GEAR!. 459 
journey in the interior of Brazil should dress Bloomer-fashion 
and mount en cavalier. A lady's seat on horseback is too 
insecure for dangerous mountain roads, or for fording 
streams ; and her long skirt is another inconvenience. 
Nothing can be more picturesque than the situation of 
this sitio. It is surrounded by magnificent masses of rock, 
which seem embedded in the forest, as it were ; and by its 
side a cascade conies leaping down through the trees, so hid- 
den by them that, though you hear the voice of the water 
constantly, you only see its glimmer here and there among 
the green foliage. The house itself stands on a fine speci- 
men of moraine, flanked on one side by a bank of red mo- 
rainic soil, overtopped by boulders. It is so built in among 
huge masses of rock that its walls seem half natural. At 
C-/ 
the foot of the mountain spreads the Sertao, stretching 
level for the most part to the ocean, though broken here 
and there by billowy hills rising isolated from its surface. 
Beyond it many miles away may be seen the yellow lines 
of the sand-dunes on the shore, and the white glitter of the 
sea. The Sertao (desert) is beautifully green now, and 
spreads out like a verdant prairie below. But in the dry 
season it justifies its name and becomes a very desert indeed, 
being so parched that all vegetation is destroyed. The 
drought is so great during eight months of the year, that 
the country people living in the Sertao are often in danger 
of famine from the drying up of all the crops.* After this 
long dry season the rains often set in with terrible violence, 
* But for the existence of a shrub allied to onr hawthorn, and known to 
botanists as Zizyphus Joazeiro, the cattle would suffer excessively daring the 
drought. This shrub is one of the few plants common to this latitude which 
does not lose its foliage during the dry season, and, happily for the inhabitants, 
all the herbivorous domesticated animals delight to feed upon it. L. A. 
