ts of a different type and bows and
arrows. The bows were seven feet long and the arrows five feet. There
were blunt-headed arrows for birds, arrows with long, sharp wooden
blades for tapir, deer, and other mammals; and the poisoned war-
arrows, with sharp barbs, poison-coated and bound on by fine thongs,
and with a long, hollow wooden guard to slip over the entire point and
protect it until the time came to use it. When people talk glibly of
"idle" savages they ignore the immense labor entailed by many of their
industries, and the really extraordinary amount of work they
accomplish by the skilful use of their primitive and ineffective
tools.

It was not until early in the afternoon that we started into the
"sertao,"[*] as Brazilians call the wilderness. We drove with us a
herd of oxen for food. After going about fifteen miles we camped
beside the swampy headwaters of a little brook. It was at the spot
where nearly seven years previously Rondon and Lyra had camped on the
trip when they discovered Utiarity Falls and penetrated to the
Juruena. When they reached this place they had been thirty-six hours
without food. They killed a bush deer--a small deer--and ate literally
every particle. The dogs devoured the entire skin. For much of the
time on this trip they lived on wild fruit, and the two dogs that
remained alive would wait eagerly under the trees and eat the fruit
that was shaken down.

[*] Pronounced "sairtown," as nearly as, with our preposterous methods
of spelling and pronunciation, I can render it.

In the late afternoon the piums were rather bad at this camp, but we
had gloves and head-nets, and were not bothered; and although there
were some mosquitoes we slept well under our mosquito-nets. The frogs
in the swamp uttered a peculiar, loud shout. Miller told of a little
tree-frog in Colombia which swelled itself out with air until it
looked like the frog in Aesop's fables, and then brayed like a mule;
and Cherrie told of a huge frog in Guiana that uttered a short, loud
roar.

Next day the weather was still fair. Our march lay through country
like that which we had been traversing for ten days. Skeletons of
mules and oxen were more frequent; and once or twice by the wayside we
passed the graves of officers or men who had died on the road. Barbed
wire encircled the desolate little mounds. We camped on the west bank
of the Burity River. Here there is a balsa, or ferry, run by two
Parecis Indians, as emplo