g to the knees.

Taking on board rubber and salt fish, the "Tapajos" steamed down stream,
passing the perpendicular pink-clay cliffs of Cararaucu, arriving in
ten hours at Villa Nova,[142] one hundred and fifty miles below Serpa.
Villa Nova is a straggling village of mud huts standing on a
conglomerate bank. The trade is chiefly in rubber, copaiba, and fish.
The location is healthy, and in many respects is one of the most
desirable places on the river. Here the Amazon begins to narrow, being
scarcely three miles wide; but the channel, which has a rocky bed, is
very deep. One hundred miles from Villa Nova is Obidos, airily situated
on a bluff of pink and yellow clay one hundred feet above the river. The
clay rests on a white calcareous earth, and this on red sandstone. It is
a picturesque, substantially-built town, with a population, mostly
white, engaged in raising cacao and cattle. Cacao is the most valuable
product on the Amazon below Villa Nova. The soil is fertile, and the
surrounding forest is alive with monkeys, birds, and insects, and
abounds with precious woods and fruits. Obidos is blessed with a church,
a school, and a weekly newspaper, and is defended by thirty-two guns.
This is the Thermopylae of the Amazon, the great river contracting to a
strait not a mile in width, through which it rushes with tremendous
velocity. The depth is forty fathoms, and the current 2.4 feet per
second. As Bates remarks, however, the river valley is not contracted to
this breadth, the southern shore not being continental land, but a low
alluvial tract subject to inundation. Back of Obidos is an eminence
which has been named _Mount Agassiz_ in honor of the Naturalist. There
is no mountain between it and Cotopaxi save the spurs from the Eastern
Cordillera. Five miles above the town is the mouth of the Trombetas,
where Orellana had his celebrated fight with the fabulous Amazons.

[Footnote 142: Otherwise called, on Brazilian maps, Villa Bella da
Imperatriz.]

[Illustration: Santarem.]

Adding to her cargo wood, hides, horses, and Paraguayan prisoners
(short, athletic men), the "Tapajos" sailed for Santarem. The river
scenery below Obidos loses its wild and solitary character, and is
relieved with scattered habitations, factories, and cacao plantations.
We arrived at Santarem in seven hours from Obidos, a distance of fifty
miles. This city, the largest on the Amazon save Para, stands on a
pretty slope at the mouth of the Rio Tapaj