CEARA. 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 comes 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 

 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 our hawthorn, and known to 

 botanists as Zizyphus Joazeiro, the cattle would suffer excessively during 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. 



