It was not pleasant to have to stop for some days; thanks to the rapids, we had made slow progress, and with our necessarily limited supply of food, and no knowledge whatever of what was ahead of us, it was important to make good time.  But there was no alternative.  We had to build either one big canoe or two small ones.  It was raining heavily as the men started to explore in different directions for good canoe trees.  Three—­which ultimately proved not very good for the purpose—­were found close to camp; splendid-looking trees, one of them five feet in diameter three feet from the ground.  The axemen immediately attacked this one under the superintendence of Colonel Rondon.  Lyra and Kermit started in opposite directions to hunt.  Lyra killed a jacu for us, and Kermit killed two monkeys for the men.  Toward night fall it cleared.  The moon was nearly full, and the foaming river gleamed like silver.

Our men were “regional volunteers,” that is, they had enlisted in the service of the Telegraphic Commission especially to do this wilderness work, and were highly paid, as was fitting, in view of the toil, hardship, and hazard to life and health.  Two of them had been with Colonel Rondon during his eight months’ exploration in 1909, at which time his men were regulars, from his own battalion of engineers.  His four aides during the closing months of this trip were Lieutenants Lyra, Amarante, Alencarliense, and Pyrineus.  The naturalist Miranda Ribeiro also accompanied him.  This was the year when, marching on foot through an absolutely unknown wilderness, the colonel and his party finally reached the Gy-Parana, which on the maps was then (and on most maps is now) placed in an utterly wrong course, and over a degree out of its real position.  When they reached the affluents of the Gy-Parana a third of the members of the party were so weak with fever that they could hardly crawl.  They had no baggage.  Their clothes were in tatters, and some of the men were almost naked.  For months they had had no food except what little game they shot, and especially the wild fruits and nuts; if it had not been for the great abundance of the Brazil-nuts they would all have died.  At the first big stream they encountered they built a canoe, and Alencarliense took command of it and descended to map the course of the river.  With him went Ribeiro, the doctor Tanageira, who could no longer walk on account of the ulceration of one foot, three men whom the fever had rendered unable longer to walk, and six men who were as yet well enough to handle the canoe.  By the time the remainder of the party came to the next navigable river eleven more fever-stricken men had nearly reached the end of their tether.  Here they ran across a poor devil who had for four months been lost in the forest and was dying of slow starvation.  He had eaten nothing but Brazil-nuts and the grubs of insects.  He could no longer walk, but could sit erect and totter feebly for a few feet.  Another canoe was built,