poisonous serpent fangs which they mix with it.

"It is indeed a terrible poison," said Manoel. "It attacks at once those
nerves by which the movements are subordinated to the will. But the
heart is not touched, and it does not cease to beat until the extinction
of the vital functions, and besides no antidote is known to the poison,
which commences by numbness of the limbs."

Very fortunately, these Muras made no hostile demonstrations, although
they entertain a profound hatred toward the whites. They have, in truth,
no longer the courage of their ancestors.

At nightfall a five-holed flute was heard behind the trees in the
island, playing several airs in a minor key. Another flute answered.
This interchange of musical phrases lasted for two or three minutes, and
the Muras disappeared.

Fragoso, in an exuberant moment, had tried to reply by a song in his own
fashion, but Lina had clapped her hand on his mouth, and prevented his
showing off his insignificant singing talents, which he was so willingly
lavish of.

On the 2d of August, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the raft arrived
twenty leagues away from there at Lake Apoara, which is fed by the black
waters of the river of the same name, and two days afterward, about five
o'clock, it stopped at the entrance into Lake Coary.

This lake is one of the largest which communicates with the Amazon, and
it serves as a reservoir for different rivers. Five or six affluents
run into it, and there are stored and mixed up, and emerge by a narrow
channel into the main stream.

After catching a glimpse of the hamlet of Tahua-Miri, mounted on its
piles as on stilts, as a protection against inundation from the floods,
which often sweep up over these low sand banks, the raft was moored for
the night.

The stoppage was made in sight of the village of Coary, a dozen houses,
considerably dilapidated, built in the midst of a thick mass of orange
and calabash trees.

Nothing can be more changeable than the aspect of this village, for
according to the rise or fall of the water the lake stretches away on
all sides of it, or is reduced to a narrow canal, scarcely deep enough
to communicate with the Amazon.

On the following morning, that of the 5th of August, they started at
dawn, passing the canal of Yucura, belonging to the tangled system of
lakes and furos of the Rio Zapura, and on the morning of the 6th of
August they reached the entrance to Lake Miana.

No fresh incident