n be sure, for the interest they took
in human life, but because of the quantity of valuable rubber which they
expected would be collected before their return. Those poor creatures had
no possible way of escape, except under extraordinary circumstances.
They were conveyed to their stations overland by means of pack animals,
which at once were sent back and did not return until the end of the
collecting season. Even then, if the seringueiro wanted to get away, he
was frequently compelled to purchase an animal from his employer at three
or four times its actual value--that is to say, perhaps sixty or eighty
pounds sterling. So that the more a man worked or earned the more he
became indebted to his master.

Like all men who have lived a great deal in exile and solitude, the
seringueiros--nearly all blacks or mulattos--were extraordinarily
generous. They always wanted to give you all they possessed--which was
next to nothing, but meant a fortune to them. They would deprive
themselves of anything if they thought they could give the slightest
pleasure.

We left the seringueiro. I feared the poor man could not live long in his
broken-down condition. He was most grateful for some medicine and
provisions I left with him. His farewell to us was in so melancholy a
voice, as he tried to lift himself out of an improvised bamboo couch,
that for days it rang in my ears, and before my eyes constantly remained
his skeleton-like, sunken features as he waved his farewell and fell back
exhausted.

Behind a narrow barrier of sand, about 10 ft. high, as we proceeded down
stream in a north-westerly direction, was a large lagoon.

The river was really too beautiful for words, the clear green water
reflecting with precision in deeper tones the view before us. Only when
its course was disturbed and diverted by a sharp rock or by the branches
of a fallen and dying tree, the successive angular ridges of the troubled
water shone like polished silver in parallel lines from the reflected
light of the sun, just like a huge luminous skeleton of a fish.

The trees were truly wonderful along the river--tall and healthy, with
dense deep green foliage. But Nature seemed absolutely asleep. Barring
the few swallows we had seen soon after our departure, and the
_ariranhas_, we went the whole day without hearing the song of a bird, or
the howling of a wild animal. We did hear a noise resembling the bark of
a dog--so much did it resemble it that my dogs ba