We step ashore straight into the forest, and are warmly welcomed by a group of working men, who inquire eagerly for the latest news from anywhere, about anything. For days we have been travelling in a region that is far removed from the busy haunts of man, and we have grown quite used to the solitude of the wilds; but the loneliness comes home to us much more forcibly as we realize that there are civilized folk who spend nearly all their life in these out-of-the-way parts. We set out to walk along a rough road that threads its way through the jungle. Before long we notice buildings ahead. We are close upon a “seringal”--that is to say, a village which serves as the headquarters of a number of rubber-gatherers, who work a big area of neighbouring forest-lands. The seringal, together with the stretch of country which it serves, belongs to a man who probably lives far away in one of the two great commercial centres of Brazil--Para, at the mouth of the Amazon; or Manaos, about a thousand miles up the river. The owner may have inherited his claim to proprietorship, or he may have bought it from some other man; in any case, the tract of forest which is now regarded as his private property originally became one man’s land because in days gone by some settler tried to make a living out of rubber collecting, went so far this way, so far that in his search for rubber-trees, and gradually came to look upon the district between such self-appointed boundaries as his own personal hunting-ground. Great care has to be taken in choosing the site for a seringal. Since none of the forests have yet been opened up for more than about a mile in the inland direction, the seringals must all be built near the riverside; it is very necessary that they should be perched on some piece of rising ground, because the waters of the Amazon rise very high at times, causing great floods.