 Chapter 6. Part 2 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ben Wilford. Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt. Chapter 6. Through the Highland Wilderness of Western Brazil. Part 2. In the evening, after supper or dinner, it is hard to tell by what title the exceedingly movable evening meal should be called. The members of the party sometimes told stories of incidents in their past lives. Most of them were men of varied experiences. Rondon and Lyra told of the hardship and suffering of the first trips through the wilderness across which we were going with such comfort. On this very plateau, they had once lived for weeks on the fruits of the various fruit-bearing trees. Naturally, they became emaciated and feeble. In the forests of the Amazonian basin, they did better because they often shot birds and plundered the highs of the wild honeybees. In cutting the trail for the telegraph wire, through the Juryan basin, they lost every single one of the 160 meals in which they had started. Those men paid dear who built the first foundations of empire. Fiala told of the long polar nights and of white bears that came around the snow huts of the explorers, greedy to eat them, and themselves destined to be eaten by them. Of all the party, Chere's experiences had covered the widest range. This was partly owing to the fact that the latter-day naturalist of the most vigorous type, who goes into the untrodden ways of the world, must see and do many strange things, and still more owing to the character of the man himself. The things he had seen and done and undergone often enabled him to cast the light of his own past experience on unexpected subjects. Once we were talking about the proper weapons for Calvary, and someone mentioned the theory that the lance is especially formidable because of the moral effect it produces on the enemy. He nodded emphatically, and the little cross-examination elicited the fact that he was speaking from lively personal regulation of his own feelings when charged by Lancers. It was while he was fighting with the Vince-Walien insurgents, in an unsuccessful uprising against the tyranny of Castro, he was on foot with five Vince-Walien's all cool men and good shots. In an open plain they were charged by twenty of Castro's Lancers, who galloped out from behind cover two or three hundred yards off. It was a war in which neither side gave quarter, and it wished the wounded and the prisoners were butchered. Just as President Madera was butchered in Mexico, Chere knew that it meant death for him and his companions if the charge came home. In the sight of the horsemen running in at full speed, with their long lances in rest and the blades glittering, left an indelible impression on his mind. But he and his companions shot deliberately and accurately, ten of the Lancers were killed, the nearest fallen within fifty yards, and the others rode off in headlong haste. A cool man with a rifle, if he has mastered his weapon, need fear no foe. At this camp the Otto Vans again joined us. They were to go direct to the first telegraph station at the Great Falls of Utility, on the rear of Papa Joe. Of course they traveled faster than the Mule Train. Father Zom, attended by Sieg, started for the falls in them. Chere and Miller also went in them, because they had found that it was very difficult to collect birds, and especially mammals, when we were moving every day, packing up early each morning in the Mule Train arriving late in the afternoon or not until nightfall. Moreover, there was much rain, which made it difficult to work except under the tents. Accordingly, the two naturalists desired to get to a place where they could spend several days and collect steadily, thereby doing more effective work. The rest of us continued with the Mule Train, as was necessary. It was always a picturesque sight when camp was broken, and again at nightfall, when the laden meadows came stringing in and their burdens were thrown down, while the tents were pitched and the fires lit. We breakfast before leaving camp, the aluminum cups in place being placed on ox hides, round which we sat on the ground or on camp stools. We fared well on rice, beans, and crackers, with canned corned beef and salmon or any game that had been shot, and coffee, tea, and mata. I then usually sat down somewhere to write, and when the mules were nearly ready, I popped my writing materials into my duffel bag, war sack, as we would have called it in the old days on the plains. I found that the mules usually arrived so late in the afternoon or evening that I could not depend upon being able to write at that time. Of course, if we made a very early start, I could not write at all. At night, there were no mosquitoes. In the daytime, nested sandflies and horseflies sometimes bothered us a little, but not much. Small, stingless bees lit on us in numbers and crawled over the skin, making a slight tickling, but we did not mind them until they became very numerous. There was a good deal of rain, but not enough to cause any serious annoyance. Colonel Rondant and Lieutenant Lyra held many discussions as to whether the real Di-De-Vita flowed and where its mouth might be. Its provisional name, River of Doubt, was given it precisely because of this ignorance concerning it, an ignorance which it was one of the purposes of our trip to dispel. It might go into the Guy of Piranha, in which case this course might be very short. It might flow into the Madeira Lowdown, in which case this course could be very long, or which was unlikely, it might flow into the Tapahos. There was another river of which Colonel Rondant had come across the headwaters, whose course was equally doubtful. Although in his case there was rather more probability of it flowing into the Jarena, by which name the Tapahos is known for its upper half. To this unknown river, Colonel Rondant had given the name Ananas, because when he came across it, he found a deserted Indian field with pineapples, which the hunger explorers ate greedily. Among the things that Colonel and I hoped to accomplish on the trip was to do a little work in clearing up one or other of those doubtful geographical points, and thereby to push a little forward the knowledge of this region. Originally, as described in the first chapter, my trip was undertaken primarily in the interest of the American Museum of Natural History of New York, to add to our knowledge of the birds and mammals of the far interior of the western Brazilian wilderness, and the mammals of our baggage and scientific equipment. Printed by the museum, were entitled, Colonel Roosevelt's South American Expedition for the American Museum of Natural History. But, as I've already mentioned, at Rio, the Brazilian government, though the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Loro Mueller, suggested that I should combine the expedition with one by Colonel Rondant, which they contemplated making, and thereby make both expeditions a broader scientific interest. I accepted the proposal with much pleasure, and we found, when we joined Colonel Rondant and his associates, that their baggage and equipment had been labeled by the Brazilian government, Expeditico Scientifica Roosevelt Rondant. This, thenceforth, became the proper and official title of the expedition. Cherry and Miller did the chief zoological work. The geological work was done by a Brazilian member of the expedition, Isabel Oliveira. The astronomical work necessary for obtaining the exact geographical location of the rivers, and points of note was to be done by Lieutenant Lyra. Under the supervision of Colonel Rondant, and at the telegraph station, this astronomical work would be checked by wire communications with one of the Colonel Rondant's assistants at Cayaba. Lieutenant Setano thereby securing a mentally accurate comparison of time. The sketch maps and surveying and cartographical work generally were to be made under the supervision of Colonel Rondant by Lyra, with assistants from Fiala and Kermit. Captain Almacar handled the worst problem, transportation. The medical member was Dr. Cajazeira. At night around the campfire, my Brazilian companions often spoke to the first explorers of this vast wilderness of western Brazil. Men whose very names are now hardly known, but who did each his part in opening the country which will someday cease us growth and development. Among the most noticeable of them was a Portuguese Ricardo Franco who spent 40 years at the work, during the last quarter of the 18th and the opening years of the 19th century. He ascended for a long distance to Saigou and the top holes, and went up the Madeira in a group array, crossing to the headwaters of the Paraguay and partially exploring there also. He worked among and with the Indians, much as Mungo Park worked with the natives of West Africa, having none of the aids and instruments and comforts with which even the hardest of modern explorers are provided. He was one of the men who established the beginnings of the province of Mato Grosso. For many years, the sole method of communication between this remote interior province and civilization was by the long, difficult, and perilous route which led up the Amazon and Madeira and its then capital, the town of Mato Grosso. The seat of the captain general, with his palace, cathedral, and fortress, was accordingly placed far to the west near the Guapore. When less circuitous lines of communication were established further eastward, the old capital was abandoned, and the tropic wilderness surged over the lonely little town. The tomb of the old colonial explorer still stands in the ruined cathedral, where the forest has once more come to its own, but civilization is again advancing to reclaim the lost town and to revive the memory of the wilderness wanderer who helped to found it. Colonel Rondon has named a river after Franco. A range of mountains has also been named after him. The Colonel, acting for the Brazilian government, has established a telegraph station in what was once the palace of the captain general. Our northward trail led along the high ground a league or two to the east of the northward flowing Rio Socrates. Each night we camped on one of the small tributary brooks that fitted. Fiala, Kermit, and I occupied one tent, and the daytime the PM flies, vicious little sand flies, became bad enough to make us finally use gloves and headnets. There were many heavy rains which made the traveling hard for the mules. The soil was more often clay than sand, and it was slippery when wet. The weather was overcast, and there was usually no oppressive heat even at noon. At intervals along the trail we came on the starring skull and bleached skeleton of a mule or ox. Day after day we rode forward across endless flats of grass and of low open scrubbery forest, the trees standing far apart, and in most places being but a little higher than the head of a horseman. Some of them carried blossoms, white, orange, yellow, pink, and