Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/123

 through a rich moist clayey valley, covered with forests and abounding in game; whilst the banks of the Tapajos beyond Aveyros were barren sandy campos, with ranges of naked or scantily-wooded hills, forming a kind of country which I had always found very unproductive in Natural History objects in the dry season which had now set in.

We entered the mouth of the Cuparí on the evening of the following day (August 3rd). It was not more than 100 yards wide, but very deep: we found no bottom in the middle with a line of eight fathoms. The banks were gloriously wooded; the familiar foliage of the cacao growing abundantly amongst the mass of other trees reminding me of the forests of the main Amazons. We rowed for five or six miles, generally in a south-easterly direction although the river had many abrupt bends, and stopped for the night at a settler's house situated on a high bank and accessible only by a flight of rude wooden steps fixed in the clayey slope. The owners were two brothers, half-breeds, who with their families shared the large roomy dwelling; one of them was a blacksmith, and we found him working with two Indian lads at his forge, in an open shed under the shade of mango trees. They were the sons of a Portuguese immigrant who had settled here forty years previously and married a Mundurucú woman. He must have been a far more industrious man than the majority of his countrymen who emigrate to Brazil now-a-days, for there were signs of former extensive cultivation at the back of the house in groves of orange, lemon, and coffee trees, and a large plantation of cacao occupied the lower grounds.