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usual mode of progression owing to the execrably bad road, which 

 IS no more than a track. At mid-day we halted at the foot of the 

 Serra, twelve miles from Castro. This was a wonderful place for 

 butterflies, but we could not linger as we had a long way to go to 

 get shelter for the night. We had covered the worst length of road, 

 with huge cart-ruts formed by the ox waggons, and with a sharp 

 ridge between the ruts which in some places looked like the water- 

 shed of a miniature mountain range. Driving a light two-wheeled 

 cart with a single horse on the top of the ridge is not, therefore, an 

 easy matter, and there are some extra choice places where there is 

 more than a spice of danger. From the top of the Serra there is a 

 boundless expanse of country to be seen. In the immediate neigh- 

 bourhood are numberless ant-heaps, which look exactly like the 

 manure heaps one sees at home, placed at regular intervals in the 

 fields for distributing later over the soil. The ant-heaps look very 

 dark brown or black, and show up plainly on the grassy campo. I 

 remember after we had travelled some distance beyond the Serra our 

 horses suddenly gave a bit of a spurt. 1 noticed some upright sticks 

 by the edge of a bit of wood, and I learnt that horses can see these 

 remnants of a camp a long way off, and generally put on a spurt, 

 thinking that their day's work is over. 



We put up at the Fazenda called " Boa Vista " and it is difificult to 

 realise the isolation of this house, a single building miles away from 

 anywhere. The view from the front of the house is romantic in the 

 extreme, with a great canon in the distance. Away to the left of the 

 Fazenda is a wonderful view over the valley of the Tibagy and the 

 valley of the Ivahy beyond. The whole country appears to be 

 uninhabited, and in point of fact is all but so. These great gorges, 

 or caiions, are extremely picturesque, and are clothed up the steep 

 sides with vegetation. At Guartela there is a particularly fine 

 gorge. At Itarare there is a similar phenomenon of a river 

 washing through its soft sandstone bed, only there, the sandstone 

 being softer below the surface than on top, the water has carved 

 for itself a deep, broad passage below the surface so that the 

 river is quite invisible, unless you get close to it and look down 

 vertically. On the surface there appears to be a shallow river bed 

 with a narrow chasm in the middle, through which the river has 

 disappeared. While we were halting at the little sitio at Guartela 

 there were several mules inside the enclosure that interested us 

 much by possessing circular stripes round the lower part of the leg, 

 reminding one of the marking of the zebras. The character was no 

 doubt a throw-back to a distant ancestor. 



We arrived at the primitive little town of Tibagy early in the after- 

 noon of the 22nd. The river Tibagy has to be crossed first, as the 

 little settlement is on the west side. To accomplish this there is a 

 ferry, consisting of a raft fixed to a wire rope stretched across the 

 river, which is worked backwards and forwards by the current. 

 Bigg Wither, in his fascinating book, "Pioneering in South Brazil," 