there were many flowers, the most beautiful being the morning glories. Among the trees were bastard rubber trees and dwarf palmetals. If the ladder grew more than a few feet high their tops were torn and disheveled by the wind. There was very little bird or mammal life. There was few long vistas, for in most places it was not possible to see far among the gray, gnarled trunks of the wind-beaten little trees. Yet the desolate landscape had a certain charm of its own, although not a charm that would be felt by any man who does not take pleasure in mere space and freedom and willingness and in plains standing empty to the sun, the wind and the rain. The country bore some resemblance to the country west of Red Huff on the White Nile, the home of the giant elan. Only here there was no big game, no chance of seeing the towering form of the giraffe, the black poke of elephant or buffalo, the herds of straw colored heartebeest, or the ghostly shimmer of the sun glittening on the coats of Rowan and Elan as they vanished silently in the grey sea of withered scrub. One feature in common with the African landscape was the abundance of ant hills, some as high as a man. They were red in the clay country, gray where it was sandy, and the dirt houses were also in trees, while their raised tunnels traversed trees and grounds alike. As some of the camping places we had to be only watched against the swarms of leaf-carrying ants. These are so called in the books, the Brazilians call them caragadors, or porters, because they are always carrying bits of leaf and blades of grass to their underground homes. They are inveterate burdened bears, and they industriously cut into pieces and carry off any garment they can get at. And we had to guard our shoes and clothes from them, just as we had often had to guard all of our belongings against the termites. These ants did not bite us, but we encountered huge black ants an inch and a quarter long, which were very vicious, and their bite was not only painful, but quite poisonous. Praying mantis were common, and one evening at supper, one had a comical encounter with a young dog, a jovial, near puppy of Colonel Rondon's named Cartichou. He had christened the jolly kumpup from a character in one of Frank Stockton's stories, which I suppose are now remembered only by elderly people, and by them only if they are natives of the United States. Cartichou was lying with his head on the oxhide that served his table, waiting with poorly disassembled impatience for his share of the banquet. The mantis flew down on the oxhide and proceeded to crawl over it, taking little flights from one corner to another, and whenever it thought itself diminished, it assumed an attitude of seeing devotion and real defiance. Soon it lit in front of Cartichou's nose. Cartichou cocked his big ears forward, stretched his necks, and cautiously snipped at the new arrival, not with any hostile design, but merely to find out whether it would prove to be a playmate. The mantis promptly assumed an attitude of prayer. This struck Cartichou as both novel and interesting, and he thrust his sniffing black nose still nearer. The mantis dexterously thrust forward first one, and then the other armed foreleg, touching the intrusive nose, which was instantly jerked back and again slowly and inquirently brought forward. Then the mantis suddenly flew in Cartichou's face, whereupon Cartichou, with a smothered yelp of dismay, almost turned a back somersault, and the triumph of the mantis flew back to the middle of the oxhide, among the plates where it reared erect and defied the laughing and applauding company. On the morning of the 29th, we were rather late in starting because the rain had continued through the night into the morning, drenching everything. After nightfall there had been some mosquitoes, and the pimps were a pest during daylight, where one bites that leaves a tiny black spot on the skin, which lasts for several weeks. In the slippery mud, one of the black mules fell and injured itself so that it had to be abandoned. Soon after starting, we came on the telegraph line, which runs from Cuiaba. This was the first time we had seen it. Two Parisus Indians joined us, leading a pack bullet. They were dressed in hat, shirt, trousers, and sandals, precisely like the ordinary Brazilian cover clothes. As the poor backwards peasants, usually with little white blood in them, are colloquially and half derisively styled, cubba clothes being originally a Guirani word, meaning naked savage. These two Indians were in the employ of the telegraphic commission, and had been patrolling the telegraph line. The bullet carried their personal belongings and the tools with which they could repair a break. The commission pays the ordinary engine worker 66 cents a day. A very good worker gets a dollar, and the chief a dollar 60 cents. No man gets anything unless he works. Colonel Rondine, by just, kindly, and understanding treatment of these Indians, who previously had often been exploited and maltreated by rubber gatherers, has made them the loyal friends of the government. He has gathered them at the telegraph stations, where their cultivate fields of mendiac, beans, potatoes, maize, and other vegetables, and where he is introducing them to stock raising, and the entire work of guarding and patrolling the line is theirs. After 6 hours' march, we came to the crossing of the Rio Sacre at the beautiful waterfall appropriately called the South Obello. This is the end of the automobile road. Here, there is a small, Parisa's village. The men in the village work the ferry by which everything is taken across the deep and rapid river. The ferry boat is made of planking placed on three dugout canoes and runs on a trolley. Before crossing, we enjoyed a good swim in the swift, clear, cool water. The Indian village, where we camped, is placed on a jutting tongue of land, round which the river sweeps just before it leaps from the overhang precipice. The falls themselves are very lovely. Just above them is a wooded island, but the river joins again before it races forward for the final plunge. There is a sheer drop of 40 or 50 yards, with a breath two or three times as great. And the volume of water is large. On the left, or hither bank, a cliff extends for several hundred yards below the falls. Green vines have flung themselves down over its face, and they are met by other vines thrusting upward from the mass of vegetation at its foot, glistening in the perpetual mist from the cataract, and clothing even the rock surface in vivid green. The river, after throwing itself over the rock wall, rushes off in long curves at the bottom of the thickly wooded ravine, the white water churning among the black boaters. There is a perpetual rainbow at the foot of the falls. The masses of green water that are hurling themselves over the brink dissolve into shifting foaming columns of snowy lace. On the edge of the cliff below the falls, Colonel Rondon had placed benches, giving a curious touch of rather conventional tourist civilization to this cataract far out in the lonely wilderness. It is well worth visiting for its beauty. It is also an extreme interest because of the promise it holds for the future. Lieutenant Lyra informed me that they had calculated that this fall would furnish 36,000 horsepower. Eight miles off we were to see another fall of much greater height than power. There are many rivers in this region which would furnish almost unlimited motive force to populous manufacturing communities. The country roundabout is healthy. It is an upland region of good climate. We were visiting it in the rainy season, the season when the nights are far less cool than in the dry season, and yet we found it delightful. This much fertile soil in the neighborhood of the streams and the teeming lowlands of the Amazon and Paraguay could readily and with immense advantage to both sides be made tributary to an industrial civilization seated on these highlands. A telegraph line has been built to and across them. A railroad should follow. Such a line could be easily built, but there are no serious natural obstacles. In advance of its construction, a trolley line could be run from Guyaba to the falls using the power furnished by the ladder. Once this is done, the land will offer extraordinary opportunities to settlers of the right kind, to homemakers and to enterprising businessmen of foresight, coolness, and sagacity who are willing to work with the settlers, the immigrants, the homemakers, for an advantage which shall be mutual. End of Chapter 6 Part 2 Chapter 6 Part 3 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Ben Wilford Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 6 Through the Highland Wilderness of Western Brazil Part 3 The Paracist Indians whom we met here were exceedingly interesting. They were to all appearance an unusually cheerful, good human, pleasant natured people. Their teeth were bad, otherwise they appeared strong and vigorous, and there were plenty of children. The colonel was received as a valued friend and as a leader who was to be followed and obeyed. He is raising them by degrees, the only way by which to make the rise permanent. In this village, he has got them to substitute for the flimsy Indian cabin houses of the type usually among the poor field laborers and back country dwellers in Brazil. These houses have roofs of palm thatch, steeply pitched. They are usually open at the sides, consisting merely of a framework of timbers with a wall at the back. But some have the ordinary four walls of erect palm logs. The hammocks are slung in the houses and the cooking is also done in them, with pots placed in small open fires or occasionally in a kind of clay oven. The big goers for water and the wicker baskets are placed on the ground or hung on the poles. The men had adopted and were wearing shirts and trousers, but the women had made little change in their clothing. A few wore print dresses, but obviously only for ornament. Most of them, especially the girls and young married women, wore nothing but a loincloth in addition to bead, necklaces and bracelets. The nursing mothers, and almost all the mothers were nursing, sometimes carried the child slung against their side of hip, seated in a cloth belt or sling which went over the opposite shoulder of the mother. The women seemed to be well treated, although polygamy is practiced. The children were loved by everyone. They were petted by both men and women, and they behaved well to one another. The boys not seeming to bully the girls or the smaller boys. Most of the children were naked, but the girls early wore the loincloth, and some, both of the little boys and the little girls, wore colored print garments to the evident pride of themselves and their parents. In each house there were several families, and life went on with no privacy, but with good humor, consideration and fundamentally good manners. The man or woman who had nothing to