312 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



which had been killed by the two men it had attacked. 

 They were fishing in a canoe when it rose from the bottom 

 — for it is a ground fish — and raising itself half out of the 

 water lunged over the edge of the canoe at them, with open 

 mouth. They killed it with their falcons, as machetes are 

 called in Brazil. It was taken round the city in triumph 

 in an ox-cart; the doctor saw it, and said it was three metres 

 long. He said that swimmers feared it even more than 

 the big cayman, because they could see the latter, whereas 

 the former lay hid at the bottom of the water. Colonel 

 Rondon said that in many villages where he had been on 

 the lower Madeira the people had built stockaded enclo- 

 sures in the water in which they bathed, not venturing to 

 swim in the open water for fear of the piraiba and the big 

 cayman. 



Next day, April 8, we made five kilometres only, as 

 there was a succession of rapids. We had to carry the 

 loads past two of them, but ran the canoes without difii- 

 culty, for on the west side were long canals of swift water 

 through the forest. The river had been higher, but was 

 still very high, and the current raced round the many 

 islands that at this point divided the channel. At four 

 we made camp at the head of another stretch of rapids, 

 over which the Canadian canoes would have danced with- 

 out shipping a teaspoonful of water, but which our dugouts 

 could only run empty. Cherrie killed three monkeys and 

 Lyra caught two big piranhas, so that we were again all 

 of us well provided with dinner and breakfast. When a 

 number of men, doing hard work, are most of the time on 

 half-rations, they grow to take a lively interest in any 

 reasonably full meal that does arrive. 



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