ON THE AMAZON. 269 
strongly inclined to move no further, but I represented to him that 
to sleep there would be to sleep the sleep of death—and the moon 
having risen, we resumed our journey; but the night was cloudy, and 
hardly any light could penetrate the dense forest. We scrambled on, 
now plunging among prickly palms, now getting entangled in sipós, 
some of which were also prickly. Even by daylight these sipós are 
the principal impediments to travelling in the untracked forest ; what 
must they be, then, in the night? Your foot trips in a trailing sip6— 
attempting to withdraw it, you give the sipó an additional turn—and 
in stooping to disentangle it, very likely your chin is caught as in a 
halter, by a strong twisted sipó hanging between two trees. At one 
time we got on the track of a large stinging-ant: these animals 
crowded on us and stung our ankles and legs terribly, and we were 
many minutes ere we could get clear of their neighbourhood. During 
the day we had encountered a colony of yellow wasps, such as fasten 
their nests of three or four cells to the underside of the leaves of trees, 
and these had stung our necks and hands; besides which we had at 
various times been attacked by the black tree-ants and the villanous 
formiga de fogo: but all those were enemies such as we daily en- 
countered in the forest. 
To return to our narrative: the forest was still so dense that the 
moon's rays could not penetrate it, and coming up to the river, at a 
place where several large granite blocks stood out of it, appearing 
tolerably dry, we scrambled to them and lay down until the moon 
began to approach the zenith. There was now just light enough to 
enable us to select the thinnest parts of the forest, but scarcely to 
show what stones, stumps, and sipós lay in our way. With cautious 
steps and slow, we persevered, always keeping the river within 
hearing, and at length, to our great satisfaction, reached the canoe 
a little after one o’clock in the morning. 
In such a journey we could not gather much. We found a curious 
Byttneriacea, resembling the Cacao-rana, except that the enlarged and 
persistent calyx formed a cupule for the fruit, resembling that of an 
acorn. A Calathea covered the top of a sandy hill, under the trees, 
putting forth from its roots a few yellow, crocus-like flowers. We 
got a few other plants, and I stuffed my pockets with fruits and 
mosses. 
But we had something to show for our journey besides plants. Our 
