174 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



slashing a trail with the machete through the tangle of 

 bushes, low trees, thorny scrub, and interlaced creepers. 

 There were palms of new kinds, very tall, slender, straight, 

 and graceful, with rather short and few fronds. The wild 

 plantains, or pacovas, thronged the spaces among the 

 trunks of the tall trees; their boles were short, and their 

 broad, erect leaves gigantic; they bore brilliant red-and- 

 orange flowers. There were trees whose trunks bellied into 

 huge swellings. There were towering trees with buttressed 

 trunks, whose leaves made a fretwork against the sky far 

 overhead. Gorgeous red-and-green trogons, with long tails, 

 perched motionless on the lower branches and uttered a 

 loud, thrice-repeated whistle. We heard the calling of the 

 false bell-bird, which is gray instead of white like the true 

 bell-birds; it keeps among the very topmost branches. 

 Heavy rain fell shortly after we reached our camping-place. 

 Next morning at sunrise we climbed a steep slope to 

 the edge of the Parecis plateau, at a level of about two 

 thousand feet above the sea. We were on the Plan Alto, 

 the high central plain of Brazil, the healthy land of dry 

 air, of cool nights, of clear, running brooks. The sun was 

 directly behind us when we topped the rise. Reining in, 

 we looked back over the vast Paraguayan marshes, shim- 

 mering in the long morning lights. Then, turning again, 

 we rode forward, casting shadows far before us. It was 

 twenty miles to the next water, and in hot weather the 

 journey across this waterless, shadeless, sandy stretch of 

 country is hard on the mules and oxen. But on this day 

 the sky speedily grew overcast and a cool wind blew in 

 our faces as we travelled at a quick, running walk over the 

 immense rolling plain. The ground was sandy; it was 



