tree, because a thick milky
juice runs freely from any cut. Our camaradas eagerly drank the white
fluid that flowed from the wounds made by their axes. I tried it. The
taste was not unpleasant, but it left a sticky feeling in the mouth.
The helmsman of my boat, Luiz, a powerful negro, chopped into the
tree, balancing himself with springy ease on a slight scaffolding. The
honey was in a hollow, and had been made by medium-sized stingless
bees. At the mouth of the hollow they had built a curious entrance of
their own, in the shape of a spout of wax about a foot long. At the
opening the walls of the spout showed the wax formation, but elsewhere
it had become in color and texture indistinguishable from the bark of
the tree. The honey was delicious, sweet and yet with a tart flavor.
The comb differed much from that of our honey-bees. The honey-cells
were very large, and the brood-cells, which were small, were in a
single instead of a double row. By this tree I came across an example
of genuine concealing coloration. A huge tree-toad, the size of a
bullfrog, was seated upright--not squatted flat--on a big rotten limb.
It was absolutely motionless; the yellow brown of its back, and its
dark sides, exactly harmonized in color with the light and dark
patches on the log; the color was as concealing, here in its natural
surroundings, as is the color of our common wood-frog among the dead
leaves of our woods. When I stirred it up it jumped to a small twig,
catching hold with the disks of its finger-tips, and balancing itself
with unexpected ease for so big a creature, and then hopped to the
ground and again stood motionless. Evidently it trusted for safety to
escaping observation. We saw some monkeys and fresh tapir sign, and
Kermit shot a jacu for the pot.

At about three o'clock I was in the lead, when the current began to
run more quickly. We passed over one or two decided ripples, and then
heard the roar of rapids ahead, while the stream began to race. We
drove the canoe into the bank, and then went down a tapir trail, which
led alongside the river, to reconnoiter. A quarter of a mile's walk
showed us that there were big rapids, down which the canoes could not
go; and we returned to the landing. All the canoes had gathered there,
and Rondon, Lyra, and Kermit started down-stream to explore. They
returned in an hour, with the information that the rapids continued
for a long distance, with falls and steep pitches of broken water,