The Highland Wilderness 201 



things, were heavy — and even the small naked children 

 carried the live hens. At Utiarity there is a big Parecis 

 settlement and a telegraph station kept by one of the 

 employees of the commission. His pretty brown wife is 

 acting as schoolmistress to a group of little Parecis girls. 

 The Parecis chief has been made a major and wears a 

 uniform accordingly. The commission has erected good 

 buildings for its own employees and, has superintended 

 the erection of good houses for the Indians. Most of 

 the latter still prefer the simplicity of the loin-cloth, in 

 their ordinary lives, but they proudly wore their civilized 

 clothes in our honor. When in the late afternoon the 

 men began to play a regular match game of headball, 

 with a scorer or umpire to- keep count, they soon dis- 

 carded most of their clothes, coming down to nothing but 

 trousers or a loin-cloth. Two or three of them had their 

 faces stained with red ochre. Among the women and 

 children looking on were a couple of little girls who 

 paraded about on stilts. 



The great waterfall was half a mile below us. Love- 

 ly though we had found Salto Bello, these falls were far 

 superior in beauty and majesty. They are twice as high 

 and twice as broad ; and the lay of the land is such that 

 the various landscapes in which the waterfall is a feature 

 are more striking. A few hundred yards above the falls 

 the river turns at an angle and widens. The broad, rapid 

 shallows are crested with whitecaps. Beyond this wide 

 expanse of flecked and hurrying water rise the mist col- 

 umns of the cataract ; and as these columns are swayed 

 and broken by the wind the forest appears through and 

 between them. From below the view is one of singular 



