In Obidos, we called at the parish house of some Franciscan monks, who also have a mission in a Tirio Indian village near Suriname. A young Tirio man we met in the courtyard told us in broken Portuguese that the Tirio didn't have an Amazon-women legend, but a mulata schoolteacher we interviewed in the library said she had heard that "near the Tirio" there was a tribe of tall, fair, blond, blue-eyed Indians who were "the remnants of the Amazons." She had recently assigned her students to ask around the community for stories about the women. A fisherman interviewed by a seventeen-year-old girl in the class had said that once when he was fishing along !1 creek several leagues upriver from Obidos he had felt the tail of a horse graze his cheek from behind. He had fallen to the ground and hidden his face, because he knew it was the Amazons, and he didn't want to look and be enchanted. "To us, the Amazons are horsewomen, female cavaleiros ," the schoolteacher explained.

       Quersin and I talked with one of the monks, Brother Angelico, who was seventy-three and had a flowing white beard. He told us that he had lived for twenty years with the Tirio and had never heard about this fairskinned tribe but that the Tirio esteemed fair skin. "Their chief, Yunure, says he is white, but he is Indian," Brother Angelico said. "The darkest of his four wives told me when she was expecting her first child that if the baby came out dark she would kill it." Among the Tirio, he went on, there was a group of Kaxuiana Indians, who had originally lived on a tributary of the middle Trombetas called the Rio Cachorrinho ("little dog" in Portuguese, and perhaps an attempt to approximate the tribe's name). They had been befriended by a missionary named Protasio Frikel. Brother Angelico showed us a paper that Frikel had written on the Kaxuiana, which explained that they left the Rio Cachorrinho because they were dying of diseases caught from neighboring Brazil-nut gatherers and descendants of fugitive slaves. By 1968, only seventy-one were left, of whom many were suffering from tuberculosis and venereal disease. There weren't enough marriage possibilities in the new generation, so sixty-four of them had gone to live with the Tiri6. The seven others, I read with interest, went up the Nhamunda. I wondered if they were still there.

      After we left the parish house, we met a woman who said that not far above the mouth of the Nhamunda there was a lake called the Mirror of the Moon. She hadn't been there, but she understood that that was where the muiraquitas came from and where the Amazons had lived. The women removed the right breast, she said. They would come down to the Amazon, visit men from the tribes there, and go back pregnant. The male children would be sacrificed and thrown into the lake or would be turned over to the men.

      "Good news," I told Quersin. "It looks as though the actual lake where the women are supposed to have lived exists."
 

     OUR next destination was a place called the Costa do Paru, on the southern shore of a large island in the Amazon, eighteen miles above the mouth of the Trombetas. (The Trombetas comes in about ten miles below
Obidos.) In the early eighteen-seven ties, the Brazilian botanist, explorer, antiquarian, and Indian pacifier Joao Barbosa Rodrigues, who looked deeply into the Legends of the Amazon women, visited the Costa do Paru, and found there a jade muiraquita and "an infinity" of pottery fragments. He concluded that he had found the village of the tribe that attacked Orellana and his men, and he argued that these "inappropriately named Amazons" must have been the ancestors of the Uaupes Indians, whom he had visited on the Rio Negro several years earlier, because the U aupes still made muiraquitas, of cylindrical quartz, and had told him that they originally lived on the Amazon itself, along a lake inhabited by the Mother of the Waters. One day, they said, the Mother of the Waters took the form of an animal and was accidentally killed by an Indian hunter, causing a "revolution of the waters," which forced the U aupes to move. Barbosa Rodrigues eventually came to believe that there had been a devastating flood in the Amazon not long after 1580, and this fitted neatly into his theory, explaining to his satis~ faction "what to this day was unexplained"-the disappearance of the Amazons. 

      On our second morning in Obidos, we went down to the harbor and asked the men lounging around gaily painted boats if any of them were interested in going to the Costa do Paru. By noon, we had found a boat to take us there. It was a very sturdily built cattle boat made of itauba, or stonewood, and, with a capacity for maybe a dozen head of cattle, was a good deal larger than what we needed,~but nothing else had been available in Obidos. The boat was a typical Amazonian motor, as this type of craft is called: flat-roofed, open-sided in front, a temperamental African Queen-like rig in continuous need of love and understanding from its crew of two-the motorista, who sat at the wheel, in the bow, and the mech'nico, who tended the thirty-horsepower diesel engine, enduring the din with the help of cachat;a, the raw white Brazilian rum.

