tell the truth, it was a better built and better peopled village than
many of those on the Upper Amazon.

For the Indians Joam Garral had designed regular cabins--huts without
walls, with only light poles supporting the roof of foliage. The air
circulated freely throughout these open constructions and swung the
hammock suspended in the interior, and the natives, among whom were
three or four complete families, with women and children, were lodged
as if they were on shore.

The blacks here found their customary sheds. They differed from the
cabins by being closed in on their four faces, of which only one gave
access to the interior. The Indians, accustomed to live in the open
air, free and untrammeled, were not able to accustom themselves to
the imprisonment of the _ajoupas,_ which agreed better with the life
of the blacks.

In the bow regular warehouses had arisen, containing the goods which
Joam Garral was carrying to Belem at the same time as the products of
his forests.

There, in vast storerooms, under the direction of Benito, the rich
cargo had been placed with as much order as if it had been carefully
stowed away in a ship's hold.

In the first place, seven thousand arrobas of caoutchouc, each of
about thirty pounds, composed the most precious part of the cargo,
for every pound of it was worth from three to four francs. The
jangada also took fifty hundredweight of sarsaparilla, a smilax which
forms an important branch of foreign trade throughout the Amazon