Opposite Remate de Males, across the Itecoahy, is a collection of some ten huts that form the village of Sao Francisco, while across the Javary is the somewhat larger village of Nazareth.  Like every real metropolis, you see, Remate de Males has its suburbs.  Nazareth is in Peruvian territory, the Javary forming the boundary between Brazil and Peru throughout its length of some 700 miles.  This same boundary line is a source of amusing punctiliousness between the officials of each country.  To cross it is an affair requiring the exercise of the limits of statesmanship.  I well remember an incident that occurred during my stay in the village.  A sojourner in our town, an Indian rubber-worker from the Ituhy River, had murdered a woman by strangling her.  He escaped in a canoe to Nazareth before the Brazilian officials could capture him, and calmly took refuge on the porch of a house there, where he sat down in a hammock and commenced to smoke cigarettes, feeling confident that his pursuers would not invade Peruvian soil.  But local diplomacy was equal to the emergency.  Our officials went to the shore opposite Nazareth, and, hiding behind the trees, endeavoured to pick off their man with their .44 Winchesters, reasoning that though their crossing would be an international incident, no one could object to a bullet’s crossing.  Their poor aim was the weak spot in the plan.  After a few vain shots had rattled against the sheet-iron walls of the house where the fugitive was sitting, he got up from among his friends and lost himself in the jungle, never to be heard of again.

About sixty-five houses, lining the bank of the Itecoahy River over a distance of what would be perhaps six blocks in New York City, make up Remate de Males.  They are close together and each has a ladder reaching from the street to the main and only floor.  At the bottom of every ladder appears a rudimentary pavement, probably five square feet in area and consisting of fifty or sixty whiskey and gin bottles placed with their necks downwards.  Thus in the rainy season when the water covers the street to a height of seven feet, the ladders always have a solid foundation.  The floors consist of split palm logs laid with the round side up.  Palm leaves form the roofs, and rusty corrugated sheet-iron, for the most part, the walls.  Each house has a sort of backyard and kitchen, also on stilts and reached by a bridge.

Through the roofs and rafters gambol all sorts of wretched pests.  Underneath the houses roam pigs, goats, and other domestic animals, which sometimes appear in closer proximity than might be wished, owing to the spaces between the logs of the floor.  That is in the dry season.  In the winter, or the wet season, these animals are moved into the houses with you, and their places underneath are occupied by river creatures, alligators, water-snakes, and malignant, repulsive fish, of which persons outside South America know nothing.