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. During our second night’s camp we heard the gruff, cough-like roar of a jaguar not far away, and next morning the men reported that the creature had killed one of the oxen. I went to see the slain animal and found that it was badly bitten about the neck and that one of the thighs had been partly eaten; in its enfeebled state the ox had been an easy kill for the big spotted cat. We made no attempt to follow the jaguar, but shouldered our guns and started on the home-stretch of the long journey. Again it rained heavily, though intermittently, and frequently the mud was knee-deep: but the knowledge that the river and rest lay but thirteen kilometres away acted as a stimulus to the men, and even the weary animals responded to the ceaseless urging of their drivers and panted along as if they, too, understood that the end of their toil was at hand.