands with each of us, though we were nearly all total strangers. This courtesy is always expected in the far reaches of Amazonia, and if the traveler chances upon a party of thirty or forty, it takes an hour or more to get away.

Near the house was a fine specimen of the _japuim_ tree, hundreds of oriole-like nests of the _japuim-oro-pendula_ hanging from its branches. They are a noisy bird with a surprising vocabulary, black with white wings having yellow spots, and yellow from the hips down, so to speak, with a black end to the tail, and a long, whitish beak. Their nests are cleverly woven, with the entrance near the top, and every morning the birds clean them out as carefully as any New England housewife. The _japuim_ has a saucy, noisy half-cry, half-whistle with which it keeps up a constant hubbub from daylight until dark. But the most striking of its habits is its love of company. It does not live in single nests, like our northern oriole, but hangs scores and even hundreds of them from the same tree, though there may be countless others without a nest for miles roundabout. They choose trees near houses, perhaps because the human inhabitants and their dogs scare off monkeys, snakes, bats, and other creatures that might do them harm, and like apartment dwellers in our large cities, they live so close together that the arrival or departure of one bird shakes up a dozen or more of his neighbors.

We were to have left early next morning, but this was Brazil and we finally crawled away at four in the afternoon. The _batelão_ was a floating sty. The hold, directly under the rotten-board deck on which we lived and where every step was precarious, sloshed with bilge-water having a strong scent of livestock, and everything made a transatlantic cattle-boat seem incredibly luxurious by comparison. I dipped my water direct from the river, but the crew bailed bilge-water out of the bottom of the barge, and then filled the drinking-water jar with the same bucket without even rinsing it. I had grown faint with hunger before a tiny cup of black coffee came to poison and deceive the stomach, and not a mouthful of food did we get until three in the afternoon. Passengers are not taken on these boats, though the man who presents himself will not be put off; but he has no rights and can make no demands. We ate, standing up at a dirty little workbench on the launch, some beef and _farinha_ cooked and served by an Indian boy with a rotting forefinger that suggested leprosy or something worse, and who had never heard the word “wash.” There were three tin plates on board, which we took turns in using. Bread is considered an extravagance along the Amazon, and I had seen none since the first day out of Manaos. Potatoes are as unknown as cleanliness. I would have given considerable to see a moving-picture of a germ-theorist dropping dead at sight of us.

In such predicaments moderation is the only hope; eat and drink no more than is absolutely necessary, and do not worry. My legs itched and tingled from the _mucuims_ of two days before; indeed, our whole skins were tattooed with all manner of abrasions, but there was nothing to do but play Indian and smile at anything. With perfect weather one enjoyed life, for all its drawbacks, and there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that everyone else on board was as badly off, which is more conducive to contentment than living on cattle-boat fare with the scent of first-cabin mushroom steaks in the air. Still, active rather than passive hardships would have been preferable.

The captain was a full-blooded Indian with filed teeth. Many aborigines and part-breeds along the Amazon, some of them “civilized” and living in the larger towns, file their front teeth to points. A native dentist told me that this was not due to superstition, but because it keeps them from decaying and saves people from one of the curses of wild places—toothache. While I do not recommend the custom, I was frequently assured, both by Amazonian dentists and the natives themselves, that a filed tooth never spoils. An Indian who spoke Portuguese, and who was so familiar with modern progress that he made no objection to my photographing him and his wife with their pointed fangs displayed, said that the work had been done when he was twelve, with a three-cornered file—though the wilder tribes chip them off—that the only hurt was a few days’ dull ache, and that the only purpose of the custom was to save the teeth and at the same time be able to cope with the tough “green” beefsteaks of Amazonia.

The owner of the barge, who sat _chupando canna_—“sucking” sugar-cane it was, indeed—by the light of a brilliant full moon, tried to force his cabin upon me; but I declined extra favors and swung my hammock with the others on the lower deck over the sloshing cattle-water. In the moonlight the mirror-clear river reflected every hump and turn of the banks far ahead. When I finally fell into a doze in spite of the constant hubbub on launch or barge, someone woke me and told me to take my hammock away while the crew loaded wood, which they did for some hours. Like a magnet, we seemed to pick up everything along the river and drag it with us. When daylight came we were towing the launch of a rival, which appeared to have broken down, our own clumsy old barge with some three feet of odorous water in its hold, two very large boats, roofed, and with tons of cargo, a dead gasoline launch, two large and heavily laden rowboats, two empty rowboats, four canoes, and perhaps seventy-five persons all told, some of whom had waited half a year to get this trip up the river. To say that we made speed against the swift current would be exaggerating.

