occasionally makes prey of man.  This is a grayish-white fish over nine feet long, with the usual disproportionately large head and gaping mouth, with a circle of small teeth; for the engulfing mouth itself is the danger, not the teeth.  It is called the piraiba—­pronounced in four syllables.  While stationed at the small city of Itacoatiara, on the Amazon, at the mouth of the Madeira, the doctor had seen one of these monsters which had been killed by the two men it had attacked.  They were fishing in a canoe when it rose from the bottom—­for it is a ground fish—­and raising itself half out of the water lunged over the edge of the canoe at them, with open mouth.  They killed it with their falcons, as machetes are called in Brazil.  It was taken round the city in triumph in an oxcart; the doctor saw it, and said it was three metres long.  He said that swimmers feared it even more than the big cayman, because they could see the latter, whereas the former lay hid at the bottom of the water.  Colonel Rondon said that in many villages where he had been on the lower Madeira the people had built stockaded enclosures in the water in which they bathed, not venturing to swim in the open water for fear of the piraiba and the big cayman.

Next day, April 8, we made five kilometres only, as there was a succession of rapids.  We had to carry the loads past two of them, but ran the canoes without difficulty, for on the west side were long canals of swift water through the forest.  The river had been higher, but was still very high, and the current raced round the many islands that at this point divided the channel.  At four we made camp at the head of another stretch of rapids, over which the Canadian canoes would have danced without shipping a teaspoonful of water, but which our dugouts could only run empty.  Cherrie killed three monkeys and Lyra caught two big piranhas, so that we were again all of us well provided with dinner and breakfast.  When a number of men, doing hard work, are most of the time on half-rations, they grow to take a lively interest in any reasonably full meal that does arrive.

On the 10th we repeated the proceedings:  a short quick run; a few hundred metres’ portage, occupying, however, at least a couple of hours; again a few minutes’ run; again other rapids.  We again made less than five kilometres; in the two days we had been descending nearly a metre for every kilometre we made in advance; and it hardly seemed as if this state of things could last, for the aneroid showed that we were getting very low down.  How I longed for a big Maine birch-bark, such as that in which I once went down the Mattawamkeag at high water!  It would have slipped down these rapids as a girl trips through a country dance.  But our loaded dugouts would have shoved their noses under every curl.  The country was lovely.  The wide river, now in one channel, now in several channels, wound among hills; the shower-freshened forest glistened in the sunlight; the many kinds of