Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/428

 her race I had yet seen. She was tall, and very stout; in colour much lighter than the ordinary Indian tint, and her ways altogether were more like those of a careless, laughing country wench, such as might be met with any day amongst the labouring class in villages in our own country, than a cannibal. I heard this artless maiden relate, in the coolest manner possible, how she ate a portion of the bodies of the young men whom her tribe had roasted. But what increased greatly the incongruity of this business, the young widow of one of the victims, a neighbour of mine, happened to be present during the narrative, and showed her interest in it by laughing at the broken Portuguese in which the girl related the horrible story.

In the fourth month of my sojourn at St. Paulo I had a serious illness, an attack of the "sizoens," or ague of the country, which, as it left me with shattered health and damped enthusiasm, led to my abandoning the plan I had formed of proceeding to the Peruvian towns of Pebas and Moyobamba, 250 and 600 miles further west, and so completing the examination of the Natural History of the Amazonian plains up to the foot of the Andes. I made a very large collection at St. Paulo, and employed a collector at Tabatinga and on the banks of the Jauarí for several months, so that I acquired a very fair knowledge altogether of the productions of the country bordering the Amazons to the end of the Brazilian territory, a distance of 1900 miles from the Atlantic at the mouth of the Pará; but beyond