We stopped for wood again during the day and I had my first swim in Amazonia, for here the danger of _pirainhas_ was said not to be great. This savage small fish, having double rows of teeth of razor edge with which it tears the flesh even of man, is the horror of the swimmer in nearly all the waters of the Amazon basin. Let the skin show the suggestion of a wound, and whole schools of these bloodthirsty creatures dart forward to the attack with lightning-like rapidity. The river remained wide, but was now very shallow, and much of the year it is almost completely dry. On the morning of May 28 we sighted the first town since leaving Manaos. This was Boa Vista, founded forty years ago on the left-hand bank of the river, where the dense forests begin to die out into open campo. Its red-tiled roofs and other colors gave a striking and welcome contrast after an unbroken week of watching the monotonous unrolling of jungle-forested banks. There were perhaps forty houses and huts, including a church in ruins, three shops, two dentists, one of whom was also the pharmacist, and the self-complacent air of a backwoods metropolis. Boa Vista is the “capital” of the cattle plains of northernmost Brazil, and as such has an importance out of all keeping with its size, like many another insignificant town in a boundless wilderness. Yet it had the profound melancholy, the mournful tranquillity that is the ordinary existence of _sertanejo_ populations, where nearly every individual is true to his relaxed and indolent environment. There was, however, really a “boa vista” for this region, a far-reaching view across the river and the grassy plains to ranges of hills purple-blue with distance.

For some days Antonino had been suffering from some violent throat infection, and he was now speechless. Everyone advised him to stay in Boa Vista, where at least there was a pharmacy and a dentist, if no doctor—and the next boat, I recalled, would probably be at least a month behind. I kept silence, however, rather than let my own convenience tempt me to advise him; but after everyone else had tried their turn at wheedling him to remain, he refused, and having had his throat sprayed, we were off once more. In the brilliant moonlight that night we passed, high up on a low hill, the snow-white chapel of the monks of São Bento, and below it on the river stood Fort São Joaquim. The old fortress was built by the Portuguese in 1775 to keep the Spaniards to the north and west from stealing Portuguese territory. It is now in ruins, but there was still a “garrison” of a dozen men living in thatched huts about it.

This was the junction of the Parima and the Takutú Rivers, which form the Rio Branco. We turned into the latter and struggled on. The last of our tows had dropped off at Boa Vista, and of passengers, there remained only Antonino, his servant, and myself. In the morning we were skirting the broad acres of the Fazenda Nacional. Across it, near the Venezuelan boundary, was the legendary Lago Dourado and Manoa del Dorado, said to have been built by Peruvians before the Conquest, where everything was reputed to be made of pure gold. Even Walter Raleigh took the existence of fabulous Manoa seriously, and planned an expedition to find and conquer it. To this day, however, it has not been discovered. The Manoas were the most numerous and valiant tribe in the Rio Branco region, but they grew weak under missionary civilization and retreated to British territory, though they left descendants in all the Amazon basin. It is the boast of many of the “best families” of the Rio Branco Valley that they are of the true aristocracy because some of their ancestors were Manoas.

If there had been water enough, the launch would have taken us on up the Takutú to Antonino’s door, but we were lucky to be able to push on to the home of the captain before the water ran out. From the shallow Takutú we turned into the narrow Surumú, with barely sufficient water to float us. This the English once claimed as the frontier, but the King of Italy, as arbitrator, set it farther east. The thinly wooded banks grew ever closer together, and in mid-morning we grounded the launch—the old wreck of a _batelão_, had been left before the estate of its owner near the mouth of the branch—at the captain’s _fazenda_, “Carnauba.” In the baked-mud house we were welcomed by his good-hearted, if diffident and laconic, part-Indian wife and family. I asked the captain how much I owed him for my passage, at which he showed great surprise and after long reflection remarked that he thought twenty milreis would be generous. This was distinctly reasonable for Brazil, and especially in Amazonia, where the higher you go and the poorer accommodations become, the more exorbitant are apt to be the charges. Money is not the common medium of exchange thus far up-country, where favors are usually returned by some species of barter. Thus Antonino was welcome to ride free because he often shipped cattle by this launch and _batelão_, and the man who offers money is looked upon somewhat as a “tenderfoot” is on our western plains.

