Leaving our dug-out moored with a fibre rope to a large mangrove tree, we started to thread our way through the forest, and finally reached a clearing. Here we came upon a crowd of almost naked and extremely dejected-looking women. Many of these, catching sight of me, sped into the jungle like frightened deer. The chief's wife, however, at a word from him, received me kindly, and after accepting a brass necklace with evident pleasure, showed herself very affable. Poor lost Guatos! Their dejected countenances, miserable grass huts, alive with vermin, and their extreme poverty, were most touching. Inhabiting, as they do, one of the hottest and dampest places on the earth's surface, where mosquitos are numberless, the wonder is that they exist at all. Truly, man is a strange being, who can adapt himself to equatorial heat or polar frigidity. The Guatos' chief business in life seemed to consist in sitting on fibre mats spread on the ground, and driving away the bloodthirsty mosquitos from their bare backs. For this they use a fan of their own manufacture, made from wild cotton, which there seems to abound. Writing of mosquitos, let me say these Indian specimens were a terror to us all. What numbers we killed! I could write this account in their blood. It was _my_ blood, though--before they got it! Men who hunt the tiger in cool bravery boiled with indignation before these awful pests, which stabbed and stung with marvellous persistency, and disturbed the solitude of nature with their incessant humming. I write the word _incessant_ advisedly, for I learned that there are several kinds of mosquitos. Some work by day and others by night. Naturalists tell us that only the female mosquito bites. Did they take a particular liking to us because we were all males? Some of the Indians paint their naked bodies in squares, generally with red and black pigment. Their huts were in some cases large, but very poorly constructed. When any members of the tribe are taken sick they are supposed to be "possessed" by a stronger evil power, and the sickness is "starved out." When the malady flies away the life generally accompanies it. The dead are buried under the earth inside the huts, and in some of the dwellings graves are quite numerous. This custom of interior burial has probably been adopted because the wild animals of the forest would otherwise eat the corpse. Horrible to relate, their own half-wild dogs sometimes devour the dead, though an older member of the tribe is generally left home to mount guard.