CHAPTER III. 



THE UPPER AMAZONS— VOYAGE TO EGA. 



Departure from Barra — First day and night on the Upper Amazons — 

 Desolate appearance of river in the flood season — Cucama Indians 

 — Mental condition of Indians — Scpialls — Manatee — Forest — Float- 

 ing pumice-stones from the Andes — Falling banks — Ega and its 

 inhabitants — Daily life of a Naturalist at Ega — Customs, trade, 

 &c. — The four seasons of the Upper Amazons. 



I MUST now take the reader from the picturesque, hilly 

 country of the Tapajos, and its dark, streamless waters, 

 to the boundless, wooded plains and yellow, turbid cur- 

 rent of the Upper Amazons or Solimoens. I will resume 

 the narrative of my first voyage up the river, which 

 was interrupted at the Barra of the Rio Negro in the 

 seventh chapter to make way for the description of 

 Santarem and its neighbourhood. 



I embarked at Barra on the 26th of March, 1850, 

 three years before steamers were introduced on the 

 upper river, in a cuberta which was returning to Ega, 

 the first and only town of any importance in the vast 

 solitudes of the Solimoens, from Santarem, whither it 

 had been sent with a cargo of turtle oil in earthenware 

 jars. The owner, an old white-haired Portuguese trader of 

 Ega named Daniel Cardozo, was then at Barra, attending 