do lay in a hammock or squatted on the ground, leaning against a poster wall. The children played together or lay in little hammocks or tagged around after their mothers, and when called they came trustfully up to us to be petted or given some small trinket. They were friendly little souls, and accustomed to good treatment. One woman was weaving a cloth, another was making a hammock. Others made ready melons and other vegetables and cooked them over tiny fires. The men, who had come in from work at the ferry or along the telegraph lines, did some work themselves or played with the children. One cut a small boy's hair, and then had his own hair cut by a friend, but the assortment of the men was an extraordinary game of ball. In our family we have always relished Oliver Hurford's nonsense rhymes, including the count of Willis's displeasure with his goat. I do not like my Billy goat, I wish that he was dead. Because he kicked me, so he did, he kicked me with his head. Now these perishes Indians enthusiastically play football with their heads. The game is not only native to them, but I have never heard or read of it being played by any other tribe or people. They use a light hollow rubber ball of their own manufacturer. It is circular and about 8 inches in diameter. Their players are divided into two sides and stationed much as in association football, and the ball is placed on the ground to be put in play as in football. Then a player runs forward, throws himself flat on the ground and butts the ball towards the opposite side. This first butt, when the ball is on the ground, never lifts it much and it rolls and bounds towards the opponent. One or two of the latter run towards it. One throws himself flat on his face and butts the ball back. Usually this butt lifts it, and it flies back in a curve well up in the air, and an opposite player, rushing towards it, catches it on his head with such a swing of his brawny neck and such precision and address that the ball bounds back through the air as the football soars after a drop kick. If the ball flies off to one side or the other, it is brought back and again put in play. Often it will be sent to and fro a dozen times from head to head, until finally it rises with such a sweep that it passes far over the heads of the opposite players and descends behind them. Then thrill, rolling cries of good humor triumph arise from the victors, and the game instantly begins again with fresh seal. There are, of course, no such rules as in a specialized ball game of civilization, and I saw no disputes. There may be eight or ten or many more players on each side. The ball is never touched with the hands or feet or with anything except the top of the head. It is hard to decide whether to wonder most at the dexterity and strength with which it is hit or butted with a head as it comes down through the air or its reckless speed and skill with which the players throw themselves headlong on the ground to return the ball if it comes low down. While they do not grind off their noses, I cannot imagine. Some of the players hardly ever failed to catch and return the ball if it came in their neighborhood and with such a vigorous toss of the head that it often flew in a great curve for a really astonishing distance. That night, a Pax ox got into the tent in which Kermit and I were sleeping, entering first at one end and then at the other. It is extraordinary that he did not awaken us, but we slept undisturbed by the ox deliberately ate our shirts, socks, and underclothes. It chewed him in the rags. One of my socks escaped and my undershirt, although chewed full of holes, was still good for some weeks' wear, but the other things were in fragments. In the morning, Colonel Rondon arranged for us to have breakfast over on the benches under the trees by the waterfall, whose roar, low to a thunderous murmur, had been in our ears before we slept and when we waked. There could have been no more picturesque place for the breakfast of such a party as ours. All travelers who really care to see what is most beautiful and most characteristic of the far interior of South America should in their journey visit this region and see the two great waterfalls. They are even now easy of access, and as soon as the traffic warrants it, they will be made still more so. Then, from Seoul, Louis, Caesars, they will be speedily reached by light steamboat up the Sepituba and by a day or two's automobile ride with a couple of days on horseback in between. The Colonel held a very serious counsel with the Parises Indian over an incident which caused him grave concern. One of the commission's employees, Enigro, had killed a wild, number-query Indian, but it appears that he had really been urged on and aided by the Parises, as the members of the tribe to which the dead Indian belong were much given to carrying off of Parises women and in other ways making themselves bad neighbors. The Colonel tried hard to get its truth to the matter. He went to the biggest Indian house where he sat in a hammock, an Indian child cuddling solemnly up to him, by the way, while the Indians sat in the other hammocks and stood around about, but it was impossible to get an absolutely frank statement. It appeared, however, that the number-queries had made a dissent on the Parises village in the momentary absence of the mint of the village, but the letter, notified by the screaming of the women, had returned in time to rescue them. Enigro was with them and, having good rifle, he killed one of the aggressors. The Parises were, of course, in the right, but the Colonel could not afford to have his men take sides in a tribal quarrel. It was only a two-hours march across to the Papa Joe at the falls of the Euterity, so named by the discoverer, Colonel Rondon, after the sacred falcon of the Parises. On the way he passed are Indian friends, themselves bound thither. Both the men and the women bore burdens. The burdens of some of the women, poor things, were heavy, and even the small naked children carried the live hands. At Euterity, there is a big Parises settlement and a telegraph station kept by one of the employees of the commission. The pretty brown wife is acting as school mistress to a group of little Parises girls. The Parises chief has been made a major and wears a uniform accordingly. The commission had erected good building for its own employees and had superintended the erection of good houses for the Indians. Most of the latter still prefer the simplicity of the loincloth. In their ordinary lives, but they proudly wore their civilized clothes in our honor. When in the late afternoon the men began to play a regular match game of head ball with a scorer or umpire to keep count, they soon discarded most of their clothes coming down to nothing but trousers or loincloth. Two or three of them had their faces stained with red ochre. Among the women and children looking on were a couple of little girls who paraded around on stilts. The great waterfall was half a mile below us. Unfortunately, though we had found South Obello, these falls were far superior in beauty and majesty. They were twice as high and twice as broad, and the lay of the land is such that the various landscapes in which the waterfall is a feature are more striking. A few hundred yards above the falls, the river turns at an angle and widens. The broad rapid shallows are crested with whitecaps. This wide expanse of flecked and hurrying water rise to miss columns of the cataract. And as these columns are swayed and broken by the wind, the forest appears through and between them. From below the view is one of singular grandor. The fall is over a shelving ledge of rock, which goes in a nearly straight line across the river's course. But at the left there is a salient in the cliff line, and here accordingly a great cataract of foaming water comes down almost as a separate body. In advance of the line of the main fall, I doubt whether, excepting, of course, Niagara, there is a waterfall in North America which outranks this if both volume and beauty are considered. Above the fall the river flows through a wide valley with gently sloping sides. Below it slips along a torrent of white-green water at the bottom of a deep gorge, and the sides of the gorge are clothed with a towering growth of tropical forest. Next morning the Kakakwai of these Indians, in his major's uniform, came to breakfast and bore himself with entire propriety. It was raining heavily. It rained most of the time. And a few minutes previously I had noticed the Kakakwai's two wives with three or four other young women going out to the Mandiac fields. It was a picturesque group. The women were all mothers, and each carried a nursing child. They wore loincloths or short skirts. Each carried on her back a wicker-work basket supported by a headstrap which went around her forehead. Each carried a belt slung diagonally across her body over her right shoulder, and this the child was carried against and perhaps a stride of her left hip. There were commonly women who did not look jaded or cowed, and they laughed cheerfully and nodded to us as they passed through the rain, on their way to the fields. But the contrast between them and the chief in his soldier's uniform seated at breakfast was rather too striking, and incidentally it etched in bold lines the folly of those who idealized the life of even exceptionally good and pleasant natured savages. Although it was a rainy season, the trip up to this point had not been difficult, and from May to October, when the climate is dry and at its best, there would be practically no hardship at all for travelers and visitors. This is a healthy plateau, but of course the men who do the first pioneering, even in a country like this, encounter dangers and run risk, and they make payment with their bodies. At more than one halting place, we had come across a forlorn grave of some soldier or laborer of the commission. The grave mound lay within a red stockyard, and an uninscribed wooden cross, gray and weather-beaten, marked the last resting place of the unknown and forgotten man beneath. The man who had paid with his humble life the cost of pushing the frontier of civilization into the wild savagery of the wilderness. Further west, the conditions became less healthy. At this station, Colonel Rondon received news of sickness and of some deaths among the employees of the commission in the country to the westward, which were soon to enter. Berryberry and malignant malarial fever were the diseases which claimed the major number of the victims. Surely these are the men who do the work for which they draw the wage. Kermit had with him the same copy of Kipling's poems, which he had carried through Africa. At these falls, there was one sunset of angry splendor, which contrasted this going down of the sun through broken rain clouds and overleagues of wet tropical forests. With the desert sunsets we had seen in Arizona and Sonora and along the Guasanero, north