_August 25th._—Monte Alégre. We arrived before this town, situated on the north side of the Amazons, at the mouth of the river Gurupatuba, yesterday at about midday, but the heat was so great that I did not go on shore till towards evening. The town is situated on the summit of a hill sloping rather steeply upward from the shore, and it takes its name from a mountain some four leagues to the northwest of it. But though the ground is more broken and various than we have seen it hitherto, the place does not seem to me to deserve its name of Monte Alégre (the gay mountain). To me the aspect of the country here is, on the contrary, rather sombre; the soil consists everywhere of sand, the forest is low, while here and there intervene wide, swampy flats, covered with coarse grass. The sand rests above the same reddish drift, filled with smooth rounded quartz pebbles, that we have followed along our whole road. Here and there the pebbles are disposed in undulating lines, as if a partial stratification had taken place; and in some localities we saw indications of the drift having been worked over by water, though not absolutely stratified. Both at sunset and sunrise I took a walk to the village churchyard, which commands the prettiest view in the neighborhood. It is enclosed in a picket fence, a large wooden cross stands in the centre, and there are a few other small crosses marking graves; but the place looked uncared for, grown over, wherever the sand was not bare, by the same coarse, rank shrubs which spring up everywhere in this ungenial soil.[56] At a little distance from the churchyard, the hill slopes abruptly down, and from its brow one looks across a wide plain covered with low forest, to the mountain on the other side, from which the town takes its name. Looking southward, the foreground is filled with lakes divided from each other by low alluvial lands, forming the level flats alluded to above. Though one of the earliest settlements on the Amazons, this town is, by all accounts, rather decreasing than increasing in population. In the midst of its public square stands what seems at first to be the ruin of a large stone church, but which is, in fact, the framework of a cathedral begun forty years ago, and standing unfinished to this day. Cows were pastured in its grass-grown aisles, and it seemed a rather sad memorial, bespeaking a want of prosperity in the place. We were most kindly entertained in the house of Senhor Manuel, who, finding that the mosquitoes were likely to be very thick on board the steamer, invited us to pass the night under his roof. This morning we are sailing about in the neighborhood, partly for the sake of getting fish, but passing also a couple of hours at a cattle-farm near by, in order to bring on board a number of cows and oxen for the Manaos market. It seems that one of the chief occupations here is the raising of cattle. This, with the sale of fish, cacáo, and India-rubber, constitutes the commerce of the place.