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But the glory which Pheidias obtained by the reality of his work made him an object of envy and hatred, especially when in his sculpture of the battle with the Amazons on the shield of the goddess he introduced his own portrait as a bald-headed old man lifting a great stone with both hands, and also a very fine representation of Perikles, fighting with an Amazon.
"Where the liar dreamt of or invented his cannon-ball," he says, "I cannot tell, inasmuch as he never saw the city of Ostend in his life; but the said cannon-ball, to my great sorrow, did come one afternoon through my office, shot from the enemy's great battery, which very much damaged not his memoirs but mine; taking off the legs and arms at the same time of three poor invalid soldiers seated in the sun before my door and killing them on the spot, and just missing my wife, then great with child, who stood by me with faithfulness through all the sufferings of the bloody siege and presented me twice during its continuance, by the help of Almighty God, with young Amazons or daughters of war."
After his departure, I remounted the river to Curupa with my canoe, escorted by one of greater dimensions, sent with me by the commandant of that fort on my voyage to Para, a city which, as you have justly remarked, stands on a large river, considered, but improperly, the right arm of the Amazons, as the river of Para merely communicates with the Amazons by a channel hollowed by the tides, and called Tagipuru.
Having fully examined these beautiful specimens of Greek art of the time of Pericles, the visitor should turn at once to the remaining slabs, which are devoted to the illustration of Plutarch gives a graphic account of those dissensions between Theseus and the Amazons, which terminated in the famous war here celebrated. But Bion says, he took and carried her off by a stratagem.
I noticed it in most places on the banks of the Amazons but the species is not very common on the main river, and its presence is there scarcely noticed, because it does not attack man, and the sting is not so virulent as it is in the same species on the banks of the Tapajos.
The tides are extremely intricate throughout all the infinite channels and creeks which intersect the lands of the Amazons delta. The moon now broke forth and lighted up the trunks of colossal trees, the leaves of monstrous Jupati palms which arched over the creek, and revealed groups of arborescent arums standing like rows of spectres on its banks.
These matters arranged, the house put in order, and a rude table, with a few chairs, bought or borrowed to furnish the house with, I was ready in three or four days to commence my Natural History explorations in the neighbourhood. I found Santarem quite a different sort of place from the other settlements on the Amazons.
This is the general character of the country of the Upper Amazons; a land of small elevation and abruptly undulated, the hollows forming narrow valleys in the dry months, and deep navigable creeks in the wet months.
In the middle part of the Lower Amazons, about Obydos and Villa Nova, where many of the lakes with their channels of communication with the trunk stream dry up in the fine months, the alligator buries itself in the mud and becomes dormant, sleeping till the rainy season returns. On the Upper Amazons, where the dry season is never excessive, it has not this habit, but is lively all the year round.
We arrived, on the 3rd of December, at the mouth of the Jutahi, a considerable stream about half a mile broad, and flowing with a very sluggish current. This is one of the series of six rivers, from 400 to 1000 miles in length, which flow from the southwest through unknown lands lying between Bolivia and the Upper Amazons, and enter this latter river between the Madeira and the Ucayali.
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