“Lina will go mad!” exclaimed Benito.
“If those dresses were worn properly,” said Minha, “they might not be so ridiculous!”
“My dear Minha,” said Manoel, “with your simple gown and straw hat, you are better dressed than any one of these Brazilians, with their headgear and flying petticoats, which are foreign to their country and their race.”
“If it pleases you to think so,” answered Minha, “I do not envy any of them.”
But they had come to see. They walked through the streets, which contained more stalls than shops; they strolled about the market-place, the rendezvous of the fashionable, who were nearly stifled in their European clothes; they even breakfasted at an hotel—it was scarcely an inn—whose cookery caused them to deeply regret the excellent service on the raft.
After dinner, at which only turtle flesh, served up in different forms, appeared, the Garral family went for the last time to admire the borders of the lake as the setting sun gilded it with its rays; then they rejoined their pirogue, somewhat disillusioned perhaps as to the magnificence of a town which one hour would give time enough to visit, and a little tired with walking about its stifling streets which were not nearly so pleasant as the shady pathways of Iquitos. The inquisitive Lina’s enthusiasm alone had not been damped.
They all took their places in the pirogue. The wind remained in the northwest, and had freshened with the evening. The sail was hoisted. They took the same course as in the morning, across the lake fed by the black waters of the Rio Teffe, which, according to the Indians, is navigable toward the southwest for forty days’ journey. At eight o’clock the pirogue regained the mooring-place and hailed the jangada.
As soon as Lina could get Fragoso aside—
“Have you seen anything suspicious?” she inquired.
“Nothing, Miss Lina,” he replied; “Torres has scarcely left his cabin, where he has been reading and writing.”