Eager to stretch my legs, I would have pushed on without delay. But Brazil is Brazil, even on its edges, and haste was difficult. First coffee must be served; then came talk enough to settle the terms of a treaty of peace, after which we finally packed all but the most indispensable of our baggage and sent it away by canoe with Antonino’s servant, who must descend again to the Takutú and paddle his way up it. By this time “breakfast” was ready, and we sat down to a heavy Brazilian meal of several kinds of meat, chicken included, and _farinha_ wet in broth, ending with the unescapable black coffee. Then the nearest neighbor, from several miles away, dropped in, and the chatter went on while we lolled in _capechanas_ sipping more black coffee. This was my first acquaintance with the typical seat of the region, a short hammock made of dried cowhides and used not as a bed by night, for which it would lack comfort and size, but as a lounging-place by day. There were six of these _capechanas_ swinging under the veranda. Cowhide is so plentiful in these parts that stiffened ones are often set upright as walls or partitions. There was not a chair in the house, though there were two American sewing-machines and a rusty American phonograph with a hundred records, both so long maltreated that every song sounded like the squawking of the same hen in a slightly different key. The most prized product of the outside world seemed to be kerosene, used in everything from launch-engines to lamps, and always eagerly sought. A ten-gallon box of two cans cost 25$, say seven dollars, and for several months a year it is not obtainable at any price.

First we were to start at ten, then at noon; now we must wait until the sun was lower. A dozen horses were rounded up in the corral, where two were lassooed, and for once it looked as if I were to have a real mount. But the captain insisted on having him tried out first, and after fiercely bucking and rearing for some time, he took the Indian peon on his back for a gallop which he ended suddenly by throwing the rider over his head into a shallow pool, breaking the ancient weather-rotted leather of both saddle and bridle—which was lucky, for otherwise we might never have recovered them. I was quite willing to try my luck, if they would catch him again, but the captain insisted on choosing a substitute, which turned out to be another of those equine rats it seemed always my fate to ride in South America. Notwithstanding his unpromising appearance, however, I was no sooner astride him than he gave a splendid plea for admission to a Wild West show, bucking, jumping up into the air and coming down stiff-legged on all fours, kicking, rearing, and finally taking the cowhide “bit” in his teeth and galloping wildly away across the bushy campo. For a time I was undecided whether to stay on his back or catapult over his head, but decided that the ground was hard and that the honor of my race depended on my performance before those Amazonian gauchos. Somehow, therefore, even with the kodak over my shoulder thumping me in the back at every jump, I kept aboard and returned to the house, which astounded the natives so profoundly as to imply that every other “gringo” of their acquaintance had toppled limply off at the first jump.

Even when I got him quieted down, the animal was so ticklish that if a foot or a bush touched him, he instantly went through the impersonation of a bronco all over again, so that a dozen times that afternoon I had the same sport. Antonino in time caught up with me and we rode on together across a great plain, with scrub trees here and there, many clusters of the _burity_ palm from the fan-like fronds of which all roofs of the region are made, and countless _tepecuim_, conical ant-hills from six to ten feet high. The range of hills, which I now knew to be the Kanuku Mountains in British Guiana, stood out blue, yet clear, against the far eastern horizon when, about five o’clock, we stopped at the “Fazenda Maravilha” on a bank of the Takutú River. It was a “marvel” only in its own estimation, though the part-Indian owners showed all the hospitality of the region by not only serving the ceremonious black coffee, but by insisting that we remain for the evening meal. Here, also, there were leather hammocks, and a sadly abused phonograph which did its best to entertain us. We were off again at dusk, meaning to take advantage of the full moon; but the clouds were thick, and even after it appeared we saw little of it. Before it rose we stumbled upon what Antonino called a “_maloca_,” a cluster of huts built and intermittently inhabited by more or less wild Indians. In the darkness between two of the shanties we found a pair of Indian youths, dressed in the remnants of cotton shirts and trousers and lying in their only other possession,—old hammocks swung from posts under the projecting eaves. They belonged to the Macuxy (pronounced “ma-coo-shée”) tribe scattered through the hills of the three countries about the source of the Rio Branco. My companion wanted them to go back to “Maravilha” and help row his canoe and baggage home next day, and the argument he was forced to put up resembled that of a spellbinder seeking votes. In words of one syllable—for they understood little Portuguese—and with such reasoning as one might offer a child of six, he told them at least a dozen times that he would pay them two days’ wages, either in food or money, and that they might be on their way again the following evening. Though they admitted that they had not eaten that day, that they had no water, and asked for tobacco, their unvarying reply was an indifferent monosyllable, and it was only after half an hour of pleading that they gave a grunted promise to roll up their hammocks as soon as the moon was high and be in “Maravilha” in time to start up the river at dawn.

