File:Brazil, the Amazons and the coast (1879) (14596696428).jpg

Identifier: brazilamazonscoa00smit (find matches)
Title: Brazil, the Amazons and the coast
Year: 1879 (1870s)
Authors: Smith, Herbert H. (Herbert Huntington), 1851-1919
Subjects: Folklore -- Brazil Brazil -- Description and travel Brazil -- Economic conditions Amazon River Valley -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : C. Scribner's Sons
Contributing Library: Brown University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brown University

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, maybe,rippling the surface as he disappears beneath it. And theimagination looks into the depths and sees strange forms,undefined beings, rising slowly from the shadows, wavingand beckoning, and sinking back into the water, and liftingthemselves again to gigantic heights. O Night and Soli-tude ! Ye are the peopled, the full of life ! Our fisherman lights his torch and throws a ruddy glowover the water. Now our phantoms hide among the reeds. * The leaf-stalks of a lowland palm, Mauritia carana. 164 BRAZIL. and peep out from behind the tree-trunks, and move theirwings overhead as they flit past us : childish monsters thatfly the Hght and yet return to it; gigantic human moths ;vapory bats and owls. Flap ! The man in the bow has speared a fish in theshallows : waving the torch with his left hand, while he usesthe trident with his right. Flap, flop ! A big carauana issquirming about in the bottom of the canoe ; the ghosts startin dismay, and fly silently into the darkness. And the torch
Text Appearing After Image:
Fishing by Torchlight. flares and leaps, and sends great rockets after them, andflickers down to a coal, and flames up angrily to grasp theirreturning forms. Flop ! There is another fish—and another—a harvest of them ; the torch-holder cannot spear them fastenough ; and ever, as he raises his arm, a shadow springsaway behind his half-naked body, and dives under the ca-noe, and dances up on the other side, and disappears into the AMERICAN FARMERS ON THE AMAZONS. 165 unknown, and brings back a thousand more to the harmlesswarfare. We paddle slowly about among the grass-clumps,sometimes starthng a bird on an overhanging-branch ; oncethe poor bewildered thing comes within reach of a boatman,who catches it in his hand to carry home to the children ;and the ghosts and witches throw themselves aloft Avith madjoy, and sink to despair in the inky waters, rustling theleaves above, and vanishing into nowhere, and forming them-selves again out of nothing, until the torch goes out andleaves th

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