ACROSS UNKNOWN SOUTH AMERICA 
ancestral land in Central Africa — that of the Banda 
tribe, which I happened to have visited some years before. 
I identified him easily by his features, as well as by his 
music and other characteristics. 
Filippe did not remember his father and mother, nor 
had he known any other relatives. He had no idea to 
what tribe he had belonged, he did not know any African 
language, and he had never to his remembrance knowingly 
heard African music. It was remarkable under those cir¬ 
cumstances that the Central African characteristics should 
recur unconsciously in Filippe’s music. It showed me 
that one is born with or without certain racial musical 
proclivities, dictated by the heart and brain. They cannot 
be eradicated for many generations, no matter what the 
place of birth may be or the different surroundings in 
which the individual may find himself, or the influences 
which may affect him even early in life. 
Brazil was certainly a great country for tablelands. 
As we came out again into the open, another great plateau, 
ending with a spur not unlike the ram of a battleship, 
loomed in the foreground to the south. Yet another 
plateau of a beautiful pure cobalt, also with another 
gigantic ram, appeared behind the first, in continuation 
of the two separated plateaux we have already examined. 
It was separated from these by a deep cut — a regular 
canon — several miles wide, and with sides so sharply 
defined that it looked like the artificial work of an immense 
canal. 
Great campos lay before us in the near foreground, 
from our high point of vantage (elevation 1,550 feet). 
We were still travelling on a surface of volcanic debris, 
yellow ashes, and sand, forming a mere cap over all those 
hills, the foundation of which was simply a succession of 
giant domes of lava. 
Northwest we still had the almost flat sky-line of a 
plateau rising slightly in two well-defined steps or terraces 
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