beginning of July, and we were now at the end of
September. Wet or not wet, I made the man come along. Finding the forest
comparatively clean, we covered another 20 kil. that day. We had a most
miserable night, rain coming down in sheets upon us. I was suffering from
high fever, chiefly from exhaustion and the effects of over-eating, most
injurious to my internal arrangements, which had got dried up during the
long sixteen days' fast. I shivered with cold the entire night.

When we got up the next morning, dripping all over, with water still
pouring down in bucketfuls upon us from above, Benedicto said that if it
went on much longer like that he should surely turn into a fish. He
looked comical, with water streaming down from his hair, his ears, nose
and coat.

The trousers which our friend Pedro Nunes had given me were made of cheap
calico, printed in little checks. They were of the kind that was usually
sold to the _seringueiros_, and looked pretty when they were new. But
they were a little too small, and had evidently not been shrunk before
they were made. With the great moisture that night they shrank so badly
all of a sudden that they split in four or five different places. I had
no way of mending them.

As we went on--on September 28th--we encountered a great deal of
entangled vegetation, many liane and thorns, which completely finished up
my lower garments. My coat also, which was of similar material, was
beginning to give signs of wear and tear, the sewing of the sleeves and
at the back having burst everywhere.

We were going over almost level ground that day, across forest sparsely
wooded and with much undergrowth of palms and ferns. We had drenching
rain the entire day. My trousers were in shreds, dangling and catching in
everything. When we had gone some eight or ten kilometres they were such
a trouble to me that I discarded them altogether. The coat, too, was
getting to be more of a nuisance than a protection. Owing to the
incessant rain we were only able to march 14 kil. that day.

On September 29th we again started off, marching due east. We had
slightly better weather, and were fortunate enough to shoot two monkeys,
a _coati_, and a _jacu_, the new man possessing a rifle of his own, for
which I had bought 200 cartridges from our friend Pedro Nunes. We had,
therefore, that day, a good meal of meat; but what terrible pain we felt
when we devoured the tough pieces of those animals, which we had broiled