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If it is doubtful if there are any Amazons an the river of that name, there is no doubt of there being Amazons at Dahomey. Some have a blue shirt with a blue or red scarf, with white-and-blue striped trousers and a white cap; others, the elephant-huntresses, have a heavy carbine, a short-bladed dagger, and two antelope horns fixed to their heads by a band of iron.
Below the mouth of the Madeira he landed once on the northern bank in a region inhabited only by tall Amazons, from whom the river received its name. But the tale of Amazons was really a sailor's romance, just as the Spaniards dreamed of Eldorado, or the land of gold. On they went and the river never ended.
To put it briefly, the only parts of the world that count much for human habitation are the mud deposits of the great rivers, and notably of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the Hoang Ho, the Yang-tse-Kiang; of the Po, the Rhone, the Danube, the Rhine, the Volga, the Dnieper; of the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Orinoco, the Amazons, the La Plata.
Some of them were found also on the Lower Amazons, and have been noticed in former chapters of this narrative. Of the remainder, the most remarkable is the Macaco barrigudo, or bag- bellied monkey of the Portuguese colonists, a species of Lagothrix.
Returning from a long journey, the hero undertook an expedition against the Amazons in order to finish the ninth adventure and bring to King Eurystheus the sword belt of the Amazon Hippolyta. The Amazons inhabited the region of the river Thermodon and were a race of strong women who followed the occupations of men. From their children they selected only such as were girls.
This seems sufficient to prove that no considerable volume of water passes by this medium from the Amazons to the Para, and that the opinion of those geographers is an incorrect one, who believe the Para to be one of the mouths of the great river. There is, however, another channel connecting the two rivers, which enters the Para six miles to the south of the Breves.
Burton presently caught sight of Gelele's body-guard of 1,000 women the famous Amazons, who were armed with muskets, and habited in tunics and white calottes. With great protruding lips, and no chin to speak of, they were surely the ugliest women in the world.
It was not more than a hundred yards wide, but very deep: we found no bottom in the middle with a line of eight fathoms. The banks were gloriously wooded, the familiar foliage of the cacao growing abundantly amongst the mass of other trees, reminding me of the forests of the main Amazons.
The women and children were sent to the towns to look out for themselves as best they could, while the men joined the insurgent army. In a number of cases wives refused to be separated from their husbands, and followed them into the ranks of the revolutionists, where they fought like the Amazons of old.
There were swarms of edible turtles, and the Indians caught them and collected their eggs; and the fish were abundant and various no wonder, when two thousand species of fish live in the basin of the Amazons. Shortly afterwards they glided past the mouth of the Madeira, a mile and a half broad, which discharges a volume of water little inferior to that of the main river.
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