their hammocks, or, seated on mats in the shade appear too languid even
to talk. White clouds now appear in the east, and gather into cumuli,
with an increasing blackness along their lower portions. The whole
eastern horizon becomes rapidly black, the dark hue spreading upwards.
Even the sun is at length obscured. Then the rush of a mighty wind is
heard through the forest swaying the tree-tops. A vivid flash of
lightning bursts forth, then a crash of thunder, and down streams the
deluging rain. The storm soon ceases, leaving the bluish-black
motionless clouds in the sky till night. Meantime all nature is
refreshed, but heaps of flower petals and leaves are seen under the
trees.

Towards evening life revives again. The noises of the forest animals
begin just as the sun sinks behind the trees, leaving the sky above of
the intensest shade of blue. The briefest possible twilight commences,
and the sounds of multifarious life come from every quarter. Troops of
howling monkeys, from their lofty habitations among the topmost
branches--some near, some at a distance--fill the echoing forest with
their dismal noise; flocks of parrots and blue macaws pass overhead, the
different kinds of cawing and screaming of the various species making a
terrible discord. Added to them are the calls of strange cicada--one
large kind perched high on the trees setting up a most piercing chirp.
It begins with the usual harsh jarring tone of its tribe, rapidly
becoming shriller, until it ends in a long and loud note resembling the
steam whistle of a locomotive engine. A few of these wonderful
performers make a considerable item in the evening concert. The uproar
of beasts, birds, and insects lasts but a short time; the sky quickly
loses its intense hue, and the night sets in. Then begin the
tree-frogs--Quack, quack! Drum, drum! Hoo, hoo! These, accompanied by
melancholy night-jars, keep up their monotonous cries till late at
night.

The night, however, is not given over to darkness. In every forest
path, across the calm waters of the igarapes, along open spaces, in the
village as well as in spots remote from man's abode, the whole air is
full of bright and glittering lights of varied hue; now darting here,
now there, like meteors flashing through the sky--now for a moment
obscured, to burst forth again with greater brilliancy. Beautiful as is
the English glow-worm, the fire-flies and fire-beetles, the elaters of
the tropics, fa