and west of Mount Kenia, when the barren mountains were changed into flaming ramparts of slaughter and pearl standing above the wine-dark flats below. It rained during most of the day when there was any let-up, the men promptly came forth from their house and played head-ball with the utmost figure and we would listen to this real undulating cries of applause and triumph until we also grew interested and strolled over to look on. They are more infatuated with the game than an American boy is with baseball or football. It is an extraordinary thing that this strange and exciting game should be played by, and only by, one little tribe of Indians in what is almost the very center of South America. If any traveler or ethnologist knows of a tribe elsewhere that plays a similar game, I wish he would let me know. To play it demands great activity, vigor, guilt, and endurance. Looking at the strong supple bodies of the players and as the number of children round about, it seemed as if the tribe must be in vigorous health, yet the parishes have decreased in numbers for the measles and smallpox have been fatal to them. By the evening the rain was coming down more heavily than ever. It was not possible to keep the moisture out of our belonging. Everything became moldy except what became rusty. It rained all that night and daylight saw the downpour continuing with no prospect of cessation. The packmills could not have gone on with the march. They were already rather done up by their previous ten days labor through the rain and mud, and it seemed advisable to wait until the weather became better before attempting to go forward. Moreover, there had been no chance to take the desired astronomical observations. There was very little grass for the mules, but there was a bonus of small leaf plant eight or ten inches high, unfortunately not very nourishing, on which they fed gridly. In such weather and over such muddy trails, oxen travel better than mules. In spite of the weather, cherry and miller, whom together with father Zong and Sig, we had found a waiting-up. Made good collections of birds and mammals. Among the latter were opossums and mice that were new to them. The birds included various forms so unlike our home birds that the enumeration of their names would mean nothing. One of the most interesting was a large black and white woodpecker, with white predominating in the plumage. Several of these woodpeckers were usually found together. They were showy, noisy, and restless, and pursed on twigs in ordinary bird fashion, at least as often as they clung to the trees in orthodox woodpecker style. The prettiest bird was a tiny, mannequin, cold black with red and orange head. On February the 2nd, the rain lit up. Although the sky remained overcast and there were no additional showers, I walked off with my rifle for a couple of leagues. At that distance from a slight hillock, the mist columns of the falls were conspicuous in the landscape. The only mammal I saw on the walk was a rather hairy armadillo with a flexible tail which I picked up and brought back to Miller. It showed none of the speed of the nine banded armadillos we met on our Jaguar hunt. Judging by its actions they told me it must be diurnal in habits. It was new to the collection. I spent much of the afternoon by the waterfall. Under the overcast sky, the great cataract lost the deep, green, and fleecy white of the sunlit, falling waters. Instead it showed opaline hues, and tents of topaz, and amrith. At all times, and under all lights, it was majestic and beautiful. Colonel Rondon had given the Indians various presents. Both for the women including calico, prince, and what they especially prize, bottles of sin and oil from Paris for their hair. The men held a dance in the late afternoon. For this occasion most, but not all, of them cast aside their civilized clothing and appeared as doubtless they would all have appeared had none but themselves been present. They were absolutely naked except for a beaded string around the waist. Most of them were spotted in red paint and on one leg were anklets which rattled. A number carried pipes through which they blew a kind of deep, stifled whistle in time to the dancing. One of them had his pipe leading into a huge gourd which gave out a hollow moaning boon. Many wore two red or green or yellow macaul feathers in their hair and one had a macaul feather stuck traversely through the septum of his nose. They circled slowly around and around chanting and stamping their feet while the anklets rattled clattered and the pipes droned. They advanced to the wall of one of the houses again and again chanting and bowing before it. I was told this was demand for drink. They entered one house and danced in a ring around the cooking fire in the middle of the earth floor. I was told that they were then reciting the deeds of mighty hunters and describing how they brought in the game. They drank freely from gores and panikins of a fermented rake made from mandiot which were brought out to them. During the first part of the dance the women remained in the houses and all the doors and windows were shut and blankets hung to prevent the possibility of seeing out. But during the second part all the women and girls came out and looked on. They were themselves to have danced when the man had finished, but were overcome with shyness at the thought of dancing and so many strangers looking on. The children played about with unconcerned throughout the ceremony one of them throwing high in the air and again catching in his hands a loaded feather, a kind of shuttlecock. In the evening the growing moon shoved through the cloud rake. Anything approaching fair weather always put our men in good spirits and the mealtiers wadded in a circle by a fire near a pile of packs and listened to a longlessly and rather mournfully chanted song about a dance in a love affair. We ourselves worked fizzily with our photographs and our writings. There was so much humidity in the air that everything grew damp and stayed damp and mold gathered quickly. At this season it is a country in which writing, taking photographs and preparing specimens are all work of difficulty at least so far as concerns preserving and sending home the results of the labor. And a man's clothing is never really dry. From here Father Zahm returned to a terrapinone, accompanied by sea. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Part 1 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Matthew Westra. Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 7 With a Mule Train Across Nambiquara Land Part 1 From this point we were to enter a still wilder region, the land of the naked Nambiquaras. On February 3 the weather cleared and we started with the Mule Train and two ox carts. Fiala and Lieutenant Rondo stayed at UTRT to take canoes and go down the Papagayo, which had not been descended by any scientific party, and perhaps by no one. They were then to descend the Hue Ruina and Tapajos, thereby performing a necessary part of the work of the expedition. Our remaining party consisted of Colonel Rondon, Lieutenant Lyra, the Doctor, Olivier, Cherry, Miller, Kermit, and myself. On the Hue Ruina we expected to meet the pack of ox-train with Captain Amilcar and Lieutenant Mello. The other Brazilian members of the party had returned. We had now begun the difficult part of the expedition. The PM files were becoming a pest, and there was much fever and berry-berry in the country we were entering. The feed for the animals was poor, the rains had made the trails slippery and difficult, and many, of the mules and the oxen were already weak, and some had to be abandoned. We left the canoe, the motor, and the gasoline. We had hoped to try them on the Amazonian rivers, but we were obliged to cut down everything that was not absolutely indispensable. Before leaving we prepared for shipment back to the museum, some of the bigger skins, and also some of the weapons and utensils of the Indians which Kermit had collected. These included woven fillets, and fillets made of macaw feathers for use in the dances, woven belts, a gourd in which the sacred drink is offered to the god Inouere, wicker work baskets, flutes or pipes, anklet rattles, hammocks, a belt of the kind used by the women in carrying the babies with the weaving frame. All these were parisus articles. He also secured from the Nambuqueras wicker work baskets of a different type in bows and arrows. The bows were seven feet long and the arrows five feet. There were blunt headed arrows for birds, arrows with long, sharp wooden blades for tapir, deer, and other mammals, and the poisoned war arrows with sharp barbs, poison coated and bound on by fine thongs with a long, hollow wooden guard to slip over the entire point and protect it until the time came to use it. When people talk glibly of idle savages, they ignore the immense labor entailed by many of their industries and the really extraordinary amount of work they accomplish by the skillful use of their primitive and ineffective tools. It was not until early in the afternoon that we started into the sertão, as Brazilians call the wilderness. We drove with us a herd of oxen for food. After going about 15 miles we camped beside the swampy headwaters of a little brook. It was at the spot where nearly seven years previously Rondon and Lyra had camped on the trip when they discovered eutyarity falls and penetrated to the Huruena. When they reached this place they had been 36 hours without food. They killed a bush deer, a small deer, and ate literally every particle. The dogs devoured the entire skin. For much of the time on this trip they lived on wild fruit and the two dogs that remained alive would wait eagerly under the trees and eat the fruit that was shaken down. In the late afternoon the pymes were rather bad at this camp but we had gloves and headnets and were not bothered and although there were some mosquitoes we slept well under our mosquito nets. The frogs in the swamp uttered a peculiar loud shout. Miller told of a little bee-frog in Columbia which swelled itself out with air until it looked like the frog in Aesop's fables and then braided like a mule and Sherry told of a huge frog in Guyana that uttered a short loud roar. Next day the weather was still fair. Our march lay through country like that which we had been traversing for ten days. Skeletons of mules and oxen were more frequent and once or twice by the wayside we passed the graves of officers or men who had died on the road. Barbed wire encircled the desolate little mounds. We camped on the west bank of the Buriti river. Here there is a balsa or ferry run by two Parisis Indians as employees of the telegraphic commission under the colonel. Each had a thatched house and each had two wives. All these Indians are pagans. All were dressed much like the poorer peasants of the Brazilian back country and all were pleasant and well behaved. The women ran the ferry about as well as the