CHAPTER III. 
THE UPPER AMAZONS— VOYAGE TO EGA. 
Departure from Barra — First day and night on the Upper Amazons — 
Desolate appearance of river in the flood season — Cncama Indians 
— Mental condition of Indians — Squalls — Manatee — Forest — Float- 
ing pumice-stones from the Andes — Falling banks — Ega and its 
inhabitants — Daily life of a Naturalist at Ega — Customs, trade, 
&c. — The four seasons of the Upper Amazons. 
I MUST now take the reader from the picturesque, hilly 
country of the Tapajos, and its dark, streamless waters, 
to the boundless, wooded plains and yellow, turbid cur- 
rent of the Upper Amazons or Solimoens. I will resume 
the narrative of my first voyage up the river, which 
was interrupted at the Barra of the Rio Negro in the 
seventh chapter to make way for the description of 
Santarem and its neighbourhood. 
I embarked at Barra on the 26th of March, 1850, 
three years before steamers were introduced on the 
upper river, in a cuberta which was returning to Ega, 
the first and only town of any importance in the vast 
solitudes of the Solimoens, from Santarem, whither it 
had been sent with a cargo of turtle oil in earthenware 
jars. The owner, an old white-haired Portuguese trader of 
Ega named Daniel Cardozo, was then at Barra, attending 
