228 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 
it a great bore at home, with all the necessary means and 
appliances ; but with the stimulus of difficulty and the 
excitement of the journey it is quite pleasant, and gives 
a new relish to ordinary fare. After we had had a 
cup of hot coffee and a farinha biscuit, being somewhat 
cramped with sitting in the canoe, we landed for a walk 
on a broad beach along which we were coasting. There 
is much to be learned on these Amazonian beaches ; they 
are the haunts and breeding-places of many different kinds 
of animals, and are covered by tracks of alligators, tur- 
tles, and capivari. Then there are the nests, not only of 
alligators and turtles, but of the different kind of fishes 
and birds that lay their eggs in the mud or sand. It is 
curious to see the address of the Indians in finding the 
turtle-nests ; they walk quickly over the sand, but with 
a sort of inquiring tread, as if they carried an instinctive 
perception in their step, and the moment they set their 
foot upon a spot below which eggs are deposited, though 
there is no external evidence to the eye, they recognize 
it at once, and, stooping, dig straight down to the eggs, 
generally eight or ten inches under the surface. Besides 
these tracks and nests, there are the rounded, shallow 
depressions in the mud, which the fishermen say are the 
sleeping-places of the skates. They have certainly about 
the form and size of the skate, and one can easily believe 
that these singular impressions in the soft surface have 
been made in this way. The vegetation on these beaches 
is not less interesting than these signs of animal life. In 
the rainy season more than half a mile of land, now un- 
covered along the margins of the river, is entirely under 
water, the river rising not only to the edge of the forest, 
but penetrating far into it. At this time of the year, 
