Chap. IV. BIVOUAC ON THE SANDS. 297 



place luckily free from mosquitoes. The different por- 

 tions of the party made arched coverings with the 

 toldos or maranta-leaf awnings of their canoes to sleep 

 under, fixing the edges in the sand. No one, however, 

 seemed inclined to go to sleep, so after supper we all 

 sat or lay around the large fires and amused our- 

 selves. We had the fiddler with us, and in the in- 

 tervals between the wretched tunes which he played, 

 the usual amusement of story-telling beguiled the time : 

 tales of hair-breadth escapes from jaguar, alligator, and 

 so forth. There were amongst us a father and son who 

 had been the actors, the previous year, in an alligator 

 adventure on the edge of the praia we had just left. 

 The son, whilst bathing, was seized by the thigh and 

 carried under water : a cry was raised, and the father, 

 rushing down the bank, plunged after the rapacious 

 beast which was diving away with his victim. It 

 seems almost incredible that a man could overtake 

 and master the large cayman in his own element ; but 

 such was the case in this instance, for the animal was 

 reached and forced to release his booty by the man's 

 thrusting his thumb into his eye. The lad showed us 

 the marks of the alligator's teeth in his thighs. We 

 sat up until past midnight listening to these stories 

 and assisting the flow of talk by frequent potations of 

 burnt rum. A large shallow dish was filled with the 

 liquor and fired : when it had burnt for a few minutes 

 the flame was extinguished and each one helped him- 

 self by dipping a tea-cup into the vessel. 



One by one the people dropped asleep, and then the 

 quiet murmur of talk of the few who remained awake was 



