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From Corumba there is a regular service by shallow steamers to Cuyaba, at the head of one fork, and to Sao Luis de Caceres, at the head of the other. The steamers are not powerful and the voyage to each little city takes a week. There are other forks that are navigable. Above Cuyaba and Caceres launches go up-stream for several days' journey, except during the dryest parts of the season.
They would fill up the holes and ruts, and, in such intense heat, why do needless work? Corumba is a typical Brazilian town. Little carts, drawn by a string of goats or rams, thread their way through the streets. Any animal but the human must do the work. As the majority of the people go barefooted, the patriarchal custom prevails of having water offered on entering a house to wash the feet.
With these they hooked into the branches and dragged themselves up along the bank, in addition to poling where the depth permitted it. The river was as big as the Paraguay at Corumba; but, in striking contrast to the Paraguay, there were few water-birds. We ran some rather stiff rapids, the Infernino, without unloading, in the morning.
The naturalists found the bird fauna totally different from that which they had been collecting in the hill country near Corumba, seventy or eighty miles distant; and birds swarmed, both species and individuals. South America has the most extensive and most varied avifauna of all the continents.
Several steamers came out to meet us, and accompanied us for a dozen miles, with bands playing and the passengers cheering, just as if we were nearing some town on the Hudson. Corumba is on a steep hillside, with wide, roughly paved streets, some of them lined with beautiful trees that bear scarlet flowers, and with well-built houses, most of them of one story, some of two or three stories.
The morning after our arrival at Corumba I asked Colonel Rondon to inspect our outfit; for his experience of what is necessary in tropical travelling has been gained through a quarter of a century of arduous exploration in the wilderness.
His career has been an uneventful one, and has been confined principally to the not unpleasant task of drawing $480 a month from the public treasury. Owing to bubonic plague, my stay in Corumba was prolonged. I have been in the city of Bahia when an average of 200 died every day from this terrible disease, so Brazil is beginning to be more careful.
Only three weeks previously a twelve-year-old boy who had gone in swimming near Corumba was attacked, and literally devoured alive by them. Colonel Rondon during his exploring trips had met with more than one unpleasant experience in connection with them. He had lost one of his toes by the bite of a piranha.
His vacant look showed him to be a poor, helpless idiot. Beside him a large wood fire was kept burning. The ashes of this fire, strewn around him for the sake of cleanliness, are carried away for medicinal purposes by the thousands of pilgrims who visit him. The church is, of course, very much in evidence in Corumba, for it is a very religious place.
There another steamer waited to carry us to Corumba, another thousand miles further north. The climate and scenery of the upper reaches of the Paraguay are superb, but our spirits were damped one morning when we discovered that a man of our party had mysteriously disappeared during the night. We had all sat down to dinner the previous evening in health and spirits, and now one was missing.
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