dangers. The markets of the world need rubber, and the supplying of
this gives them each year a few months' work in the forests at very
high wages. I always try to remember these facts when I am tempted to
harshly judge Remate de Males according to our standards; moreover, I
can never look upon the place quite as an outsider. I formed pleasant
friendships there and entered into the lives of many of its people,
so I shall always think of it with affection. The village is placed
where the Itecoahy runs at right angles into the Javary, the right-hand
bank of the Itecoahy forming at once its main and its only street. The
houses stand facing this street, all very primitive and all elevated
on palm-trunk poles as far as possible above the usual high-water
mark of the river. Everything, from the little sheet-iron church
to the pig-sty, is built on poles. Indeed, if there is anything in
the theory of evolution, it will not be many generations before the
inhabitants and domestic animals are born equipped with stilts.

Opposite Remate de Males, across the Itecoahy, is a collection of
some ten huts that form the village of São 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,