Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/358

326 starlight. The dawn grew upon us at 5.30, and at 6.30 the sun gilded the mountain-tops. At eight we arrived at Rio das Pedras, our old station, breakfasted from our basket, and changed animals. I had arranged to ride my mule in the dark, but my good grey horse in the daylight, for he trotted well, and this would relieve the journey greatly. We had now ridden twelve miles. My mule was lazy, I had no spur, and besides the country was difficult. I had still twelve miles to go. So I changed for the grey. I passed over several bits of prairie ground, where I gave my grey "spirits." I arrived at twelve o'clock, two hours later than I had intended, at Casa Branca, the station where we had stopped five weeks previously. The sun had already been fierce for two hours. It is an excellent plan in Brazil to start early and ride your twenty-four or thirty miles before ten or eleven, and rest during the great heat of the day under shelter. It saves both man and beast, and enables them to last longer; and on a moonlight or starlight morning in the tropics you lose nothing of scenery, it is so bright. Casa Branca was an old broken-down house in a valley near a river. The only available room was occupied by an invalid. The woman of the house, be it remarked, had twenty-four children, and a cat for each child; so we had scanty room, but decent food—canjica (a rice mess), fowl roast and stewed, farinha (flour), coves (cabbage), with tocinho (bacon fat), and feijão (black beans). My sleeping-place was a room with four narrow mud walls, a rush ceiling, mud floor, a door which only kept shut by planting a stake against it, and a bit of sacking covered