第77章

The mouth of the channel lies about twenty-five miles from Villa Nova; the entrance is only about forty yards broad, but it expands, a short distance inland, into a large sheet of water.We suffered terribly from insect pests during the twenty-four hours we remained here.At night it was quite impossible to sleep for mosquitoes; they fell upon us by myriads, and without much piping came straight at our faces as thick as raindrops in a shower.The men crowded into the cabins, and then tried to expel the pests by the smoke from burnt rags, but it was of little avail, although we were half suffocated during the operation.In the daytime, the Motuca, a much larger and more formidable fly than the mosquito, insisted upon levying his tax of blood.We had been tormented by it for many days past, but this place seemed to be its metropolis.The species has been described by Perty, the author of the Entomological portion of Spix, and Martius' travels, under the name of Hadrus lepidotus.It is a member of the Tabanidae family, and indeed is closely related to the Haematopota pluvialis, a brown fly which haunts the borders of woods in summer time in England.The Motuca is of a bronzed-black colour;its proboscis is formed of a bundle of horny lancets, which are shorter and broader than is usually the case in the family to which it belongs.Its puncture does not produce much pain, but it makes such a large gash in the flesh that the blood trickles forth in little streams.Many scores of them were flying about the canoe all day, and sometimes eight or ten would settle on one's ankles at the same time.It is sluggish in its motions, and may be easily killed with the fingers when it settles.Penna went forward in the montaria to the Pirarucu fishing stations, on a lake lying further inland; but he did not succeed in reaching them on account of the length and intricacy of the channels; so after wasting a day, during which, however, I had a profitable ramble in the forest, we again crossed the river, and on the 16th continued our voyage along the northern shore.

The clay cliffs of Cararaucu are several miles in length.The hard pink and red coloured beds are here extremely thick, and in some places present a compact, stony texture.The total height of the cliff is from thirty to sixty feet above the mean level of the river, and the clay rests on strata of the same coarse iron-cemented conglomerate which has already been so often mentioned.

Large blocks of this latter have been detached and rolled by the force of currents up parts of the cliff where they are seen resting on terraces of the clay.On the top of all lies a bed of sand and vegetable mold, which supports a lofty forest, growing up to the very brink of the precipice.After passing these barreiros we continued our way along a low uninhabited coast, clothed, wherever it was elevated above high-water mark, with the usual vividly-coloured forests of the higher Ygapo lands, to which the broad and regular fronds of the Murumuru palm, here extremely abundant, served as a great decoration.Wherever the land was lower than the flood height of the Amazons, Cecropia trees prevailed, sometimes scattered over meadows of tall broad-leaved grasses, which surrounded shallow pools swarming with water-fowl.Alligators were common on most parts of the coast; in some places we also saw small herds of Capybaras (a large Rodent animal, like a colossal Guinea-pig) among the rank herbage on muddy banks, and now and then flocks of the graceful squirrel monkey (Chrysothrix sciureus), while the vivacious Caiarara (Cebus albifrons) were seen taking flying leaps from tree to tree.On the 22nd, we passed the mouth of the most easterly of the numerous channels which lead to the large interior lake of Saraca, and on the 23rd ,threaded a series of passages between islands, where we again saw human habitations, ninety miles distant from the last house at Cararaucu.On the 24th we arrived at Serpa.

Serpa is a small village, consisting of about eighty houses, built on a bank elevated twenty-five feet above the level of the river.The beds of Tabatinga clay, which are here intermingled with scoria-looking conglomerate, are in some parts of the declivity prettily variegated in colour; the name of the town in the Tupi language, Ita-coatiara, takes its origin from this circumstance, signifying striped or painted rock.It is an old settlement, and was once the seat of the district government, which had authority over the Barra of the Rio Negro.It was in 1849 a wretched-looking village, but it has since revived, on account of having been chosen by the Steamboat Company of the Amazons as a station for steam saw-mills and tile manufactories.

We arrived on Christmas Eve, when the village presented an animated appearance from the number of people congregated for the holidays.The port was full of canoes, large and small, from the montaria, with its arched awning of woven lianas and Maranta leaves, to the two-masted cuberta of the peddling trader, who had resorted to the place in the hope of trafficking with settlers coming from remote sitios to attend the festival.We anchored close to an igarite, whose owner was an old Juri Indian, disfigured by a large black tatooed patch in the middle of his face, and by his hair being close cropped, except a fringe in front of the head.