ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
of the collecting season. Even then, if the seringueiro 
wanted to get away, he was frequently compelled to pur¬ 
chase an animal from his employer at three or four times 
its actual value, that is to say, perhaps sixty or eighty 
pounds sterling. So the more a man worked or earned, 
the more he became indebted to his master. 
Like all men who have lived a great deal in exile and 
solitude, the seringueiros, nearly all blacks or mulattoes, 
were extraordinarily generous. They always wanted to 
give you all they possessed, which was next to nothing, 
but meant a fortune to them. They would deprive them¬ 
selves of anything if they thought they could give the 
slightest pleasure. 
We left the seringueiro. I feared the poor man could 
not live long in his broken-down condition. He was most 
grateful for some medicine and provisions I left with him. 
His farewell to us was in so melancholy a voice, as he 
tried to lift himself out of an improvised, bamboo couch, 
that for days it rang in my ears, and before my eyes 
constantly remained his skeleton-like, sunken features as 
he waved his farewell and fell back exhausted. 
Behind a narrow barrier of sand, about ten feet high, 
as we proceeded down stream in a northwesterly direction, 
was a large lagoon. 
The river was really too beautiful for words, the clear 
green water reflecting with precision in deeper tones the 
view before us. Only when its course was disturbed and 
diverted by a sharp rock or by the branches of a fallen and 
dying tree, the successive angular ridges of the troubled 
water shone like polished silver in parallel lines from the 
reflected light of the sun, just like a huge luminous 
skeleton of a fish. 
The trees w T ere truly wonderful along the river — tall 
and healthy, with dense, deep green foliage. But Nature 
seemed absolutely asleep. Barring the few swallows we 
had seen soon after our departure, and the ariranhas, we 
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