men. They had no cultivated fields and for weeks they had been living only on game and honey. And they hailed with joy our advent and the quantities of beans and rice which together with some beef the colonel left with them. They feasted most of the night. Their houses contained their hammocks, longings, and they owned some poultry. In one house was a tiny parakeet very much at home and familiar but by no means friendly with strangers. There are wild nababiquaras in the neighborhood and recently several of these had menaced the two ferrymen with an attack even shooting arrows at them. The ferrymen had driven them off by firing their rifles in the air and they expected and received the colonel's praise for their self-restraint. For the colonel is doing all he can to persuade the Indians to stop their blood feuds. The rifles were short and light Winchester carbines of the kind so universally used by the rubber-gatherers and other adventurous wanderers in the forest wilderness of Brazil. There were a number of rubber trees in the neighborhood by the way. We enjoyed a good bath in the Buriti, although it was impossible to make headway by swimming against them. There were few mosquitoes on the other hand various kinds of pimes were a little too abundant. They vary from things like small gnats to things like black flies. The small stingless bees have no fear and can hardly be frightened away when they light on the hands or face but they never bite and merely cause a slight tickling as they crawl over the skin. There were some big bees however which although they crawled about harmlessly if they were undisturbed yet stung fiercely if they were molested. The insects were not ordinarily a serious bother, but there were occasional hours when they were too numerous for comfort and now and then I had to do my riding in a head net and gauntlets. The night we reached the Buriti it rained heavily and next day the rain continued. In the morning the mules were ferried over while the oxen were swam across. Half a dozen of our men, Indians and Negroes, all stark naked and uttering wild cries drove the oxen into the river and then with powerful overhand strokes swam behind and alongside them as they crossed half breasting the swift current. It was a fine sight to see the big long horned staring beasts swimming strongly while the sinewy naked men urged them forward utterly at ease in the rushing water. We made only a short day's journey for owing to the lack of grass. The mules had to be driven off nearly three miles from our line of march in order to get them feed. We camped at the headwaters of a little brook called Huatsui which is Parises for monkey. Accompanying us on this march was a soldier bound for one of the remotor posts. With him trudged his wife. They made the whole journey on foot. There were two children. One was so young that it had to be carried alternately by the father and mother. The other, a small boy of eight and much the best of the party, was already a competent wilderness worker. He bore his share of the belongings on the march and when camp was reached sometimes himself put up the family shelter. They were mainly of negro blood, struck by the woman's uncomplaining endurance of fatigue we offered to take her and the baby in the automobile while it accompanied us. But alas it proved to be one of those melancholy cases where the effort to relieve hardship well-endured results only in showing that those who endure the adversity cannot stand even a slight prosperity. The woman proved a quarrel-less traveler in the auto. Complaining that she was not made as comfortable as apparently she had expected and after one day the husband declared he was not willing to have her go unless he went to and the family resumed their walk. In this neighborhood there were multitudes of the big gregarious crepuscular or nocturnal spiders, which I have before mentioned. On arriving in camp at about four in the afternoon I ran into a number of remains of their webs and saw a very few of these spiders themselves sitting in the webs midway between trees. I then strolled a couple of miles up the road ahead of us under the line of telegraph poles. It was still bright sunlight and no spiders were out. In fact, I did not suspect their presence along the line of telegraph poles, although I ought to have done so, for I continually ran into long strings of tough, fine web which got across my face or hands or rifle barrel. I returned just at sunset and the spiders were out in force. I saw dozens of colonies, each of scores or hundreds of individuals. Many were among the small trees along the broad, cleared trail. But most were dependent from the wire itself. Their webs had all been made or repaired since I had passed. Each was sitting in the middle of his own wheel and all the wheels were joined to one another and the whole pendant fabric hung by fine ropes from the wire above and was in some cases steadied by guy ropes, thrown thirty feet off to little trees alongside. I watched them until nightfall and evidently to them after their days rest, their days work had just begun. Next morning, owing to a desire to find out what the facts were as regards the ox carts which were in difficulties, Cherie, Miller, Kermit and I walked back to the Burity River where Colonel Rondon had spent the night. It was a misty overcast morning and the spiders in the webs that hung from this telegraph wire were just going to their day homes. These were in and under the big white China insulators on the telegraph poles. Hundreds of spiders were already climbing up into these when, two or three hours later we returned the sun was out and not a spider was to be seen. Here we had to cut down our baggage and rearrange the loads for the mule train. Cherie and Miller had a most workman-like equipment including a very light tent and two light flies. One fly they gave for the kitchen use one fly was allotted to Kermit and me and they kept only the tent for themselves. Colonel Rondon and Lyra went in one tent the doctor and Oliveri in another. Each of us got rid of everything above the sheer necessities. This was necessary because of the condition of the baggage animals. The oxen were so weak that the effort to bring on the carts had to be abandoned. Nine of the pack mules had already been left on the road during the three days marked from uterity. In the first expeditions into this country all the baggage animals had died and even in our case the loss was becoming very heavy. This state of affairs is due to the scarcity of forage in the type of country. Good grass is scanty and the endless leagues of sparse scrubby forest render it exceeding difficult to find the animals when they wander. They must be turned absolutely loose to roam about and pick up their scanty subsistence and must be given as long a time as possible to feed and rest. Even under these conditions most of them grow weak when, as in our case it is impossible to carry corn. They cannot be found again until after daylight and then hours must be spent in gathering them and this means that the march must be made chiefly during the heat of the day, the most trying time. Often some of the animals would not be brought in until so late that it was well on in the forenoon, perhaps mid-day before the bulk of the pack train started and they reached the camping place as often after nightfall as before it. Under such conditions many of the mules and oxen grew constantly weaker and ultimately gave out and it was imperative to load them as lightly as possible and discard all luxuries especially heavy or bulky luxuries. Traveling through a wild country where there's little food for man or beast is beset with difficulties almost inconceivable to the man who does not himself know this kind of wilderness and especially to the man who only knows the ease of civilization. A scientific party of some size with the equipment necessary in order to do scientific work can only go at all if the men who actually handle the problems of food and transportation do their work thoroughly. Our march continued through the same type of high nearly level upland covered with scanty scrubby forest. It is the kind of country known to the Brazilians as Chapadao, pronounced almost as if it were a French word and spelled H-A-P-A-D-O-N. Our camp on the fourth night was in a beautiful spot, an open grassy space beside a clear cool rushing little river. We ourselves reached this and waited our beasts across the deep narrow stream in the late afternoon and we then enjoyed a bath and swim. The loose bullocks arrived at sunset and with shrill cries the mounted herdsmen urged them into and across the swift water. The mule train arrived long after nightfall and it was not deemed wise to try to cross the laden animals. Accordingly the loads were taken off and brought over on the heads of the men. It was fine to see the sinewy naked figures bearing their burdens through the broken moonlit water to the hither bank. The night was cool and pleasant. We kindled a fire and sat beside the blaze. Then healthily hungry we gathered around the ox hides to a delicious dinner of soup, beef, beans, rice, and coffee. Next day we made a short march across the brook and camped by another clear, deep, rapid little river, swollen by the rains. All these rivers that we were crossing run actually into the hew ruina and therefore form part of the headwaters of the Tapajos. For the Tapajos is a pretty river and the basin which holds its headwaters covers an immense extent of country. This country and the adjacent regions forming the high interior of western Brazil will surely someday support a large industrial population of which the advent would be hastened although not necessarily in permanently better fashion if Colonel Rondon's anticipations about the development of mining, especially gold mining, are realized. In any event the region will be a healthy home for a considerable agricultural and pastoral population. Above all, the many swift streams with their numerous waterfalls, some of great height and volume, offer the chance for the upgrowth of a number of big manufacturing communities knit by railroads to one another and to the Atlantic coast and the valleys of the Paraguay, Madeira, and feeding and being fed by the dwellers in the rich hot alluvial lowlands that surround this elevated territory. The work of Colonel Rondon and his associates of the Telegraphic Commission has been to open this great and virgin land to the knowledge of the world and to the service of their nation. In doing so, they have incidentally founded the Brazilian School of Exploration. Before their day almost all the scientific and regular exploration of Brazil was done by foreigners. But, of course, there was much exploration and settlement by nameless Brazilians who were merely endeavoring to make new homes or advance their private fortunes. In recent years, by rubber gatherers, for instance, and a century ago by those bold and restless