As we sailed along the southern shore, during the 6th and two following days, the table-topped hills on the opposite side occupied most of our attention. The river is from four to five miles broad, and in some places long, low wooded islands intervene in mid-stream, whose light-green, vivid verdure formed a strangely beautiful foreground to the glorious landscape of broad stream and grey mountain. Ninety miles beyond Almeyrim stands the village of Monte Alegre, which is built near the summit of the last hill visible of this chain. At this point the river bends a little towards the south, and the hilly country recedes from its shores to re-appear at Obydos, greatly decreased in height, about a hundred miles further west.
Flat-topped mountains of Paraua-quara, lower Amazons.
We crossed the river three times between Monte Alegre and the next town, Santarem. In the middle the waves ran very high, and the vessel lurched fearfully, hurling everything that was not well secured from one side of the deck to the other. On the morning of the 9th of October, a gentle wind carried us along a “remanso,” or still water, under the southern shore. These tracts of quiet water are frequent on the irregular sides of the stream, and are the effect of counter movements caused by the rapid current of its central parts. At 9 a.m. we passed the mouth of a Paraná-mirim, called Mahicá, and then found a sudden change in the colour of the water and aspect of the banks. Instead of the low and swampy water-frontage which had prevailed from the mouth of the Xingú, we saw before us a broad sloping beach of white sand. The forest, instead of being an entangled mass of irregular and rank vegetation as hitherto, presented a rounded outline, and created an impresssion of repose that was very pleasing. We now approached, in fact, the mouth of the Tapajos, whose clear olive-green waters here replaced the muddy current against which we had so long been sailing. Although this is a river of great extent—1000 miles in length, and, for the last eighty miles of its course, four to ten in breadth—its contribution to the Amazons is not perceptible in the middle of the stream. The white turbid current of the main river flows disdainfully by, occupying nearly the whole breadth of the channel, whilst the darker water of its tributary seems to creep along the shore, and is no longer distinguishable four or five miles from its mouth.