832 A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 
these torrents of water, and every shower is a fresh sur- 
prise. Yet the rainy season is no such impediment to 
travelling and working as we had supposed it would be. 
The rain is by no means continuous, and there are often 
several days together of clear weather. Indeed, it no 
more rains all the time in the rainy season here than 
it snows all the time in the winter with us. One word 
of the geology. The Pedreira granite, of which we had 
heard, proves to be a granitoid mica-slate, a highly 
metamorphic rock, indistinctly stratified, but resembling 
granite in its composition. It is in immediate contact 
with the red drift which rests above it. 
This morning we had a melancholy proof of the bru- 
tality of recruiting here, of which we have already heard 
so much. Several Indians, who had been kept in confine- 
ment in Pedreira for some days, waiting for an opportunity 
to send them to Manaos, were brought out to the ship. 
These poor wretches had their feet passed through heavy 
blocks of wood, the holes being just large enough to fit 
around the ankles. Of course they could only move 
with the greatest difficulty ; and they were half pushed, 
half dragged up the side of the vessel, one of them hav- 
ing apparently such a fit of ague upon him that, when he 
was fairly landed on his feet, I could see him shake from 
my scat at a distance of half the deck. These Indians 
can speak no Portuguese : they cannot understand why 
they are forced to go ; they only know that they are 
seized in the woods and treated as if they were the worst 
criminals ; punished with barbarity for no crime, and then 
sent to fight for the government which so misuses them. 
To the honor of our commander be it said, that he showed 
the deepest indignation at the condition in which these 
