HEADWATERS OF THE PARAGUAY 127 



In the late afternoon of the 5th we reached the quaint 

 old-fashioned little town of Sao Luis de Caceres, on the 

 outermost fringe of the settled region of the state of Matto 

 Grosso, the last town we should see before reaching the 

 villages of the Amazon. As we approached we passed 

 half-clad black washerwomen on the river's edge. The 

 men, with the local band, were gathered at the steeply 

 sloping foot of the main street, where the steamer came to 

 her moorings. Groups of women and girls, white and 

 brown, watched us from the low bluff; their skirts and 

 bodices were red, blue, green, of all colors. Sigg had gone 

 ahead with much of the baggage; he met us in an impro- 

 vised motor-boat, consisting of a dugout to the side of which 

 he had clamped our Evinrude motor; he was giving sev- 

 eral of the local citizens of prominence a ride, to their huge 

 enjoyment. The streets of the little town were unpaved, 

 with narrow brick sidewalks. The one-story houses were 

 white or blue, with roofs of red tiles and window-shutters 

 of latticed woodwork, come down from colonial days and 

 tracing back through Christian and Moorish Portugal to a 

 remote Arab ancestry. Pretty faces, some dark, some light, 

 looked out from these windows; their mothers' mothers, 

 for generations past, must thus have looked out of similar 

 windows in the vanished colonial days. But now even 

 here in Caceres the spirit of the new Brazil is moving; a 

 fine new government school has been started, and we met 

 its principal, an earnest man doing excellent work, one of 

 the many teachers who, during the last few years, have 

 been brought to Matto Grosso from Sao Paulo, a centre 

 of the new educational movement which will do so much 

 for Brazil. 



