292 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



ered a quantity of big Brazil-nuts, which when roasted 

 tasted like the best of chestnuts and are nutritious; and 

 they caught a number of big piranhas, which were good 

 eating. So we all had a feast, and everybody had enough 

 to eat and was happy. 



By these rapids, at the fall, Cherrie found some strange 

 carvings on a bare mass of rock. They were evidently 

 made by men a long time ago. As far as is known, the 

 Indians thereabouts make no such figures now. They were 

 in two groups, one on the surface of the rock facing the 

 land, the other on that facing the water. The latter were 

 nearly obliterated. The former were in good preservation, 

 the figures sharply cut Into the rock. They consisted, upon 

 the upper flat part of the rock, of four multiple circles 

 with a dot in the middle (®), very accurately made and 

 about a foot and a half in diameter; and below them, on 

 the side of the rock, four multiple m's or inverted w's (^). 

 What these curious symbols represented, or who made 

 them, we could not, of course, form the slightest idea. It 

 may be that in a very remote past some Indian tribes of 

 comparatively advanced culture had penetrated to this 

 lovely river, just as we had now come to it. Before white 

 men came to South America there had already existed 

 therein various semicivilizations, some rude, others fairly 

 advanced, which rose, flourished, and persisted through 

 immemorial ages, and then vanished. The vicissitudes in 

 the history of humanity during its stay on this southern 

 continent have been as strange, varied, and inexplicable as 

 paleontology shows to have been the case, on the same con- 

 tinent, in the history of the higher forms of animal life dur- 

 ing the age of mammals. Colonel Rondon stated that such 



