e a downpour, such as I have seldom seen,
and which lasted for two entire days. That was the dry season too! The
house in which we had put up--and through the roof of which we could
admire the stars at our ease while in bed--was turned into a regular
swimming-tank when the rain came. We had a good deal of trouble to keep
our things dry, propping them up on improvised stands of stones which we
removed from the crumbling walls of the building. Fortunately, most of my
pack-saddle cases were air- and water-tight, so that the contents could
not be injured. The wind blew with great fury--at the rate of 460
metres a minute, to be strictly accurate.

There was a humble hamlet at Rio Grande or Porto do Castanho, on the
Matto Grosso side, where we had crossed the Araguaya River. It was the
gloomiest of gloomy places even in glorious weather. Imagine it on a wet,
windy day. The few tiny one-storied cabins--they could hardly be called
houses--had got soaked with the storm, and looked miserable. The
inhabitants were busy baling water from inside their dwellings. Many
tiles of the roofs had been blown away, and those that remained had grown
extra dark with the moisture, with merely a bluish tinge from the
reflected light of the grey sky upon their shiny surfaces. The solitary
palm tree at the end of the oblong square looked pitiful, with its long
bladed leaves split and broken by the wind, while the dense foliage along
the river banks was now several tones darker and richer than we had seen
it before.

Under usual circumstances the _plaza_--or square--was so high above the
river that one could not see the water at all until one went to the edge
of the stream, but during flood the river rose as much as 20 ft. and
occasionally overflowed the greater portion of the square.

The grass of the square--a mere field--alone seemed happy in the damp.
Half dried and anaemic from the hot sun, it seemed to be quickly coming
back to life and vigour in those few hours which had rendered us all
miserable. My poor horses and mules, worn and sore, stood dripping and
wretched, with quivering knees, in the middle of the square--too
miserable to feed, only now and then slashing their long wet tails to
right or left to drive away impertinent flies.

With the storm the temperature had suddenly descended to 75 deg., and
everybody was shivering with cold after the oppressive heat before the
storm.

Upon the half-rotted wooden cross which stood in front