plains.  The midday sun was very hot; but it was hard to realize that we were in the torrid zone.  There were no mosquitoes, so that we never put up our nets when we went to bed; but wrapped ourselves in our blankets and slept soundly through the cool, pleasant nights.  Surely in the future this region will be the home of a healthy highly civilized population.  It is good for cattle-raising, and the valleys are fitted for agriculture.  From June to September the nights are often really cold.  Any sound northern race could live here; and in such a land, with such a climate, there would be much joy of living.

On these plains the Telegraphic Commission uses motor-trucks; and these now to relieve the mules and oxen; for some of them, especially among the oxen, already showed the effects of the strain.  Travelling in a wild country with a pack-train is not easy on the pack-animals.  It was strange to see these big motor-vans out in the wilderness where there was not a settler, not a civilized man except the employees of the Telegraphic Commission.  They were handled by Lieutenant Lauriado, who, with Lieutenant Mello, had taken special charge of our transport service; both were exceptionally good and competent men.

The following day we again rode on across the Plan Alto.  In the early afternoon, in the midst of a downpour of rain, we crossed the divide between the basins of the Paraguay and the Amazon.  That evening we camped on a brook whose waters ultimately ran into the Tapajos.  The rain fell throughout the afternoon, now lightly, now heavily, and the mule-train did not get up until dark.  But enough tents and flies were pitched to shelter all of us.  Fires were lit, and—­after a fourteen hours’ fast we feasted royally on beans and rice and pork and beef, seated around ox-skins spread upon the ground.  The sky cleared; the stars blazed down through the cool night; and wrapped in our blankets we slept soundly, warm and comfortable.

Next morning the trail had turned, and our course led northward and at times east of north.  We traversed the same high, rolling plains of coarse grass and stunted trees.  Kermit, riding a big, iron-mouthed, bull-headed white mule, rode off to one side on a hunt, and rejoined the line of march carrying two bucks of the little pampas-deer, or field deer, behind his saddle.  These deer are very pretty and graceful, with a tail like that of the Colombian blacktail.  Standing motionless facing one, in the sparse scrub, they are hard to make out; if seen sideways the reddish of their coats, contrasted with the greens and grays of the landscape, betrays them; and when they bound off the upraised white tail is very conspicuous.  They carefully avoid the woods in which their cousins the little bush deer are found, and go singly or in couples.  Their odor can be made out at quite a distance, but it is not rank.  They still carried their antlers.  Their venison was delicious.