Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/315

 place luckily free from mosquitoes. The different portions of the party made arched coverings with the toldos or maranta-leaf awnings of their canoes to sleep under, fixing the edges in the sand. No one, however, seemed inclined to go to sleep, so after supper we all sat or lay around the large fires and amused ourselves. We had the fiddler with us, and in the intervals between the wretched tunes which he played, the usual amusement of story-telling beguiled the time: tales of hair-breadth escapes from jaguar, alligator, and so forth. There were amongst us a father and son who had been the actors, the previous year, in an alligator adventure on the edge of the praia we had just left. The son, whilst bathing, was seized by the thigh and carried under water: a cry was raised, and the father, rushing down the bank, plunged after the rapacious beast which was diving away with his victim. It seems almost incredible that a man could overtake and master the large cayman in his own element; but such was the case in this instance, for the animal was reached and forced to release his booty by the man's thrusting his thumb into his eye. The lad showed us the marks of the alligator's teeth in his thighs. We sat up until past midnight listening to these stories and assisting the flow of talk by frequent potations of burnt rum. A large shallow dish was filled with the liquor and fired: when it had burnt for a few minutes the flame was extinguished and each one helped himself by dipping a tea-cup into the vessel.

One by one the people dropped asleep, and then the quiet murmur of talk of the few who remained awake was