Next day we were ascending the Cuyaba River.  It had begun raining in the night, and the heavy downpour continued throughout the forenoon.  In the morning we halted at a big cattle-ranch to get fresh milk and beef.  There were various houses, sheds, and corrals near the river’s edge, and fifty or sixty milch cows were gathered in one corral.  Spurred plover, or lapwings, strolled familiarly among the hens.  Parakeets and red-headed tanagers lit in the trees over our heads.  A kind of primitive houseboat was moored at the bank.  A woman was cooking breakfast over a little stove at one end.  The crew were ashore.  The boat was one of those which are really stores, and which travel up and down these rivers, laden with what the natives most need, and stopping wherever there is a ranch.  They are the only stores which many of the country-dwellers see from year’s end to year’s end.  They float down-stream, and up-stream are poled by their crew, or now and then get a tow from a steamer.  This one had a house with a tin roof; others bear houses with thatched roofs, or with roofs made of hides.  The river wound through vast marshes broken by belts of woodland.

Always the two naturalists had something of interest to tell of their past experience, suggested by some bird or beast we came across.  Black and golden orioles, slightly crested, of two different species were found along the river; they nest in colonies, and often we passed such colonies, the long pendulous nests hanging from the boughs of trees directly over the water.  Cherrie told us of finding such a colony built round a big wasp-nest, several feet in diameter.  These wasps are venomous and irritable, and few foes would dare venture near bird’s-nests that were under such formidable shelter; but the birds themselves were entirely unafraid, and obviously were not in any danger of disagreement with their dangerous protectors.  We saw a dark ibis flying across the bow of the boat, uttering his deep, two-syllabled note.  Miller told how on the Orinoco these ibises plunder the nests of the big river-turtles.  They are very skilful in finding where the female turtle has laid her eggs, scratch them out of the sand, break the shells, and suck the contents.

It was astonishing to find so few mosquitoes on these marshes.  They did not in any way compare as pests with the mosquitoes on the lower Mississippi, the New Jersey coast, the Red River of the North, or the Kootenay.  Back in the forest near Corumba the naturalists had found them very bad indeed.  Cherrie had spent two or three days on a mountain-top which was bare of forest; he had thought there would be few mosquitoes, but the long grass harbored them (they often swarm in long grass and bush, even where there is no water), and at night they were such a torment that as soon as the sun set he had to go to bed under his mosquito-netting.  Yet on the vast marshes they were not seriously troublesome in most places.  I was informed that they were not in any way a bother on the grassy uplands, the high country north of Cuyaba, which from thence stretches eastward to the coastal region.  It is at any rate certain that this inland region of Brazil, including the state of Matto Grosso, which we were traversing, is a healthy region, excellently adapted to settlement; railroads will speedily penetrate it, and then it will witness an astonishing development.