154 



A JOURNEY IN BRAZIL. 



tree which mot^t immediately strikes the eye, and stands 

 out from the mass of green with wonderful grace and 

 majesty, is the lofty, slender Assai palm, with its crown 

 of light plume-like leaves, and its bunches of berry-like 

 fruit, hanging from a branch that shoots out almost hori- 

 zontally, just below the leaves. Houses on the shore 

 break the solitude here and there. From this distance 

 they look picturesque, with thatched, overhanging roofs, 

 covering a kind of open porch. Just now we passed a 

 cleared nook at the water-side, where a wooden cross 

 marked a single mound. What a lonely grave it seemed ! 

 We are now coasting along the Isle of Marajo, keeping up 

 the so-called Par^ river ; we shall not enter the undisputed 

 waters of the Amazons till the day after to-morrow. This 

 part of the river goes also by the name of the Bay of Maraj6. 



August 21st. — Last evening we stopped at our first sta- 

 tion, — the little town of Breves. Its population, like that 

 of all these small settlements on the Lower Amazons, is 

 made up of an amalgamation of races. You see the regu- 

 lar features and fair skin of the white man combined with 

 the black, coarse, straight hair of the Indian, or the mulatto 

 with partly negro, partly Indian features, but the crisp taken 

 out of the hair ; and with these combinations comes in the 

 pure Indian type, with its low brow, square build of face, 

 and straight line of the shoulders. In the women especially 

 the shoulders are rather high. In the first house we en- 

 tered there was only an old half-breed Indianwoman, stand- 

 ing in the broad open porch of her thatched home, where 

 she seemed to be surrounded with live stock, — parrots and 

 parroquets of all sorts and sizes, which she kept for sale. 

 After looking in at several of the houses, buying one or two 

 monkeys, some parroquets, and some articles of the village 



