Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/329

Rh and through rivers, but incessantly up and down, without any repose of level ground.

We rode for more than four hours, and then stopped at a village called Morro Vermelho, where we stopped an hour for breakfast and to change animals.

Our road after this, till six o'clock in the evening, lay through the most exquisite forests, but with terrible footing for the mules—thick, pudding-like, wet mud, and loose, slippery stones, corduroys of hard mud striping some of the most difficult places, where only a surefooted mule can tread. We stopped, in passing, at the house of a Mr. Brockenshaw, an English miner. It was a tumbledown ranch, but in the wildest, most desolate, and most beautiful spot imaginable. The chief features of the scenery were mountain-peaks, virgin forests, and rivers. And oh the foliage of the forest! The immense avenues of leafage looked like mysterious labyrinths, with castles and arches of ferns forty feet high. We crossed an awful serra all in ruts, and full of scarped rock, mud-holes, or atoleiros; the highest point was four thousand two hundred feet. Just as we were at the worst of our difficulties, and Mr. E had broken his crupper, we heard a cheery English voice shouting behind us, "O! da casa?" ("Any one at home?"), which is what people say in Brazil when they enter a house apparently empty and want to make somebody hear at the back. Turning, we beheld a Scotch gentleman with a merry face and snow-white hair, and a beard like floss silk down to his waist. The Brazilians call him "O Padre Eterno," as he is like the picture of God the Father. He was Mr. Brown,