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 ^sjfcates. 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, 



