ly by keeping in mid-river
and moving rapidly enough to create a breeze through our cabin, that
life was made tolerable. A little after noon we were again obliged to
tie up for a storm. Not a human being nor a habitation have we seen
since leaving Coca; and to-day nothing is visible but the river, with
its islands, and plains, and the green palisades--the edges of the
boundless forest. Not a hill over one hundred feet high are we destined
to see till we reach Obidos, fifteen hundred miles eastward. Were it not
for the wealth of vegetation--all new to trans-tropical eyes--and the
concerts of monkeys and macaws, oppressively lonely would be the sail
down the Napo between its uninhabited shores. But we believe the day,
though distant, will come when its banks will be busy with life. Toward
evening three or four canoes pulled out from the shore and came
alongside. They were filled with the lowest class of Indians we have
seen in South America. The women were nearly nude; the man (there was
only one) had on a sleeveless frock reaching to the knees, made from the
bark of a tree called _llanchama_. All were destitute of eyebrows; their
hair was parted in the middle, and their teeth and lips were dyed black.
They had rude pottery, peccari meat, and wooden lances to sell. Like all
the Napo Indians, they had a weakness for beads, and they wore necklaces
of tiger and monkey teeth. They were stupid rather than brutal, and
probably belonged to a degraded tribe of the great Zaparo family. With
Darwin, "one's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks,
could our progenitors have been men like these?--men whose very signs
and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the
domesticated animals; men who do not possess the instinct of those
animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or, at least, of arts
consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe
or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the
difference between a wild and tame animal; and part of the interest in
beholding a savage is the same which would lead every one to desire to
see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or
the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa."

On the morrow our falcon-eyed Indians whispered "_cuche_" long before we
saw any thing.[129] Williams went ashore and came upon a herd of
peccaries, killing two. The peccari is a pugnacious, fearless animal