But bad as the walking is through it, it is easier than where you cross
over the bare hills, where you have to tread on sharp stones, most of them
lying edgewise.

The ground gone over these two last days seems condemned to perpetual
solitude and silence. There was not one four-footed animal to be seen, nor
even the marks of one. It would have been as silent as midnight, and all as
still and unmoved as a monument, had not the jabiru in the marsh and a few
vultures soaring over the mountain's top shown that it was not quite
deserted by animated nature. There were no insects, except one kind of fly
about one-fourth the size of the common house-fly. It bit cruelly, and was
much more tormenting than the mosquito on the sea-coast.

This seems to be the native country of the arrowroot. Wherever you passed
through a patch of wood in a low situation, there you found it growing
luxuriantly.

The Indian place you are now at is not the proper place to have come to in
order to reach the Portuguese frontiers. You have advanced too much to the
westward. But there was no alternative. The ground betwixt you and another
small settlement (which was the right place to have gone to) was
overflowed; and thus, instead of proceeding southward, you were obliged to
wind along the foot of the western hills, quite out of your way.

But the grand landscape this place affords makes you ample amends for the
time you have spent in reaching it. It would require great descriptive
powers to give a proper idea of the situation these people have chosen for
their dwelling.