Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/317

 mosquitoes, but the rain continued until at length everything was soaked, and we had no help for it but to bundle off to the canoes with drenched hammocks and garments. There was not nearly room enough in the flotilla to accommodate so large a number of persons lying at full length; moreover the night was pitch dark, and it was quite impossible in the gloom and confusion to get at a change of clothing. So there we lay, huddled together in the best way we could arrange ourselves, exhausted with fatigue and irritated beyond all conception by clouds of mosquitoes. I slept on a bench with a sail over me, my wet clothes clinging to my body, and to increase my discomfort, close beside me lay an Indian girl, one of Cardozo's domestics, who had a skin disfigured with black diseased patches, and whose thick clothing, not having been washed during the whole time we had been out (eighteen days), gave forth a most vile effluvia.

We spent the night of the 7th of November pleasantly on the smooth sands, where the jaguars again serenaded us, and on the succeeding morning commenced our return voyage to Ega. We first doubled the upper end of the island of Catuá, and then struck off for the right bank of the Solimoens. The river was here of immense width, and the current was so strong in the middle that it required the most strenuous exertions on the part of our paddlers to prevent us from being carried miles away down the stream. At night we reached Juteca, a small river which enters the Solimoens by a channel so narrow that a man might almost jump across it, but a furlong inwards expands into a very pretty lake