an hour. Ahead of us the brown water street
stretched in curves between endless walls of dense tropical forest. It
was like passing through a gigantic greenhouse. Wawasa and burity
palms, cecropias, huge figs, feathery bamboos, strange yellow-stemmed
trees, low trees with enormous leaves, tall trees with foliage as
delicate as lace, trees with buttressed trunks, trees with boles
rising smooth and straight to lofty heights, all woven together by a
tangle of vines, crowded down to the edge of the river. Their drooping
branches hung down to the water, forming a screen through which it was
impossible to see the bank, and exceedingly difficult to penetrate to
the bank. Rarely one of them showed flowers--large white blossoms, or
small red or yellow blossoms. More often the lilac flowers of the
begonia-vine made large patches of color. Innumerable epiphytes
covered the limbs, and even grew on the roughened trunks. We saw
little bird life--a darter now and then, and kingfishers flitting from
perch to perch. At long intervals we passed a ranch. At one the large,
red-tiled, whitewashed house stood on a grassy slope behind mango-
trees. The wooden shutters were thrown back from the unglazed windows,
and the big rooms were utterly bare--not a book, not an ornament. A
palm, loaded with scores of the pendulous nests of the troupials,
stood near the door. Behind were orange-trees and coffee-plants, and
near by fields of bananas, rice, and tobacco. The sallow foreman was
courteous and hospitable. His dark-skinned women-folk kept in the
furtive background. Like most of the ranches, it was owned by a
company with headquarters at Caceres.

The trip was pleasant and interesting, although there was not much to
do on the boat. It was too crowded to move around save with a definite
purpose. We enjoyed the scenery; we talked--in English, Portuguese,
bad French, and broken German. Some of us wrote. Fiala made sketches
of improved tents, hammocks, and other field equipment, suggested by
what he had already seen. Some of us read books. Colonel Rondon, neat,
trim, alert, and soldierly, studied a standard work on applied
geographical astronomy. Father Zahm read a novel by Fogazzaro. Kermit
read Camoens and a couple of Brazilian novels, "O Guarani" and
"Innocencia." My own reading varied from "Quentin Durward" and Gibbon
to the "Chanson de Roland." Miller took out his little pet owl Moses,
from the basket in which Moses dwelt, and gave him food and