The hotel, in which I passed several months as a guest, until I finally decided to rent a hut for myself, had points about it which outdid anything that I have ever seen or heard of in comic papers about “summer boarding.”  The most noticeable feature was the quarter-of-a-story higher than any other house in the village.  While this meant a lead as to quantity I could never see that it represented anything in actual quality.  I would not have ventured up the ladder which gave access to the extra story without my Winchester in hand, and during the time I was there I never saw anyone else do so.  The place was nominally a store-house, but having gone undisturbed for long periods it was an ideal sanctuary for hordes of vermin—­and these the vermin of the Amazon, dangerous, poisonous, not merely the annoying species we know.  Rats were there in abundance, also deadly scolopendra and centipedes; and large bird-eating spiders were daily seen promenading up and down the sheet-iron walls.

On the main floor the building had two large rooms across the centre, one on the front and one on the rear.  At each side were four small rooms.  The large front-room was used as a dining-room and had two broad tables of planed palm trunks.  The side-rooms were bedrooms, generally speaking, though most of the time I was there some were used for stabling the pigs and goats, which had to be taken in owing to the rainy season.

It is a simple matter to keep a hotel on the upper Amazon.  Each room in the Hotel de Augusto was neatly and chastely furnished with a pair of iron hooks from which to hang the hammock, an article one had to provide himself.  There was nothing in the room besides the hooks.  No complete privacy was possible because the corrugated sheet-iron partitions forming the walls did not extend to the roof.  The floors were sections of palm trees, with the flat side down, making a succession of ridges with open spaces of about an inch between, through which the ground or the water, according to the season, was visible.  The meals were of the usual monotonous fare typical of the region.  Food is imported at an enormous cost to this remote place, since there is absolutely no local agriculture.  Even sugar and rice, for instance, which are among the important products of Brazil, can be had in New York for about one-tenth of what the natives pay for them in Remate de Males.  A can of condensed milk, made to sell in America for eight or nine cents, brings sixty cents on the upper Amazon, and preserved butter costs $1.20 a pound.

The following prices which I have had to pay during the wet season in this town will, doubtless, be of interest: 

    One box of sardines $ 1.20
    One pound of unrefined sugar .30
    One roll of tobacco (16 pounds) 21.30
    One basket of farinha retails in Para for $4.50 13.30
    One bottle of ginger ale