A contrasting type was our seringueiro, or owner of a rubber-field far up in the interior. He wore a goatee and mustache, cotton trousers and undershirt, the latter always open and disclosing his caveman chest; and he was almost childlike in his gaiety, with constant jokes and puns, whether winning or losing at cards. Yet beneath it all one could see that he was full of tropical superstitions and above all of the lust for money,—or, more exactly, the lusts which money will satisfy, for the Brazilian is rarely a miser—and that he would rob, or hold in slavery, or assassinate by his own hand or another’s, far up there in the unruled wilderness where he was going, not only without compunction, but almost without realizing that he was doing anything amiss.
At times the river opened out like a vast sea, and one wondered not how we were to get through, but how we were to find our way. All the jungle trees had wet feet, and every now and then pieces of forest or patches of bushy wilderness came floating down the river, though I could make out none of the giboyas (boas), deadly serpents, or jaguars of popular fiction riding upon them. Sometimes, in the refulgent western sun, the procession of trees took on a sort of early-autumn tinge, as if winter were leaving its accustomed track and was about to spread its blighting trail across this ocean of vegetation. A fine day, like a great man, dies a glorious death; a rainy one slumps off from dullness to darkness, you know not when nor care, like the invalid grouch or the malefactor, and on the whole you are glad that he is gone and that night has come. Yet there was a certain lack of color in Amazonian sunsets. It was as if nature had so many materials at her disposal that she was careless in the use of them. One evening a big ocean liner, gleaming with lights, slowly overhauled us and pushed on into the darkness beyond. Gnats similar to those that had made life miserable during my tramp across tropical Bolivia, and here called puims, gave us occasional annoyance, though by no means as much as two “Turks” deeply marked with long Amazon residence who persistently kept the most horrible of American phonographs squawking far into the night. My chair and hammock were forward, however, where it sometimes grew so cold in the wind that I had to wrap the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock about me.
Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of varicolored sails, a veritable fog rising from it under the equatorial sun
Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native, the other imported from India to improve the native stock
A family dispute on the Amazon
The captain and mate of our gaiola were both Brazilians of the north