left in the rear.

Then the river divided into two important branches, which flowed off
toward the Atlantic, one going away northeastward, the other eastward,
and between them appeared the beginning of the large island of Marajo.
This island is quite a province in itself. It measures no less than
a hundred and eighty leagues in circumference. Cut up by marshes and
rivers, all savannah to the east, all forest to the west, it offers most
excellent advantages for the raising of cattle, which can here be seen
in their thousands. This immense barricade of Marajo is the natural
obstacle which has compelled the Amazon to divide before precipitating
its torrents of water into the sea. Following the upper branch, the
jangada, after passing the islands of Caviana and Mexiana, would have
found an _embouchure_ of some fifty leagues across, but it would also
have met with the bar of the prororoca, that terrible eddy which, for
the three days preceding the new or full moon, takes but two minutes
instead of six hours to raise the river from twelve to fifteen feet
above ordinary high-water mark.

This is by far the most formidable of tide-races. Most fortunately the
lower branch, known as the Canal of Breves, which is the natural area of
the Para, is not subject to the visitations of this terrible phenomenon,
and its tides are of a more regular description. Araujo, the pilot,
was quite aware of this. He steered, therefore, into the midst of
magnificent forests, here and there gliding past island covered with
muritis palms; and the weather was so favorable that they did not
experience any of the storms which so frequently rage along this Breves
Canal.

A few days afterward the jangada passed the village of the same name,
which, although built on the ground flooded for many months in the
year, has become, since 1845, an important town of a hundred houses.
Throughout these districts, which are frequented by Tapuyas, the Indians
of the Lower Amazon become more and more commingled with the white
population, and promise to be completely absorbed by them.

And still the jangada continued its journey down the river. Here, at
the risk of entanglement, it grazed the branches of the mangliers,
whose roots stretched down into the waters like the claws of gigantic
crustaceans; then the smooth trunks of the paletuviers, with their
pale-green foliage, served as the resting-places for the long poles of
the crew as they kept the raft in the strengt