mock for a bed was a pronounced
failure, until a merciful sleep temporarily took me from the sad
realities.

Remate de Males lies just where a step farther would plunge one into
an unmapped country. It is a little village built on poles; the last
"blaze" of civilisation on the trail of the upper river. When the
rainy winter season drives out of the forests every living creature
that can not take refuge in the trees, the rubber-workers abandon
the crude stages of the manufacture that they carry on there and
gather in the village to make the best of what life has to offer them
in this region. At such times the population rises to the number of
some 500 souls, for the most part Brazilians and domesticated Indians
or _caboclos_.

Nothing could better summarise the attractions (!) of the place than
the name which has become fixed upon it. Translated into English this
means "Culmination of Evils," Remate de Males.

Some thirty years ago, a prospector with his family and servants,
in all about a score, arrived at this spot near the junction of the
Javary and the Itecoahy rivers, close to the equator. They came by
the only possible highway, the river, and decided to settle. Soon the
infinite variety of destroyers of human life that abound on the upper
Amazon began their work on the little household, reducing its number
to four and threatening to wipe it out altogether. But the prospector
stuck to it and eventually succeeded in giving mankind a firm hold
on this wilderness. In memory of what he and succeeding settlers went
through, the village received its cynically descriptive name.

Remate de Males, separated by weeks and weeks of journey by boat
from the nearest spot of comparative civilisation down the river,
has grown wonderfully since its pioneer days. Dismal as one finds
it to be, if I can give an adequate description in these pages, it
will be pronounced a monument to man's nature-conquering instincts,
and ability. Surely no pioneers ever had a harder battle than these
Brazilians, standing with one foot in "the white man's grave," as the
Javary region is called in South America, while they faced innumerable
dangers. The markets of the world need rubber, and the supplying of
this gives them each year a few months' work in the forests at very
high wages. I always try to remember these facts when I am tempted to
harshly judge Remate de Males according to our standards; moreover, I
can never look upon the place quite as