was fertile; it will be a fine site for a coffee-plantation when this region is open to settlement.  Surely such a rich and fertile land cannot be permitted to remain idle, to lie as a tenantless wilderness, while there are such teeming swarms of human beings in the overcrowded, over-peopled countries of the Old World.  The very rapids and waterfalls which now make the navigation of the river so difficult and dangerous would drive electric trolleys up and down its whole length and far out on either side, and run mills and factories, and lighten the labor on farms.  With the incoming of settlement and with the steady growth of knowledge how to fight and control tropical diseases, fear of danger to health would vanish.  A land like this is a hard land for the first explorers, and perhaps for their immediate followers, but not for the people who come after them.

In mid-afternoon we were once more in the canoes; but we had paddled with the current only a few minutes, we had gone only a kilometre, when the roar of rapids in front again forced us to haul up to the bank.  As usual, Rondon, Lyra, and Kermit, with Antonio Correa, explored both sides while camp was being pitched.  The rapids were longer and of steeper descent than the last, but on the opposite or western side there was a passage down which we thought we could get the empty dugouts at the cost of dragging them only a few yards at one spot.  The loads were to be carried down the hither bank, for a kilometre, to the smooth water.  The river foamed between great rounded masses of rock, and at one point there was a sheer fall of six or eight feet.  We found and ate wild pineapples.  Wild beans were in flower.  At dinner we had a toucan and a couple of parrots, which were very good.

All next day was spent by Lyra in superintending our three best watermen as they took the canoes down the west side of the rapids, to the foot, at the spot to which the camp had meantime been shifted.  In the forest some of the huge sipas, or rope vines, which were as big as cables, bore clusters of fragrant flowers.  The men found several honey-trees, and fruits of various kinds, and small cocoanuts; they chopped down an ample number of palms, for the palm-cabbage; and, most important of all, they gathered a quantity of big Brazil-nuts, which when roasted tasted like the best of chestnuts and are nutritious; and they caught a number of big piranhas, which were good eating.  So we all had a feast, and everybody had enough to eat and was happy.

By these rapids, at the fall, Cherrie found some strange carvings on a bare mass of rock.  They were evidently made by men a long time ago.  As far as is known, the Indians thereabouts make no such figures now.  They were in two groups, one on the surface of the rock facing the land, the other on that facing the water.  The latter were nearly obliterated.  The former were in good preservation, the figures sharply cut into the rock.  They consisted, upon the upper