adventurers, partly of Portuguese and partly of Indian blood, the Paulistas from one of whom Colonel Rondon is himself descended on his father's side. The camp by this river was in some old and grown-up fields, once the seat of a rather extensive maze and Mandioc cultivation by the Nambuqueras. On this day, Sherry got a number of birds new to the collection and two or three of them probably new to science. We had found the birds, for the most part, in worn plumage for the breeding season, the southern spring and northern fall was over. But some birds were still breeding. In the tropics, the breeding season is more irregular than in the north. Some birds breed at very different times from that chosen by the majority of their fellows. Some can hardly be said to have any regular season. Sherry had found one species of honey-creeper breeding in every month of the year. Just before sunset and just after sunrise big noisy blue and yellow macaws flew over this camp. They were plentiful enough to form a loose flock, but each pair kept to itself the two individuals always close together and always separated from the rest. Although not an abundant it was an interesting fauna, which the two naturalists found in this upland country where hitherto no collections of birds and mammals had been made. Miller trapped several species of opossums, mice and rats, which were new to him. Sherry got many birds which he did not recognize. At this camp, among totally strange forms, he found an old and familiar acquaintance. Before breakfast he brought in several birds, a dark colored fly-catcher with white forehead and rump and two very long tail feathers, a black and slate blue tannager, a black ant thrush with a concealed white spot on its back at the base of the neck and its dull colored mate and other birds which he believed to be new to science but whose relationships with any of our birds are so remote that it is hard to describe them save in technical language. Finally among these unfamiliar forms was a veery and the sight of the rufous olive back and faintly spotted throat of the singer of our northern dunes made us almost homesick. End of Chapter 7 Part 1 Chapter 7 Next day was brilliantly clear. The mules could not be brought in until quite late in the morning and we had to march twenty miles under the burning tropical sun right in the highest part of the day. From a rise of ground we looked back over the vast sun-lit landscape the endless rolling stretches of low forest. Midway on our journey we crossed a brook. The dogs ate much. They continually ran off to one side, laid down in a shady place, waited until we were several hundred yards ahead and then raced after us, overtook us and repeated the performance. The pack train came in about sunset but we ourselves reached the Heroina in the middle of the afternoon. The Heroina is the name by which the top hose goes along its upper course. Where we crossed it was a deep rapid stream flowing in a heavily trolley with rather steep sides. We were ferried across on the usual balsa, a platform on three dugouts running by the force of the current on a wire trolley. There was a clearing on each side with a few palms and on the farther bank were the buildings of the telegraph station. This is a wild country and the station was guarded by a few soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Marino a native of Rio Grande do Sao a blonde man who looked like an Englishman, an agreeable companion and a good and resolute officer as all must be who do their work in this wilderness. The Heroina was first followed at the end of the 18th century by the Portuguese explorer Franco and not again until over a hundred years had elapsed when the telegraphic commission not only descended but for the first time accurately placed and mapped its course. There were several houses on the rise of the farther bank all with thatched roofs, some of them with walls of upright tree trunks some of them dob and waddle into one of the ladder with two rooms we took our belongings. The sand flies were bothersome at night coming through the interstices of the ordinary mosquito nets. The first night they did this I got no sleep until morning when it was cool enough for me to roll myself in my blanket and put on a head net. Afterwards we used fine nets of a kind of cheesecloth. They were hot but they kept out all or almost all of the sand flies and other small tormentors. Here we overtook the rearmost division of Captain Amalcar's bullet train. Our own route had diverged in order to pass the great falls. Captain Amalcar had come direct overtaking the pack oxen which had left a pyro poem before we did, laden with material for the Devada trip. He had brought the oxen through in fine shape losing only three beasts with their loads and had himself left the Juruina in the morning of the day we reached there. His weakest animals left that evening to make the march by moonlight. And as it was desirable to give them 36 hours start we halted for a day on the banks of the river. It was not a waste of day. In addition to bathing and washing our clothes the naturalists made some valuable additions to the collection including a boldly marked black, blue and white J and our photographs were developed and our writing brought a breast of the date. Traveling wilderness in the rainy season when the amount of baggage that can be taken is strictly limited entails not only a good deal of work but also the exercise of considerable ingenuity if the writing and photographing and especially the preservation of the specimens are to be done in satisfactory shape. At the telegraph office we received news that the voyage of Loriado and Fiali down the Papagayo had opened with a misadventure. In some bad falls two of the canoes had been upset, half of their provisions and all of Fiali's baggage lost and Fiali himself nearly drowned. The Papagayo is known both at the source and the mouth to descend it did not represent a plunge into the unknown as in the case of the Duvada and the Ananos. But the actual water work over the part that was unexplored offered the same possibilities of mischance and disaster. It is a hazardous thing to descend a swift unknown river rushing through an uninhabited wilderness. To descend or ascend the ordinary great highway rivers of South America such as the Amazon, Paraguay, Tapajos and in its lower course the Orinoco is now so safe and easy whether by steamboat or big native cargo boat that people are apt to forget the very serious difficulties offered by the streams offer themselves great rivers which run into or form the horses of the same water highways. Few things are easier than the former feet and few more difficult than the latter and experience in ordinary traveling on the lower courses of the rivers is of no benefit whatever in enabling a man to form a judgment as to what can be done and how to do it on the upper courses. Failure to remember this fact is one of the obstacles in the way of securing a proper appreciation of the needs and the results of the American exploration. At the Juruina we met a party of Nambiquaras very friendly and sociable and very glad to see Colonel Rondon. They were originally exceedingly hostile and suspicious but the Colonel's unwary thoughtfulness and good temper joined with his indomitable resolution enabled him to avoid war and to secure their friendship and even their aid. He never killed one. Many of them are known to him personally. They are remarkably good terms with them and they are very fond of him. Although this does not prevent them from now and then yielding to temptation even at his expense and stealing a dog or something else which strikes them as offering an irresistible attraction. They cannot be employed at steady work but they do occasional odd jobs and are excellent at hunting up strayed mules or oxen and a few of the men have begun to wear clothes purely for ornament. Showed how well they had been treated. Probably half of our visitors were men. Several were small boys. One was a woman with a baby. The others were young married women and girls. Nowhere in Africa did we come across wilder or more absolutely primitive savages although these Indians were pleasanter and better featured than any of the African tribes at the same stage of culture. Both sexes were well made and rather good looking with fairly good teeth some of them seemed to have skin diseases. They were a laughing, easy tempered crew and the women were as well fed as the men and were obviously well treated from the savage standpoint. There was no male brutality like that which formed such a revolting feature in the life of the Australian black fellows and although to a somewhat less degree in the life of so many Negro and Indian tribes. They were practically absolutely naked. In many savage tribes men go absolutely naked but the women wear a breech clout or line cloth. In certain tribes we saw near Lake Victoria Nianza and on the upper white Nile both men and women were practically naked. Among these non-Bakwaris the women were more completely naked than the men although the difference was not essential. The men wore a string around the waist. Most of them were nothing else but a few had loosely hanging from this string in front of dried grass or a small piece of cloth which however was of purely symbolic use so far as either protection or modesty was concerned. The women did not wear a stitch of any kind anywhere on their bodies. They did not have on so much as a string or a bead or even an ornament in their hair. They were all men and women, boys and well grown young girls as entirely at ease and unconscious as so many friendly animals. All of them, men, women and children laughing and talking, crowded around us whether we were on horseback or on foot. They flocked into the house and when I sat down to right surrounded me so closely that I had to push them gently away. The women and girls often stood holding one another's hands or with their arms over one another's shoulders or around one another's waist offering an attractive picture. The men had holes pierced through the septum of the nose and through the upper lip and wore a straw through each hole. The women were not marked or mutilated. It seems like a contradiction in terms but it is nevertheless a fact that the behavior of these completely naked women and men was entirely modest. There was never an indecent look or a consciously indecent gesture. They had no blankets or hammocks and when night came simply lay down in the sand. Colonel Rondon stated that they never had a covering by night or by day and if it was cool slept one on each side of a small fire. Their huts were merely slight shelters against the rain. The moon was nearly full and after nightfall a few of the Indians suddenly held an improvised dance for us in front of our house. There were four men, a small boy and two young women or grown girls. Two of the men had been doing some work for the commission and were dressed one