128 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



Father Zahm went to spend the night with some French 

 Franciscan friars, capital fellows. I spent the night at the 

 comfortable house of Lieutenant Lyra; a hot-weather 

 house with thick walls, big doors, and an open patio bor- 

 dered by a gallery. Lieutenant Lyra was to accompany 

 us; he was an old companion of Colonel Rondon's explora- 

 tions. We visited one or two of the stores to make some 

 final purchases, and in the evening strolled through the 

 dusky streets and under the trees of the plaza; the women 

 and girls sat in groups in the doorways or at the windows, 

 and here and there a stringed instrument tinkled in the 

 darkness. 



From Caceres onward we were entering the scene of 

 Colonel Rondon's explorations. For some eighteen years 

 he was occupied in exploring and in opening telegraph- 

 lines through the eastern or north-middle part of the great 

 forest state, the wilderness state of the *'matto grosso" — 

 the "great wilderness," or, as Australians would call it, 

 "the bush." Then, in 1907, he began to penetrate the 

 unknown region lying to the north and west. He was 

 the head of the exploring expeditions sent out by the 

 Brazilian Government to traverse for the first time this 

 unknown land; to map for the first time the courses of 

 the rivers which from the same divide run into the upper 

 portions of the Tapajos and the Madeira, two of the mighty 

 affluents of the Amazon, and to build telegraph-lines across 

 to the Madeira, where a line of Brazilian settlements, con- 

 nected by steamboat lines and a railroad, again occurs. 

 Three times he penetrated into this absolutely unknown, 

 Indian-haunted wilderness, being absent for a year or two 

 at a time and suff^ering every imaginable hardship, before 



