IN HUMBOLDT'S COUNTRY 429 
most of them. The capitan's cuniico was a long 
way off, and after waiting through that day and the 
next, till evening, he made his appearance, and I 
purchased a few fowls of him. When I have 
nothing to eat I find it impossible to work, and, 
besides, I had been able to take in the curiara only 
two small bundles of drying paper which I wished 
to reserve for the plants of humble growth I hoped 
to meet in the cerros. For this reason I had left 
several interesting plants in the cano, the specimens 
of which w^ould have been so bulky as speedily to 
fill the papers. The weather proved showery, but 
in these two days I gathered a few plants near the 
pueblo as interesting perhaps as any got elsewhere, 
and took a sketch from the casa real looking towards 
Tibialis 
On the morning of February 11, having caused 
a fowl to be roasted to eat on the way, I started for 
the Cerro Imei (Cerro de Abispa), accompanied by 
a young man, as guide, and by two of my Indians. 
^ Most of the other inhabitants came to the pueblo along with the capitan 
when they heard a white man had arrived there. As it was a fine dry moon- 
light evening, I got them out into the plaza and set them a -dancing. In a 
place so remote from civilisation, and where the people, since they were 
gathered together into something like a Christian pueblo, had not been visited 
by any missionary to baptize them, I expected to see and hear something quite 
new to me in their dances and songs ; what then was my astonishment when, 
to the sound of a kind of guitar made from an internode of bamboo, the 
dancers began to caper wildly about and to throw their legs high into the air 
in a way quite foreign to the grave and stolid Indian, and to sing in good 
Portuguese, " Vamos a ver, vamos aver, vamos a ver a Mai de Deos ! " — 
precisely the song and dance of the negroes at the Barra de Rio Negro when, 
during the festival of Christmas, they go about visiting the altars on which is 
exposed a figure of the Virgin and Child set up usually at the corners of the 
streets. When I asked them to change the "figure" it was still a nigger 
dance and song. "Oh," said I to myself, "my friend Custodio has been 
here," and I afterwards ascertained that the Indians had really derived their 
novel accomplishments from the Brazilian slave. However, I was highly 
amused, and praised their performance as it deserved. 