Soon we came to a muddy _igarapé_ that our animals refused for a long time to cross, and finally, toward what was perhaps midnight, the barking of a pack of curs drew our attention to a hut and corral and announced us to their unwashed owner. He invited us to swing our hammocks inside, gave us each a nibble of miserable native cheese, and eventually, a discussion of the news of the day having been exhausted, let us fall asleep. The chief item of interest which Antonino had brought with him was that a youth known to himself and our host had resorted to the plan, still usual in those parts, of stealing a woman, but who this time happened to be a widow. The hut-owner refused to believe it, saying in a surly grunt that “of course Pedro is old enough now to hunt him a woman, but whoever heard of stealing a _widow_!” The scorn in his tone is inexpressible in words. Long before daylight we saddled again, drank a glass of foaming milk still warm from the corral, and struck out across bushy campo, rather sandy and very dry. An unusual danger on these great savannahs is that wild horses, especially stallions, roaming the plains attack mounted animals, sometimes biting mouthfuls out of them, if not out of the rider. Several pursued us, and one big black brute would not give up his nefarious project until I had fired my revolver over his head. About seven we came upon another hut, where the usual limp handshakes and mutual inquiries as to the health of families—for, of course, Antonino knew everyone in the region—was followed by the exchange of local gossip until coffee had been made and served. An hour later there was a similar halt at a similar hut. Life in Brazil is just one black coffee after another. Here there was a branch of the Takutú, to be crossed in a canoe, swimming our horses and re-saddling them, after which a long and fairly swift trot brought us at last to the home of Antonino.

It was by no means as sumptuous a place as his choice of language had led me to picture, but at least it was more comfortable than the mud hut in which we had spent part of the night. There was a large thatched and once whitewashed adobe house standing forth on a big bare spot at the top of a slight bluff above the Takutú, and three or four smaller huts and a corral, all of which, with several hundred dry and sandy acres about them, Antonino had inherited six years before from his mother-in-law. The site was on the extreme edge of Brazil, where the Takutú makes an almost complete turn and the Mahú flows into it, and it would have been easy to throw a stone from Antonino’s door over onto British territory. I had looked upon my companion as almost a youth, yet his wife, younger than he, was already old and gray, and his daughter of thirteen was in the physical prime of life and visibly longing for a husband. These, a son, and Antonino’s brother, dying of tuberculosis, made up the household, though there was the usual swarm of Indian or half-Indian servants.

After a swim in the boundary and a mammoth, though rough, dinner, I was led to the “chaletsinha,” a small mud-and-thatched hut reserved for visitors, for even here it would have been scandalous to lodge a male friend in the same house with one’s women folk. The floor was of unleveled earth and there were a dozen hammock-hooks, between two of which I napped for a couple of hours. Meanwhile the fifteen-year old son had been sent over into British Guiana to summon the “Americano.” Ever since I first met him Antonino had insisted that a _compatriota_ of mine lived just across the boundary from his _fazenda_, but I had so often found in South America that men reputed to be my compatriots turned out to be Italians, Syrians, negroes, or something else as un-American, that I had given little attention, and no faith, to his assertion. My surprise, as well as my delight, was all the greater, therefore, when there suddenly walked in upon me a magnificently built, handsome type of outdoor American in the early prime of life and the visible pink of condition, his ruddy health in striking contrast to the chalky faces of the indoor Brazilians. He was Ben Hart from South Dakota, who had gone first to Panama, then to the Madeira-Mamoré, later had prospected for gold around Sorata, and finally had come to British Guiana eight months before with an American partner to start a cattle ranch. The partner had an English wife, however, and when the war broke out he had gone to London to enlist and left Hart alone. I was the first “white man” he had seen in half a year, and though he could not assure me that I could reach Georgetown, never having been there himself, he did “hope I would come over and stay a few weeks with him.”

On the last day of May we walked a couple of kilometers over bushy campo and dried bogs to a fringe of woods on the edge of the Mahú, across which Hart hallooed to his Indian boys about a newly thatched hut visible on the opposite bank. They soon appeared in an aged dugout, the gunwales of which were under water, but with boards nailed above them, a precarious craft that would have filled in ten minutes; but luckily the trip lasted only three. Thus I was removed bag and baggage from Brazil eleven months to a day from the time I had entered it from Uruguay. That day I was firmly convinced that nothing short of penal servitude would ever again get me back into the mammoth land of the imperial palm and political corruption; but time cures most lacerations of the skin and nothing is so disagreeable at a distance as it is close at hand. The Brazilian bubbles over with faults. As my old friend, Professor Ross, puts it, “he much prefers the lollipops of compliment to the pungent olive of truth”; yet there is something fascinating about both him and his gigantic, wasted national domain. Long after his grafting politicians and his un-trounced men and boys have become the dimmest of memories, his magnificent palms, swaying beneath peerless skies, his incomparable capital and the songs of his _sabiás_ remain vividly etched in a crowded recollection; and when, on a dark and dreary winter day in the Puritan-weighted North, I read again some of the swinging, color-flashing lyrics of Casimiro d’Abreu, nothing but the Portuguese word _saudade_ expresses the longing that comes over me to behold again those marvelous days and luminous nights of which he sings.