Women, who have spent most of their isolated lives in utterly uncivilised surroundings, will suddenly be brought into a community where other women are found, and immediately the instinct of self-adornment is brought into full play.  Each of them falls under the sway of “Dame Fashion”—­for there are the latest things, even on the upper Amazon.  Screaming colours are favoured; a red skirt with green stars was considered at one time the height of fashion, until an inventive woman discovered that yellow dots could also be worked in.  In addition to these dresses, the women will squander money on elegant patent-leather French slippers (with which they generally neglect to wear stockings), and use silk handkerchiefs perfumed with the finest Parisian eau de Cologne, bought at a cost of from fourteen to fifteen dollars a bottle.  Arrayed in all her glory on some gala occasion, the whole effect enhanced by the use of a short pipe from which she blows volumes of smoke, the woman of Remate de Males is a unique sight.

CHAPTER II

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL LIFE OF REMATE DE MALES

The social life of the town is in about the same stage of development as it must have been during the Stone Age.  When darkness falls over the village, as it does at six o’clock all the year round, life practically stops, and a few hours afterwards everyone is in his hammock.

There is one resort where the town-sports come to spend their evenings, the so-called Recreio Popular.  Its principal patrons are seringueiros, or rubber-workers, who have large rolls of money that they are anxious to spend with the least possible effort, and generally get their desire over the gaming boards.  The place is furnished with a billiard table and a gramophone with three badly worn records.  The billiard table is in constant use by a certain element up to midnight, and so are the three eternal records of the gramophone.  It will take me years surrounded by the comforts of civilisation to get those three frightful tunes out of my head, and I do not see how they could fail to drive even the hardened seringueiros to an early grave.

Another resort close by, where the native cachassa is sold, is patronised principally by negroes and half-breeds.  Here they play the guitar, in combination with a home-made instrument resembling a mandolin, as accompaniment to a monotonous native song, which is kept up for hours.  With the exception of these two places, the village does not furnish any life or local colour after nightfall, the natives spending their time around the mis-treated gramophones, which are found in almost every hut.