Across Nhambiquara Land 245 



(some of them filled with pineapples), gourds, fire-sticks, 

 wooden knives, wooden mortars, and a board for grating 

 mandioc, made of a thick slab of wood inset with sharp 

 points of a harder wood. From the Brazilians one or 

 two of them had obtained blankets, and one a hammock ; 

 and they had also obtained knives, which they sorely 

 needed, for they are not even in the stone age. One 

 woman shielded herself from the rain by holding a green 

 palm-branch down her back. Another had on her head 

 what we at first thought to be a monkey-skin head-dress. 

 But it was a little, live, black monkey. It stayed habitu- 

 ally with its head above her forehead, and its arms and 

 legs spread so that it lay moulded to the shape of her 

 head ; but both woman and monkey showed some reluc- 

 tance about having their photographs taken. 



Bonofacio consisted of several thatched one-room 

 cabins, connected by a stockade which was extended to 

 form an enclosure behind them. A number of tame 

 parrots and parakeets, of several dififerent species, scram- 

 bled over the roofs and entered the houses. In the open 

 pastures near by were the curious, extensive burrows of 

 a gopher rat, which ate the roots of grass, not emerging 

 to eat the grass but pulling it into the burrows by the 

 roots. These burrows bore a close likeness to those of 

 our pocket gophers. Miller found the animals difficult 

 to trap. Finally, by the aid of Colonel Rondon, several 

 Indians, and two or three of our men, he dug one out. 

 From the central shaft several surface galleries radiated, 

 running for many rods about a foot below the surface, 

 with, at intervals of half a dozen yards, mounds where 

 the loose earth had been expelled. The central shaft ran 



