We left the Duvida (now Rio Theodoro) shortly before noon; but it had rained nearly the entire day and the trail was indescribably bad; besides, the animals had completed their thirty-eighth day of travel without proper food or rest. That night we camped beside the trail on a site cleared for the purpose by the _camaradas_; we had taken only the canvas flies, as it had been found necessary to abandon the wall-tents some little distance back on account of their great weight. There was no feed for the animals, but the men had cut a quantity of palm-leaves growing abundantly in the forest, which the oxen refused to eat, however.
[Illustration: Camp on the Rio da Duvida.
From this point the exploration of the river was undertaken by Col. Roosevelt.]
The trail had now left the open _chapadão_ and wound between high walls of dark forest; instead of the monotonous level of the plain, the country was broken and hilly, with numerous small streams trickling through the dividing ravines, and it rained almost continuously; if we had succeeded in evading the rainy season heretofore, it descended on us now with doubled vigor.
A very wide swath had been cut through the forest for the telegraph-line to protect the wires from falling trunks and branches; so recent had been the work that the shrivelled leaves still clung to the prostrate trees, and the thick second growth, which springs up immediately where the sunlight is permitted to reach the ground, was just sprouting. The ground was covered with fruits of many kinds, most of them insipid or of acrid flavor, but the herds of peccaries seemed to relish them; and the flocks of parrots and macaws quarrelled noisily overhead in their struggles to reach some particularly appetizing morsel. One of the things that especially attracted our attention was the great number of hard, cannon-ball-like shells that littered the trail; they were the empty casques of the _castanha_, or Brazil nut, which grew abundantly throughout the forest. The Indians had opened most of them, in what manner I am unable to say, as they are so hard the blows of a hammer fail to make any impression, and extracted the dozen or more triangular nuts from each. The trees upon which they grow are remarkable for their height and great thickness; not infrequently we saw one a hundred and fifty feet high and four feet in diameter without a single branch lower than sixty or seventy feet. Graves were numerous by the wayside; I counted fifteen, near one another, each newly made mound being marked by a rude cross without name or inscription; they indicated the burial sites of _camaradas_, victims to the dread beri-beri and malaria.