SOUTH AMERICA. 
187 
When two or three families have determined to come third 
down the river and pay you a visit, they send an — 
Indian beforehand with a string of beads. You take method of 
° cornmu- 
one bead off every day; and on the day that the nication. 
string is beadless, they arrive at your house. 
In finding their way through these pathless wilds, 
the sun is to them what Ariadne’s clue was to 
Theseus. When he is on the meridian, they generally 
sit down, and rove onwards again as soon as he has 
sufficiently declined to the west; they require no 
other compass. When in chase, they break a twig 
on the bushes as they pass by every three or four 
hundred paces, and this often prevents them from 
losing their way on their return. 
You will not be long in the forests of Guiana, 
before you perceive how very thinly they are in¬ 
habited. You may wander for a week together 
without seeing a hut. The wild beasts, snakes, the 
swamps, the trees, the uncurbed luxuriance of every 
thing around you, conspire to inform you that man has 
no habitation here—man has seldom passed this way. 
Let us now return to natural history. There was 
a person making shingles, with twenty or thirty 
negroes, not far from Mibiri-hill. I had offered a 
reward to any of them who would find a good-sized 
snake in the forest, and come and let me know where 
it was. Often had these negroes looked for a large 
snake, and as often been disappointed. 
One Sunday morning I met one of them in the 
forest, and asked him which way he was going : he 
said he was going towards Warratilla creek to hunt 
