While we prepare to take astronomical observations, half a dozen large fires are lighted round about, in whose fitful blaze the neighboring forest-trees appear like huge phantoms, looking contemptuously down on us, poor tiny mortals. Our Indians warm themselves in the cheerful glow, smoking, and chatting of the day’s adventures, or rather of what are regarded as such,—unusual good or ill luck at fishing and hunting; the casual meeting of some canoe; or the sight of a seringueiro’s poor cottage. Work over, they take off the rough cáscara, and put on the camiseta, a cotton garment without sleeves, resembling a wide poncho sewn together at the sides, and whose dazzling whiteness is set off by two scarlet stripes along the seams. The ample folds and the simple cut of the garment, which is made by the Indian women of the Missions on very primitive looms, give quite a stately, classical appearance to the numerous groups round the fires. Such must have been the aspect presented by the halting-places of those daring seafarers, the Phœnicians, who were the first to call into life an international commerce, and whose light-rigged barques first ventured to distant shores, to bring home the precious amber and the useful tin. Only the dense swarms of mosquitoes, which set in immediately after sunset, remind us rather unpleasantly that we are far off from those happy northern regions, where such a nuisance can hardly be well imagined. Especially in the dense forest beneath cacao-bushes, or under the close leafage of the large figueiras, where no breath of air incommodes those light-winged tormentors, it is quite impossible, for the European at least, to close an eye without the shelter of a mosquiteiro (mosquito-net); and we could but wonder at our Indians, most of whom did without it. After supper they simply spread a hide on the ground, on which, with no covering other than the starry firmament above them, they slept undisturbed till the dawn, only occasionally brushing away, as if by way of diversion, the most obtrusive of the little fiends. The capitanos only, and one or other of the older rowers, allow themselves the luxury of good cotton hammocks, which are also made by their wives in the Missions.
Such, with few variations, was the course of our daily life, until we reached the regions of the rapids, when, of course, the hundred little incidents connected with the dragging of the canoes through narrow, foaming channels, and with carrying the goods and the vessels themselves overland, disturbed the monotony of this rude forest life.
BESIEGED BY PECCARIES.
JAMES W. WELLS.
[It is to “Three Thousand Miles through Brazil, from Rio de Janeiro to Maranhão,” by James W. Wells, F.R.G.S., that we owe the following exciting example of the perils of a hunter’s life in the wilds of the tropics. Mr. Wells and his fellow-travellers, while journeying up the valley of the Sapão, far in interior Brazil, came upon traces of the peccary, an animal which, from its fearlessness, and its habit of moving in troops, is occasionally a very unsafe creature to meet. What followed we shall leave the author to tell.]
We were down in the deep, narrow valley, where the slopes of the table-land surrounded us like a wall, up which there was no visible ascent. The tall, rank grass was also littered with boulders of sandstone and short, gnarled, and distorted cork-trees; it was a toilsome march for both men and animals, but there, certainly, must be the head-quarters of all the peccaries of the region, for everywhere the ground was furrowed and rooted up, the grass trodden down in long lanes, the pools of water turbid, from their wallowing, and the place odorous as a rank pigsty; and yet, strange to say, not a pig was to be seen, fortunately for us; for in such an inconvenient place an attack from these vicious animals in the numbers they could evidently collect would have enabled them to take us at great disadvantage.
We pushed on the animals to get out of this pig-set man-trap, and eventually got clear of the labyrinth on the farther side of the last feeder of the main morass, and, after some difficulty, found an ascent on to the geraes, where we made a bee-line to the Sapão across the flats.
During the passage of the swamps the Don said,—
“Ah! Senhor Doctor, what a shame to leave such a lovely place; if you and I were only here to-night, what fun we would have with the peccaries; but, patience, they will make us a visit to-night, because of the trail of the dogs.”