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The river assumes a new aspect, widening into great sheets of water dotted with flat islands lying far apart, and in its lake-like proportions justifying the Guaranian meaning of its name "like the sea." So far-reaching indeed are these expanses of water that when a brisk south-east wind rises large vessels in them roll and pitch as in the open bay.
The very name of the Cordillera of Caaguazu bears testimony to the abundance of the yerba, caa meaning maté in the Guaranian language, and guazu, "great" or "much." As seen from the elevation on which Villa Rica stands, this mountain-range, twelve leagues distant, stretches along the horizon an undulating mass of blue.
As they thus pass in single file, the customary mode of walking with the Guaranian women, nothing can be more coquettish than the pose of the jugs on their heads. They resemble an ancient bas-relief. Some of them have admirable figures, and nearly all have fine teeth. Though the type of the race is not a handsome one, owing to the high cheek-bones and square chin, many individuals are pretty.
I'll finish up this catalog, a little dry but quite accurate, with the series of bony fish I observed: eels belonging to the genus Apteronotus whose snow-white snout is very blunt, the body painted a handsome black and armed with a very long, slender, fleshy whip; long sardines from the genus Odontognathus, like three-decimeter pike, shining with a bright silver glow; Guaranian mackerel furnished with two anal fins; black-tinted rudderfish that you catch by using torches, fish measuring two meters and boasting white, firm, plump meat that, when fresh, tastes like eel, when dried, like smoked salmon; semired wrasse sporting scales only at the bases of their dorsal and anal fins; grunts on which gold and silver mingle their luster with that of ruby and topaz; yellow-tailed gilthead whose flesh is extremely dainty and whose phosphorescent properties give them away in the midst of the waters; porgies tinted orange, with slender tongues; croakers with gold caudal fins; black surgeonfish; four-eyed fish from Surinam, etc.
Indeed, M. Forgues remembers to have seen a Guaranian mother, with her little one straddling her hip, endeavoring to quiet the child's cries by placing between its lips the half-chewed end of her cigar. Among the women of this class marriages are rare.
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