All day we steamed slowly up-stream.  We passed two or three fazendas.  At one, where we halted to get milk, the trees were overgrown with pretty little yellow orchids.  At dark we moored at a spot where there were no branches to prevent our placing the boats directly alongside the bank.  There were hardly any mosquitoes.  Most of the party took their hammocks ashore, and the camp was pitched amid singularly beautiful surroundings.  The trees were wawasa palms, some with the fronds cresting very tall trunks, some with the fronds—­seemingly longer—­rising almost from the ground.  The fronds were of great length; some could not have been less than fifty feet long.  Bushes and tall grass, dew-drenched and glittering with the green of emeralds, grew in the open spaces between.  We left at sunrise the following morning.  One of the sailors had strayed inland.  He got turned round and could not find the river; and we started before discovering his absence.  We stopped at once, and with much difficulty he forced his way through the vine-laced and thorn-guarded jungle toward the sound of the launch’s engines and of the bugle which was blown.  In this dense jungle, when the sun is behind clouds, a man without a compass who strays a hundred yards from the river may readily become hopelessly lost.

As we ascended the river the wawasa palms became constantly more numerous.  At this point, for many miles, they gave their own character to the forest on the river banks.  Everywhere their long, curving fronds rose among the other trees, and in places their lofty trunks made them hold their heads higher than the other trees.  But they were never as tall as the giants among the ordinary trees.  On one towering palm we noticed a mass of beautiful violet orchids growing from the side of the trunk, half-way to the top.  On another big tree, not a palm, which stood in a little opening, there hung well over a hundred troupials’ nests.  Besides two or three small ranches we this day passed a large ranch.  The various houses and sheds, all palm-thatched, stood by the river in a big space of cleared ground, dotted with wawasa palms.  A native house-boat was moored by the bank.  Women and children looked from the unglazed windows of the houses; men stood in front of them.  The biggest house was enclosed by a stockade of palm-logs, thrust end-on into the ground.  Cows and oxen grazed round about; and carts with solid wheels, each wheel made of a single disk of wood, were tilted on their poles.

We made our noonday halt on an island where very tall trees grew, bearing fruits that were pleasant to the taste.  Other trees on the island were covered with rich red and yellow blossoms; and masses of delicate blue flowers and of star-shaped white flowers grew underfoot.  Hither and thither across the surface of the river flew swallows, with so much white in their plumage that as they flashed in the sun they seemed to have snow-white bodies, borne by dark wings.