Chap. IV. LAKE OF JUTECA. 299 



mosquitoes, but the rain continued until at length every- 

 thing was soaked, and we had no help for it but to 

 bundle off to the canoes with drenched hammocks and 

 garments. There was not nearly room enough in the 

 flotilla to accommodate so large a number of persons 

 lying at full length ; moreover the night was pitch dark, 

 and it was quite impossible in the gloom and confusion to 

 get at a change of clothing. So there we lay, huddled 

 together in the best way we could arrange ourselves, ex- 

 hausted with fatigue and irritated beyond all conception 

 by clouds of mosquitoes. . I slept on a bench with a sail 

 over me, my wet clothes clinging to my body, and to 

 increase, my discomfort, close beside me lay an Indian 

 girl, one of Cardozo's domestics, who had a skin dis- 

 figured with black diseased patches, and whose thick 

 clothing, not having been washed during the whole time 

 we had been out (eighteen days), gave forth a most vile 

 effluvia. 



We spent the night of the 7th of November plea- 

 santly on the smooth sands, where the jaguars again sere- 

 naded us, and on the succeeding morning commenced our 

 return voyage to Ega. We first doubled the upper end 

 of the island of Catua, and then struck off for the right 

 bank of the Solimoens. The river was here of immense 

 width, and the current was so strong in the middle that 

 it required the most strenuous exertions on the part of 

 our paddlers to prevent us from being carried miles 

 away down the stream. At night we reached Juteca, 

 a small river which enters the Solimoens by a channel 

 so narrow that a man might almost jump across it, but 

 a furlong inwards expands into a very pretty lake 



