Chap. IY. 
LAKE OF JUTSCA. 
299 
mosquitoes, but the rain continued until at length every- 
thing was soaked, and we had no help for it but to 
bundle off to the canoes with drenched hammocks and 
garments. There was not nearly room enough in the 
flotilla to accommodate so large a number of persons 
lying at full length ; moreover the night was pitch dark, 
and it was quite impossible in the gloom and confusion to 
get at a change of clothing. So there we lay, huddled 
together in the best way we could arrange ourselves, ex- 
hausted with fatigue and irritated beyond all conception 
by clouds of mosquitoes. I slept on a bench with a sail 
over me, my wet clothes clinging to my body, and to 
increase my discomfort, close beside me lay an Indian 
girl, one of Cardozo's domestics, who had a skin dis- 
figured with black diseased patches, and whose thick 
clothing, not having been washed during the whole time 
we had been out (eighteen days), gave forth a most vile 
effluvia. 
We spent the night of the 7th of November plea- 
santly on the smooth sands, where the jaguars again sere- 
naded us, and on the succeeding morning commenced our 
return voyage to Ega. We first doubled the upper end 
of the island of Catua, and then struck off* for the right 
bank of the Solimoens. The river was here of immense 
width, and the current was so strong in the middle that 
it required the most strenuous exertions on the part of 
our paddlers to prevent us from being carried miles 
away down the stream. At night we reached Juteca, 
a small river which enters the Solimoens by a channel 
so narrow that a man might almost jump across it, but 
a furlong inwards expands into a very pretty lake 
