moving; a fine new
government school has been started, and we met its principal, an
earnest man doing excellent work, one of the many teachers who, during
the last few years, have been brought to Matto Grosso from Sao Paulo,
a centre of the new educational movement which will do so much for
Brazil.

Father Zahm went to spend the night with some French Franciscan
friars, capital fellows. I spent the night at the comfortable house of
Lieutenant Lyra; a hot-weather house with thick walls, big doors, and
an open patio bordered by a gallery. Lieutenant Lyra was to accompany
us; he was an old companion of Colonel Rondon's explorations. We
visited one or two of the stores to make some final purchases, and in
the evening strolled through the dusky streets and under the trees of
the plaza; the women and girls sat in groups in the doorways or at the
windows, and here and there a stringed instrument tinkled in the
darkness.

From Caceres onward we were entering the scene of Colonel Rondon's
explorations. For some eighteen years he was occupied in exploring and
in opening telegraph lines through the eastern or north middle part of
the great forest state, the wilderness state of the "Matto Grosso"--
the "great wilderness," or, as Australians would call it, "the bush."
Then, in 1907, he began to penetrate the unknown region lying to the
north and west. He was the head of the exploring expeditions sent out
by the Brazilian Government to traverse for the first time this
unknown land; to map for the first time the courses of the rivers
which from the same divide run into the upper portions of the Tapajos
and the Madeira, two of the mighty affluents of the Amazon, and to
build telegraph-lines across to the Madeira, where a line of Brazilian
settlements, connected by steamboat lines and a railroad, again
occurs. Three times he penetrated into this absolutely unknown,
Indian-haunted wilderness, being absent for a year or two at a time
and suffering every imaginable hardship, before he made his way
through to the Madeira and completed the telegraph-line across. The
officers and men of the Brazilian Army and the civilian scientists who
followed him shared the toil and the credit of the task. Some of his
men died of beriberi; some were killed or wounded by the Indians; he
himself almost died of fever; again and again his whole party was
reduced almost to the last extremity by starvation, disease, hardship,
and the over-exhaustion due to w