arts; there are
no carriages; and oxen as well as mules are used for riding. The water
comes from a big central well; around it the water-carts gather, and
their contents are then peddled around at the different houses. The
families showed the mixture of races characteristic of Brazil; one
mother, after the children had been photographed in their ordinary
costume, begged that we return and take them in their Sunday clothes,
which was accordingly done. In a year the railway from Rio will reach
Corumba; and then this city, and the country roundabout, will see much
development.

At this point we rejoined the rest of the party, and very glad we were
to see them. Cherrie and Miller had already collected some eight
hundred specimens of mammals and birds.

III. A JAGUAR-HUNT ON THE TAQUARY

The morning after our arrival at Corumba I asked Colonel Rondon to
inspect our outfit; for his experience of what is necessary in
tropical travelling has been gained through a quarter of a century of
arduous exploration in the wilderness. It was Fiala who had assembled
our food-tents, cooking-utensils, and supplies of all kinds, and he
and Sigg, during their stay in Corumba, had been putting everything in
shape for our start. Colonel Rondon at the end of his inspection said
he had nothing whatever to suggest; that it was extraordinary that
Fiala, without personal knowledge of the tropics, could have gathered
the things most necessary, with the minimum of bulk and maximum of
usefulness.

Miller had made a special study of the piranhas, which swarmed at one
of the camps he and Cherrie had made in the Chaco. So numerous were
they that the members of the party had to be exceedingly careful in
dipping up water. Miller did not find that they were cannibals toward
their own kind; they were "cannibals" only in the sense of eating the
flesh of men. When dead piranhas, and even when mortally injured
piranhas, with the blood flowing, were thrown among the ravenous
living, they were left unmolested. Moreover, it was Miller's
experience, the direct contrary of which we had been told, that
splashing and a commotion in the water attracted the piranhas, whereas
they rarely attacked anything that was motionless unless it was
bloody. Dead birds and mammals, thrown whole and unskinned into the
water were permitted to float off unmolested, whereas the skinned
carcass of a good-sized monkey was at once seized, pulled under the
water,