the forest, skilled veterans in wilderness work. They were lithe as
panthers and brawny as bears. They swam like waterdogs. They were
equally at home with pole and paddle, with axe and machete; and one
was a good cook and others were good men around camp. They looked like
pirates in the pictures of Howard Pyle or Maxfield Parrish; one or two
of them were pirates, and one worse than a pirate; but most of them
were hard-working, willing, and cheerful. They were white,--or,
rather, the olive of southern Europe,--black, copper-colored, and of
all intermediate shades. In my canoe Luiz the steersman, the headman,
was a Matto Grosso negro; Julio the bowsman was from Bahia and of pure
Portuguese blood; and the third man, Antonio, was a Parecis Indian.

The actual surveying of the river was done by Colonel Rondon and Lyra,
with Kermit as their assistant. Kermit went first in his little canoe
with the sighting-rod, on which two disks, one red and one white, were
placed a metre apart. He selected a place which commanded as long
vistas as possible up-stream and down, and which therefore might be at
the angle of a bend; landed; cut away the branches which obstructed
the view; and set up the sighting-pole--incidentally encountering
maribundi wasps and swarms of biting and stinging ants. Lyra, from his
station up-stream, with his telemetre established the distance, while
Colonel Rondon with the compass took the direction, and made the
records. Then they moved on to the point Kermit had left, and Kermit
established a new point within their sight. The first half-day's work
was slow. The general course of the stream was a trifle east of north,
but at short intervals it bent and curved literally toward every point
of the compass. Kermit landed nearly a hundred times, and we made but
nine and a third kilometres.

My canoe ran ahead of the surveying canoes. The height of the water
made the going easy, for most of the snags and fallen trees were well
beneath the surface. Now and then, however, the swift water hurried us
toward ripples that marked ugly spikes of sunken timber, or toward
uprooted trees that stretched almost across the stream. Then the
muscles stood out on the backs and arms of the paddlers as stroke on
stroke they urged us away from and past the obstacle. If the leaning
or fallen trees were the thorny, slender-stemmed boritana palms, which
love the wet, they were often, although plunged beneath the river, in
full and vigorou