The old man informed me that he lived in constant fear of an attack from the Cherentes. He had been in this solitary place for three years, but had now made up his mind to leave it in the course of a few months. His wife had been dead about a year, and he and three little children were the only inhabitants of the place. He had two houses, the best of which was at one end of the shed in which we were stowed, but he had never lived in it; the reason he assigned was, that the Indians when they attack a house, immediately set fire to it, and surround it, so that no one may escape. The hut in which he resided was at some distance from the other, and in appearance was but little better than a pig-sty, but he said that in case of an attack, he could very easily make his escape from it to the woods. He had a very small piece of ground cleared by the side of the river, in which grew some mandiocca, Indian corn, cotton, and bananas. He possessed no cattle of his own, but I was afterwards informed that he was very expert in stealing oxen, from the droves which occasionally pass on their way to the coast. Three days after we left this habitation, we arrived at a place where the Rio Preto divides the Province of Pernambuco from that of Goyaz. The country we passed through was very similar to the first part of the Geräes, with the exception of the last four leagues of our journey which lay through an undulating elevated region destitute of arboreous vegetation; the soil was of a white sandy nature, thinly covered with dwarf shrubs, and small dry tufts of grass: it was only here and there that a small stunted tree made its appearance among the bushes: as we approached the river, however, the country became more flat and better wooded. Notwithstanding the arid nature of this tract, its scanty vegetation was, with few exceptions, quite new to me. The moister sandy places afforded me several of those curious _Eriocaulons_, of which so many exist in my collections, one of these, which I found shortly before we reached the river, was a large branched species about five feet in height; these remarkable forms I afterwards met with in great abundance in the Diamond District, which is the great centre of the _Eriocaulons_, as it is of the _Vellozias_, or tree-lily tribe. The river we here found to be about forty feet broad, and not less than from sixteen to twenty feet in depth; the current was still rapid, and the water so limpid, that the bottom could be seen quite distinctly. Several large Buriti palms grow on its banks, and the bridge by which we crossed, was one of these trees cut down, so as to fall across the stream. It was not without considerable trouble, that we got all our luggage taken to the other side, which when accomplished, the horses were swum over a little further up the river. At about two hundred yards from its banks we encamped under a large Myrtle tree (_Myrica_), where we remained a day, for I found it