132 Through the BraziHan Wilderness 



walks. The one-story houses were white or blue, with 

 roofs of red tiles and window-shutters of latticed wood- 

 work, come down from colonial days and tracing back 

 through Christian and Moorish Portugal to a remote 

 Arab ancestry. Pretty faces, some dark, some light, 

 looked out from these windows ; their mothers' mothers, 

 for generations past, must thus have looked out of simi- 

 lar windows in the vanished colonial days. But now 

 even here in Caceres the spirit of the new Brazil is mov- 

 ing; a fine new government school has been started, and 

 we met its principal, an earnest man doing excellent 

 work, one of the many teachers who, during the last few 

 years, have been brought to Matto Grosso from Sao 

 Paulo, a centre of the new educational movement which 

 will do so much for Brazil. 



Father Zahm went to spend the night with some 

 French Franciscan friars, capital fellows. I spent the 

 night at the comfortable house of Lieutenant Lyra; a 

 hot-weather house with thick walls, big doors, and an 

 open patio bordered by a gallery. Lieutenant Lyra was 

 to accompany us; he was an old companion of Colonel 

 Rondon's explorations. We visited one or two of the 

 stores to make some final purchases, and in the evening 

 strolled through the dusky streets and under the trees of 

 the plaza ; the women and girls sat in groups in the door- 

 ways or at the windows, and here and there a stringed 

 instrument tinkled in the darkness. 



From Caceres onward we were entering the scene of 

 Colonel Rondon's explorations. For some eighteen years 

 he was occupied in exploring and in opening telegraph- 

 lines through the eastern or north-middle part of the 



