Big toucans called overhead, lustrous
green-black in color, with white throats, red gorgets, red-and-yellow
tail coverts, and huge black-and-yellow bills. Here the soil was
fertile; it will be a fine site for a coffee-plantation when this
region is open to settlement. Surely such a rich and fertile land
cannot be permitted to remain idle, to lie as a tenantless wilderness,
while there are such teeming swarms of human beings in the
overcrowded, over-peopled countries of the Old World. The very rapids
and waterfalls which now make the navigation of the river so difficult
and dangerous would drive electric trolleys up and down its whole
length and far out on either side, and run mills and factories, and
lighten the labor on farms. With the incoming of settlement and with
the steady growth of knowledge how to fight and control tropical
diseases, fear of danger to health would vanish. A land like this is a
hard land for the first explorers, and perhaps for their immediate
followers, but not for the people who come after them.

In mid-afternoon we were once more in the canoes; but we had paddled
with the current only a few minutes, we had gone only a kilometre,
when the roar of rapids in front again forced us to haul up to the
bank. As usual, Rondon, Lyra, and Kermit, with Antonio Correa,
explored both sides while camp was being pitched. The rapids were
longer and of steeper descent than the last, but on the opposite or
western side there was a passage down which we thought we could get
the empty dugouts at the cost of dragging them only a few yards at one
spot. The loads were to be carried down the hither bank, for a
kilometre, to the smooth water. The river foamed between great rounded
masses of rock, and at one point there was a sheer fall of six or
eight feet. We found and ate wild pineapples. Wild beans were in
flower. At dinner we had a toucan and a couple of parrots, which were
very good.

All next day was spent by Lyra in superintending our three best
watermen as they took the canoes down the west side of the rapids, to
the foot, at the spot to which the camp had meantime been shifted. In
the forest some of the huge sipas, or rope vines, which were as big as
cables, bore clusters of fragrant flowers. The men found several
honey-trees, and fruits of various kinds, and small cocoanuts; they
chopped down an ample number of palms, for the palm-cabbage; and, most
important of all, they gathered a quantity of big Brazil-