326 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



and the settlers purchase certain necessities, and certain 

 things that strike them as luxuries. This year the Brazil- 

 nut crop on the river had failed, a serious thing for all 

 explorers and wilderness wanderers. 



On the 20th we made the longest run we had made, 

 fifty-two kilometres. Lyra took observations where we 

 camped; we were in latitude 8° 49'. At this camping- 

 place the great, beautiful river was a little over three 

 hundred metres wide. We were in an empty house. The 

 marks showed that in the high water, a couple of months 

 back, the river had risen until the lower part of the house 

 was flooded. The difference between the level of the river 

 during the floods and in the dry season is extraordinary. 



On the 2 1st we made another good run, getting down 

 to the Inferno rapids, which are in latitude 8° 19' south. 

 Until we reached the Cardozo we had run almost due 

 north; since then we had been running a little west of 

 north. Before we reached these rapids we stopped at a 

 large, pleasant thatch house, and got a fairly big and 

 roomy as well as light boat, leaving both our two smaller 

 dugouts behind. Above the rapids a small river, the Ma- 

 deirainha, entered from the left. The rapids had a fall 

 of over ten metres, and the water was very wild and rough. 

 Met with for the first time, it would doubtless have taken 

 several days to explore a passage and, with danger and 

 labor, get the boats down. But we were no longer explor- 

 ing, pioneering, over unknown country. It is easy to go 

 where other men have prepared the way. We had a guide; 

 we took our baggage down by a carry three-quarters of a 

 kilometre long; and the canoes were run through known 

 channels the following morning. At the foot of the rap- 



I 



