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It is generally made as a liquid, but the Juri and Miranha tribes on the Japura make it up in the form of a black paste by a mode of preparation I could not learn; it is then called Tucupi-pixuna, or black Tucupi I have seen the Indians on the Tapajos, where fish is scarce, season Tucupi with Sauba ants.
They are certainly found among the Red Negroes; but, unfortunately for the African theory, it is equally certain that they are told by savage Indians of the Amazon's Valley, away up on the Tapajos, Red Negro, and Tapura. The animal stories told by the negroes in our Southern States and in Brazil were brought by them from Africa.
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.
Besides the Araras and the Mundurucus, the latter a tribe friendly to the whites, attached to agriculture, and inhabiting the interior of the country from the Madeira to beyond the Tapajos, two other tribes of Indians now inhabit the lower Madeira, namely, the Parentintins and the Muras.
At length, after rounding a projecting bluff, the bay at Mapiri is reached. The river view is characteristic of the Tapajos; the shores are wooded, and on the opposite side is a line of clay cliffs with hills in the background clothed with a rolling forest.
He and his assistants performed a similar service for the Juruena, discovering the sources, discovering and descending some of the branches, and for the first time making a trustworthy map of the main river itself, until its junction with the Tapajos.
A person may travel, however, on foot, as Indians frequently do, in the dry season for fifty or sixty miles along the broad clean sandy beaches of the Tapajos. The only obstacles are the rivulets, most of which are fordable when the waters are low. To the east my rambles extended to the banks of the Mahica inlet.
They could now scarcely muster forty; but the horde has no longer a close political connection with the main body of the tribe, which inhabits the banks of the Tapajos, six days' journey from the Cupari settlement. I spent the remainder of the day here, sending Aracu and the men to fish, while I amused myself with the Tushaua and his people.
In the Amazonas the tides are felt a hundred leagues from the mouth; and, whilst the stream moves seawards, the level of the water rises, proving an evident under-current. Mr. Bates has detected the influence of oceanic tides at a point on the Tapajos, 530 miles distant from its mouth, such is the amazing flatness of the country's profile: here we find the reverse.
To descend or ascend the ordinary great highway rivers of South America, such as the Amazon, Paraguay, Tapajos, and, in its lower course, the Orinoco, is now so safe and easy, whether by steam- boat or big, native cargo-boat, that people are apt to forget the very serious difficulties offered by the streams, often themselves great rivers, which run into or form the upper courses of these same water highways.
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