THE SERXNGUEIROS 
The banks of the river were about twenty feet high, 
generally of red earth, with a stratum of white sand 
above. The vegetation was luxuriant and extraordinarily 
tidy along the summit of the banks. The water was quite 
crystal-like, it was so clear. All the time our nostrils were 
fully expanded to inhale the delicious scent of the forest, 
which closely resembled that of jessamine. Masses of 
violet-coloured convolvuli were festooned from the trees. 
That was a great treat for me, after the months I had 
gone through when my entire days were spent eating up 
dust raised in clouds by the troop of animals marching 
in front of me. 
When you came to survey a river it was really amazing 
what zigzags water could make in cutting its way through 
a country. From northwest the Arinos veered southwest, 
and from southwest to northeast. 
By one o’clock we were in a spacious basin, 200 metres 
in diameter, close to which a small tributary, two metres 
wide, entered the Arinos on the left bank. Farther down 
on the right bank were neat beaches of white and red sand. 
We stopped for a few moments at a seringueiro’s shed. 
The poor fellow, a negro, was in a pitiable condition from 
malarial fever. 
Those martyrs of labour were much to be pitied, and 
also admired. There, hundreds of miles away from every¬ 
body, they stayed, abandoned in the forest until the agents 
of their masters who had dropped them there found it 
convenient to come and fetch them back again. If they 
came back at all and never failed, it was not, you can be 
sure, for the interest they took in human life, but because 
of the quantity of valuable rubber which they expected 
would be collected before their return. Those poor 
creatures had no possible way of escape, except under 
extraordinary circumstances. They were conveyed to 
their stations overland by means of pack animals, which 
at once were sent back and did not return until the end 
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