completely impartially in ordinary clothes. Two of the men and the boy were practically naked and the two young women were absolutely so. All of them danced in a circle without a touch of embarrassment or impropriety. The two girls kept hold of each other's hands throughout dancing among the men as modestly as possible and with the occasional interchange of a laugh or jest in as good taste and temper as any dance in civilization. The dance consisted in slowly going into a circle, first one way then the other, rhythmically beating time with the feet to the music of the song they were chanting. The chants, there were three of them all told, were measured and rather slowly uttered melodies, varied with an occasional half subdued shrill cry. The women continually uttered a kind of long-drawn wailing or droning. I am not enough of a musician to say whether it was an overtone or the sustaining The young boys sang better than any of the others. It was a strange and interesting sight to see these utterly wild, friendly savages circling in their slow dance and chanting their immemorial melodies in the brilliant tropical moonlight with the river rushing by in the background through the lonely heart of the wilderness. The Indians stayed with us, feasting, dancing and singing until the early hours of the morning. They then suddenly and silently disappeared in the morning. We discovered that they had gone off with one of Colonel Rondon's dogs. Probably the temptation had proved irresistible to one of their number and the others had been afraid to interfere and also afraid to stay in or return to our neighborhood. We had not time to go after them but Rondon remarked that as soon as he again came to the neighborhood he would take some soldiers, hunt up the Indians and reclaim the dog. It has been his mixture of firmness, good nature and good judgment to control these bold warlike savages and even to reduce the warfare between them and the Parises. In spite of their good nature and laughter their fearlessness and familiarity showed how necessary it was not to let them get the upper hand. They are also required to leave all their arms a mile or two away before they come into the encampment. They are much wilder and more savage and at a much lower cultural level than the Parises. In the afternoon of the day following our arrival there was a heavy rainstorm which drove into the unglazed windows and here and there came through the roof and walls of our dob and wattle house. The heat was intense and there was much moisture in this valley. During the downpour I looked out at the dreary little houses showing through the driving rain while the sheets of muddy water slid past their door cells and I felt a sincere respect for the Lieutenant and his soldiers who were holding this desolate outpost condition. It is an unhealthy spot. There has been much malarial fever and berry berry and obscure and deadly disease. Next morning we resumed our march. It soon began to rain and we were drenched when, some fifteen miles on, we reached the river where we were to camp. After the great heat we felt quite cold in our wet clothes and gladly crowded round a fire which was kindled under a thatched shed beside the cabin of the ferryman. This ferry boat was so small that it could only take one mule or at most two at a time. The mules and a span of six oxen dragging an ox cart which we had overtaken were ferried slowly to the farther side that afternoon as there was no feed on the hither bank where we ourselves camped. The ferryman was a soldier in the employ of the telegraphic commission. His good-looking pleasant-mannered wife evidently of both Indian and Negro blood was with him and was doing all she could do as a housekeeper in the comfortless little cabin with its primitive bareness of furniture and fittings. Here we saw Captain Elmokar who had come back to hurry up his rear guard. We stood ankle-deep in mud and water by the swollen river while the rain beat on us and enjoyed a fuminous talk with the cool competent officer who was doing a difficult job with such workman-like efficiency. He had no poncho and was wet through but was much easier in getting his laden oxen forward to think of personal discomfort. He had had a good deal of trouble with his mules but his oxen were still in fair shape. After leaving the hero arena the ground became somewhat more hilly and the scrubby forest was less open but otherwise there was no change in the monotonous and yet to me rather attractive landscape. The ant hills and the ant houses in the trees aborial ant hills so to speak were as conspicuous as ever. The architects of some were red ants of others black ants and others which were on the whole the largest had been built by the white ants the termites. The latter were not infrequently taller than a horseman's head. That evening round the campfire Colonel Rondon happened to mention how the brother of one of the soldiers with us a Parisis Indian had been killed by a Jarrah rocket snake. Sherry told of a narrow escape he had from one while collecting in Guyana. At night he used to set traps in camp for small mammals. One night he heard one of these traps go off under his hammock. He reached down for it and as he fumbled for the chain he felt a snake strike at him just missing him in the darkness but actually brushing his hand. He lit a light and saw that a big Jarrah rocket had been caught in the trap and he preserved it as a specimen. Snakes frequently came into his camp after nightfall. He killed one rattles snake which had swallowed the skin bodies of four mice he had prepared as specimens, which shows that rattles snakes do not always feed only on living prey. Another rattles snake which he killed in Central America had just swallowed an opossum which proved to be of a species new to science. Miller told Howe once on the Orinoco he saw on the bank a small anaconda, some ten feet long, killing one of the iguanas. Big active and succulent carnivorous lizards equally at home on the land and in the water. Evidently the iguanas were digging out holes in the bank in which to lay their eggs for there were several such holes and iguanas working at them. The snake had crushed its prey to a pulp and not more than a couple of feet away another iguana was still busily and with entire unconcern engaged in making its burrow. At Miller's approach the anaconda left the dead iguana and rushed into the water and a live iguana promptly followed it. Miller also told of the stone gods and altars and temples he had seen in the great Columbian forests, monuments of strange civilizations which flourished and died out ages ago and of which all memory has vanished. He and Sherry told of giant rivers and waterfalls and a forest never penetrated and mountains never ascended by civilized man and of bloody revolutions that devastated the settled regions. Listening to them I felt they could write tale of two naturalists that would be worth reading. They were short of literature by the way a party such as ours always needs books and as Kermit's reading matter consisted chiefly of Camões and other Portuguese or else Brazilian writers I strove to supply the deficiency with spare volumes of gibbon. At the end of our march we were usually far ahead of the mule train and the rain was also usually falling. Accordingly we would sit out under trees or under a shed or lean to if there was one each solemnly reading a volume of gibbon and no better reading can be found. In my own case as I had been having rather a steady course of gibbon I varied him now and then with a volume of Arsene Lupin lent me by Kermit. End of Chapter 7, Part 2 Chapter 7 Part 3 of Through the Brazilian Wilderness This is a LibriVox recording Our LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Deft Van Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Udovelt Chapter 7 With a Mule Train Across Nambi Quarreland, Part 3 There were many swollen rivers to cross at this point of our journey. Some we waited at 4th, some we crossed by root bridges. The larger ones such as Adruina, we crossed by ferry and when the approaches were swampy and the river broad and swift, many hours might be consumed in getting the Mule Train, the loose bullocks and the ox cart over. We had few accidents although we once lost a ferryload of provisions which was quite a misfortune in a country where they could not be replaced. The pasture ridge was poor and it was impossible to make long marches with our weakened animals. At one camp three Nambi Quarrels paid us a visit at breakfast time. They left their weapons behind them before they appeared and shot it loudly while they were still hid by the forest and it was only after repeated answering calls of welcome that they approached. Always in the Wilderness France proclaimed their presence. A silence advance marks a fall. Our visitors were men and stark naked as usual. One seemed sick, he was thin and his back was scarred with marks of the grub of the loathome burning fly. Indeed all of them showed scars chiefly from the insect wounds but the other two were in good condition and although they ate greedily the food offered them they had with them a big mendic cake some honey and a little fish. One of them wore a high helmet of Puma skin with a tail hanging down his back handsome headgear which he gladly buttered for several strings of bright color red beads. Around the upper arms of two of them were bands bound so tightly as to cut in two and deform the muscles a singular custom seemingly not only purpose this but mischievous which is common among this tribe and many others. The Nambi quebrers are a numerous tribe covering a large region but they have no general organization. Each group of families acts for itself. Half a dozen years previously they had been very hostile and Colonel Rondon had to guard his camp and exercise every precaution to guarantee his safety whereas at the same time successfully endeavoring to avoid the necessity of himself shedding blood. Now they are for the most part friendly but there are groups or individuals that are not. Several soldiers have been killed at these little lonely stations and while in some cases the attack may have been due to soldiers having meddled with the Nambi quebrers women in other cases the killing was entirely wanton and unprovoked. Sooner or later these criminals or outlaws will have to be brought to justice. It will not do to let their crimes go unpunished. Twice soldiers have deserted and fled to the Nambi quebrers. The runaways were well received were given wives and adopted into the tribe. The country when opened will be a healthier boat for white settlers but pioneering in the wilderness is grim work for both men and beasts. Continually as we journeyed onward under the pitiless glare of the sun or through blinding torrents of rain we passed to desolate little graves by the roadside. They marked as the last resting places of men who had died by fever or dysentery or nondiquary arrows. We