Next day we journeyed to the telegraph station at Bonofacio, through alternate spells of glaring sunshine and heavy rain.  On the way we stopped at an aldea-village of Nhambiquaras.  We first met a couple of men going to hunt, with bows and arrows longer than themselves.  A rather comely young woman, carrying on her back a wickerwork basket, or creel, supported by a forehead band, and accompanied by a small child, was with them.  At the village there were a number of men, women, and children.  Although as completely naked as the others we had met, the members of this band were more ornamented with beads, and wore earrings made from the inside of mussel-shells or very big snail-shells.  They were more hairy than the ones we had so far met.  The women, but not the men, completely remove the hair from their bodies—­ and look more, instead of less, indecent in consequence.  The chief, whose body was painted red with the juice of a fruit, had what could fairly be styled a mustache and imperial; and one old man looked somewhat like a hairy Ainu, or perhaps even more like an Australian black fellow.  My companion told me that this probably represented an infusion of negro blood, and possibly of mulatto blood, from runaway slaves of the old days, when some of the Matto Grosso mines were worked by slave labor.  They also thought it possible that this infiltration of African negroes might be responsible for the curious shape of the bigger huts, which were utterly unlike their flimsy, ordinary shelters, and bore no resemblance in shape to those of the other Indian tribes of this region; whereas they were not unlike the ordinary beehive huts of the agricultural African negroes.  There were in this village several huts or shelters open at the sides, and two of the big huts.  These were of closely woven thatch, circular in outline, with a rounded dome, and two doors a couple of feet high opposite each other, and no other opening.  There were fifteen or twenty people to each hut.  Inside were their implements and utensils, such as wicker baskets (some of them filled with pineapples), gourds, fire-sticks, wooden knives, wooden mortars, and a board for grating mandioc, made of a thick slab of wood inset with sharp points of a harder wood.  From the Brazilians one or two of them had obtained blankets, and one a hammock; and they had also obtained knives, which they sorely needed, for they are not even in the stone age.  One woman shielded herself from the rain by holding a green palm-branch down her back.  Another had on her head what we at first thought to be a monkey-skin head-dress.  But it was a little, live, black monkey.  It stayed habitually with its head above her forehead, and its arms and legs spread so that it lay moulded to the shape of her head; but both woman and monkey showed some reluctance about having their photographs taken.