EXCELLENT FISHING 
River was peculiar. Great clusters of globular clouds 
generally collected in three distinct strata upon a whitish 
sky extending high up on the sky vault. 
Facing north, the country appeared absolutely flat, 
and nothing could be seen above the trees as far as the 
eye or even a telescope could perceive. In that direction 
the stream, 200 yards wide, flowed through a perfectly 
straight channel for about one mile. 
The fishing in the river was excellent. One night we 
caught a quantity of fish, — one, a huge pirarara weighing 
40 pounds, then some pirahiba and a pintado , the latter 
24 pounds in weight. The pirarara was an extraordinary¬ 
looking fish. It had a long head covered entirely with 
a hard, bony, granular substance, which could be cracked 
only by a severe blow with an axe. The eyes were 
prominent and placed quite close to abnormally long 
antennas or feelers. The back of the pirarara was bluish 
black, the centre of the body longitudinally was yellowish, 
whereas the under part was white. The tail was of a 
bright vermilion, and the black fins had red edges, which 
made the huge pirarara a really beautiful fish to look at. 
The pirahiba had a grey back with stripes so faint that 
they were hardly visible. Its head was flat and anchor¬ 
shaped. The eyes, very small, were curiously situated on 
the top of the head instead of at the sides, owing to the 
fact that the head was really so flat that it had no sides: 
it was merely a gentle convex curve from one side of the 
mouth to the other, over the skull. The pirahiba too, like 
most fish of those rivers, possessed long tentacles. Its 
mouth and fins were slightly tinted red. It displayed 
powerful teeth similarly arranged to those of the pintado 
fish previously described. 
Then we got some tubarao (or Squalus carcharias ), a 
small fish with a long, pointed head like a bird’s beak, of 
the plagiostomos order, and several mandi — a small 
yellow fish with enormous eyes. The mandi had remark- 
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