raced our heads as our mules plodded slowly by through the sand. On each grave were the frail wooden cross and this end the paving round above were already stained by the weather as gray as the tree trunks of the stunted forest that stretched endlessly on every side. The skeletons of mules and oxen were frequent along the road. Now and then we came across a mule or ox which had been abandoned by Captain Emile Carr's party ahead of us. The animal had been left with the hope that one night came it would follow along the trail to water. Sometimes it did so, sometimes we found it dead or it was an emotionless waiting for death. From time to time we had to live behind one of our own mules. It was not always easy to recognize what pasture rage the mules would accept as good. One afternoon we pitched camp by a tiny rivulet in the midst of the scrubby upland forest. A camp by the way where the p.m. the small biting flies were atonement during the hours of daylight where after dark their places were more than taken by the diminutive nets which the Brazilians expressively termed porvora or powder and which get through the smallest meshes of the mosquito net. The feed were so scanty and the cover so dense at this spot that I thought we would have a great difficulty in gathering the mules next morning but we did not. A few hours later in the afternoon we camped by a beautiful open nettle on one side ran a rapid brook with a waterfall eight feet high and rich we bathed and swam. Here the feed looked so good that we all expressed pleasure but the mules did not like it and after nightfall they hiked back on the trail and it was a long and arduous work to gather them next morning. I have touched above on the insect pests men are used to the South American wilderness speakers ape of the danger varying from jaywars, crocodiles and poisonous snakes. In reality the danger from these sources is trivial much less than the danger of being run down by an automobile at home but at times the torment of the insect flakes can hardly be exaggerated. There are many different species of mosquitos, some of them bearers of disease. There are many different kinds of small biting flies and nets loosely grouped together under various titles. The ones more especially called PMs by my companions were somewhat like our northern black flies. They gorge themselves with blood as the moment their bites did not hurt but they left in an aging scar. Hand nets and gloves are a protection but are not very comfortable in stifling hot weather. It is impossible to sleep without mosquito bite. When settlers of the right type come into a new land they speedily learn to take the measures to minimize the annoyance caused by all these pests. Those that are winged have plenty of kingsfolk in so much of the northern continent as has not yet been subdued by men but the most noxious of the South American ants have thank heaven, no representatives in North America. At the camp of the PMs of a column of the carnivorous foraging ants made its appearance before nightfall and for a time we feared it might put us out of our tents for it went straight through camp between the kitchen tent and our own sleeping tents. However the column turned neither to the right nor the left streaming uninterruptedly past for several hours and do you no damage except to the legs of any unconscious man who walked near it. On the afternoon of February 15 we reached the campers novice. This place was utterly unlike the country we had been traversing. It was a large basin several miles across traversed by several brooks. The brooks ran in deep swampy valleys occupied by a matted growth of tall tropical forest. Between them the ground rose in both hills bare of forest and covered with grass on which our jaded animals fared eagerly. On one of these hills a number of buildings were arranged in a quadrangle. For the pasture rage at this spot is so good that it is permanently occupied. There were milk cows and we got delicious fresh milk. There were goats, pigs, turkeys and chickens. Most of the buildings were made of upright poles with roofs of palm satch. One or two were of native brick plastered with mud before this there was an enclosure with a few ragged palms and some pineapple plants. Here we halted. Our attendance made two kitchens. One was out in the open air. One was under a shelter of oxide. The view over the surrounding grassy hills, driven by deep wooded valleys was lovely. The air was cool and fresh. We were not bothered by insects. Although mosquitoes swarmed every belt of timber, yet there has been much fever at this beautiful and seemingly healthy place. At least one settlement is sufficiently advanced and remedy will be developed. The geology of this neighborhood was interesting. Oliver found also tree trunks which he believed to be of a cretaceous age. Here we found a mill car and mellow who had waited for us with the rail guard of their pack train and we enjoyed our meeting with two fine fellows than whom no military service of any nation could produce more efficient men for this kind of difficult and responsible work. Next morning they mustered their soldiers. Muteers and Pax Oaks men and marched off. Renich the taxi dermis towards with them, we followed in the late afternoon, camping after few miles. We left the Pax card at campus novice from thence on the trail was only for pack animals. In this neighborhood the two naturalists found many birds which we had not hitherto met. The most conspicuous was a huge oriole, the size of a small crow with a naked face, a black and red bell and godly variegated plumage of green, yellow and chestnut. Very interesting was a false bellbird, a grey bird with loud metallic notes. There was also a tiny soft-tailed woodpecker no larger than a kinglet, a queer hummingbird with a slightly flexible bell, and many species of ant, thrush, tenager, mannequin and toadie. Among these unfamiliar forms was a virial looking much like our solitary virial. At one camp cherry collected a dozen perching birds, miller a beautiful little rail and kermit with a small luger bell trifle, a handsome cure-soul. Nearly as big as a turkey, out of which after it had been skinned the cook made a delicious canya, the thick Brazilian soup of fowl and rice, then which there is nothing better of this kind. All these birds were new to the collection. No naturalists had previously worked this region so that the afternoon's work represented nice bishis new to the collection, six new genera and the most excellent soup. Two days after leaving campers novice we reached Wilhanna, where there is a telegraph station. We camped once at a small river named by Colonel Rondon the 12th of October, because he reached it on the day Columbus discovered America. I had never before known what day it was, and once at the foot of a hill which he had named after Lyra, his companion in the exploration. The two days march really one full day and a part of two others were through a beautiful country, and we enjoyed it thoroughly, although there were occasional driving rainstorms when the rain came in almost level sheets and drenched everyone and everything. The country was like that around campers novice and offered a striking contrast to the level barren sandy widths of the chapter which is a healthy region. Where great industrial centers can arise, but not suited for extensive agriculture as are the lowland flats. For these 48 hours the trail climbed into and out of steep valleys and broad basins and up and down hills. In the deep valleys were magnificent woods in which giant rubber trees towered, while the huge leaves of the low growing pachalba are wild banana who are conspicuous in the undergrowth. Great zewer butterflies flitted through the open sunny glades and the bellbirds sitting motionless uttered their ringing calls from the dark stillness of the columned growth. The hillsides were grassy pastures or airs covered with low open forest. A huge frog brown above with a light streak down each side was found hiding under some sticks in a damp place in one of the improvised kitchens. And another frog with discs on his toes was caught on one of the tents. A coral snake puzzled us. Some coral snakes are harmless, others are poisonous, although not aggressive. The best authorities given an infallible recipe for distinguishing them by the pattern of the colors. By this particular specimen, although it corresponded exactly in color pattern with the description of the poisonous snakes, nevertheless had no poisonous fins that even after the most minute examination we could discover. Miller and one of the dogs caught a Sarayama a big long-legged bastard-like bird in rather a curious way. We were on the march plodding along through as heavy a tropic downpour as it was our ill fortune to encounter. The Sarayama evidently as drenched and uncomfortable as we were was hiding under a bush to avoid the pelting rain. The dog discovered it and after the bird valiantly repelled him, Miller was able to seize it. Its stomach contained about half a pint of grasshoppers and beetles and young leaves. At Wilhanna there was a tame Sarayama much more familiar and at home than any of the poultry. It was without the least fear of man or dog. The Sarayama, like the Screamer and the Curacao ought to be introduced into our baniars and on our laws. At any rate in the southern states it is a good looking, friendly and attractive bird. Another bird we met is in some places far more intimate, domestic case itself. This is a pretty little honeycreeper. In Columbia Miller found the honeycreepers habitually coming inside the houses and hotels at meal times hopping about the table and climbing into the sugar bowl. Along this part of our march there was much of what a hasty glance seemed to be volcanic rock. But Olivia showed me that it was a kind of conglomerate with bubbles or hollows in it, made of sand and iron buried earth. He said it was a superficial quaternary deposit formed by erosion from the cretaceous rocks and that there were here no tertiary deposits. He described the geological structure of the lands through which we had passed as follows. The pentenotes were of Pleistocene age along the upper of the Potuba in the region of the Rapids. There were sandstones, shells and clays of permanent age. The rolling country east of this contained eruptive rocks, a polyuretic space with zeolite, quartz and agate of Triassic age with the chapter of the Paracist plateau we came to a land of sand and clay dotted with lumps of sandstone and pieces of petrified wood. This, according to Olivia Ara, is of mesozoic age, possibly cretaceous and similar to the South American formation. There are geologists who consider it is of permanent age. At Wilhanna, we were on a watershed which drained into the J. Parana, which itself runs into the Madeira nearly midway between its sources and its mouth. A little further along a north world, we again came to streams running ultimately into the