Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/50

26 penny or twopence is enough to give for such things, which are of no value to the natives; and though they will not search much after them for such a price, yet they will bring you all that come in their way when they know you will purchase them. Snakes were unpleasantly abundant at this time. I nearly trod on one about ten feet long, which rather startled. me, and it, too, to judge by the rapid manner in which it glided away. I caught also a small Amphisbena under the coffee-trees in our garden. Though it is known to have no poison-fangs, the Negroes declared it was very dangerous, and that its bite could not be cured. It is commonly known as the two-headed snake, from the tail being blunt and the head scarcely visible; and they believe that if it is cut in two, and the two parts thrown some yards apart, they will come together again, and join into an entire animal.

Among the curious things we meet with in the woods are large heaps of earth and sand, sometimes by the roadside, and sometimes extending quite across the path, making the pedestrian ascend and descend (a pleasing variety in this flat country), and looking just as if some Pará and Peru direct Railway Company" had commenced operations. These mounds are often thirty or forty feet long, by ten or fifteen wide, and about three or four feet high; but instead of being the work of a lot of railway labourers, we find it is all due to the industry of a native insect, the much-dreaded Saüba ant. This insect is of a light-red colour, about the size of our largest English species, the wood-ant, but with much more powerful jaws. It does great injury to young trees, and will sometimes strip them of their leaves in a single night. We often see, hurrying across the pathways, rows of small green leaves; these are the Saübas, each with a piece of leaf cut as smoothly as with scissors, and completely hiding the body from sight. The orange-tree is very subject to their attacks, and in our garden the young trees were each planted in the centre of a ring-shaped earthen vessel, which being filled with water completely surrounded the stem, preventing the ants from reaching it. Some places are so infested by them that it is useless planting anything. No means of destroying them are known, their numbers being so immense, as may readily be seen from the great quantities of earth they remove.

Many different kinds of wasps' and bees' nests are constantly