To the Amazon and Home 335 



worked as far up-stream. We expected to meet them 

 somewhere below the next rapids, the Inferno. The 

 trader or rubber-man brings up his year's supply of goods 

 in a batelao, starting in February and reaching the upper 

 course of the river early in May, when the rainy season 

 is over. The parties of rubber-explorers are then 

 equipped and provisioned ; and the settlers purchase cer- 

 tain 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 extraor- 

 dinary. 



On the 21st 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 