      Although the river was receding from its high-water mark, of a month earlier, it was still up, and much of the varzea, or floodplain, was still under water. At this time of year, the only way the people who lived in the varzea could get around was by canoe. Most of them raised cattle, and we could see that their main business now was to paddle around and gather grass to take to the marombas, the elevated corrals, built on pilings, where the animals were penned. After several hours, we reached the little settlement of N ucleo Sagrado Cora<;ao de Jesus Costa do Paru, which was still flooded except for a small strand, on which a group of muddy children were playing. We walked along the immense, amazingly buoyant trunk of a floating tnat;aranduba tree to the elevated frame house of a man named Antonio Gomes, who brought chairs and coffee to the porch. There were almost a hundred people on the island, he told us, and they were all kin. The oldest was his Uncle Amerigo, a man of about seventy with a mouthful of gold, who soon joined us. He said, "My grandfather told me that when he came here as a boy there were Indians living here"-Maue 1 Indians, from across the river, he guessed. And Antonio said that in October, when the water was down, the children would pick up all sorts of vestfgios-little things made of clay in the shape of fish and other animals especially along the big lake in the interior of the island. I asked if he had any he could show us, and a boy I brought a fish made not of clay but of stone-a faithful enough representation so that the assembled company recognized it as a cara (the popular name for several related predatory fish). "This was made long before your grandfather's time," I said to Amerigo. Two holes had been drilled through it, possibly so that it could be strung and worn around the neck. It would have made a handsome gorget, but the boy's only interest in it was as a skipping stone, for which it was also admirably suited. Antonio gave it to me as a memento, and I reciprocated with a postcard showing, in triptych, the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building.

      We spent a pleasant hour on Antonio's porch but learned nothing that either supported or sank Barbosa Rodrigues's theory; whatever evidence there may have been either was under water now or had washed away in the century since his visit. If the Amazons had lived here, it was news to Antonio and his family. This was pretty clearly a blind alley. We got on the boat and chugged back to the mouth of the Trombetas, and there we were caught in a fantastic storm, with gale-force winds and high waves that forced us to tie up to a tree for an hour. Then we went up the Trombetas about twenty miles, and were dropped off at the city of Oriximina in time for a late supper.

      The municipality that includes Oriximina (also called Oriximina) containssixty-eight thousand square miles of mostly unexplored wilderness that extends up to Suriname and the Guyanas. It is the fourth-largest municipality in Brazil. About fifty miles upriver from the city, one of the world's largest deposits of bauxite is being mined by the government and an international consortium. Oceangoing freighters have become a common if startling sight on the Tromhetas. Above its rapids the modern world stops. About a thousand W ai-Wai Indians live on one of its tributaries, the Mapuera, and other W ai-W ai live on the north-flowing Essequibo, over the Guyana border. At the Oriximina headquarters of some Catholic missionaries working with the Wai-Wai, we met a member of the tribe, a twenty-year-old named Rocinaldo, who spoke a little Portuguese. Eager to be of help, he kept saying yes to my questions until he finally understood them, and then he said that the WaiWai don't have an Amazon-women legend or muiraquitas but that women of the tribe wear yellow necklaces called eletanos, which bring luck.

      The town had a tiny branch of the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and there we met a young dental interne from Rio who had been studying the local superstitions in his spare time. Fear of the bb'to, the freshwater dolphin of Amazonia, was very strong, he told us (as it is throughout the animal's range in the valley), among both caboclos and Indians. (C aboclos are the mestiifo peasants and backwoods people of Amazonia.) The bb'to is believed to be a kind of merman, who comes ashore and seduces women or penetrates them in the water. In Oriximina, this belief was used to explain awkward pregnancies. It was so generally accepted that women registering the birth of a child sometimes gave the bb'to as the father. A woman who had slept with a bb'to, it was believed, never slept with a man again. There was a stall in the market where dolphin perfume and amulets made from dolphins' genitals were sold to men who. weren't having success with the opposite sex. A female counterpart of the bb'to was the matitapere, the striped cuckoo; at night it became a woman, who dressed in black and seduced men, and sometimes provided a convenient explanation for venereal disease.

      On the right bank of the Trombetas is a big lake, the Lago de Sapucua, whose shores were thickly populated in late prehistoric times. Several frog muiraquitas and many potsherds have been found there. We called on the mayor of Oriximina, Raimundo Oliveira, and told him of our interest in visiting the lake. He told us that his people were from there, and promised to arrange a boat and a guide for us. There was a bizarre, ancient-looking ceramic object on Mayor Oliveira's desk, which he said was from the Lago de Sapucua. It had four protuberances, each with a round hole at the end, that were suggestive-to me, at least-of bulging frog eyes. It seemed to represent something that lived in the water--or perhaps the general concept of things that live in the water, rather than a specific organism. Noticing that I was fascinated by it, he gave it to me. All told, I collected twenty-one such pieces, mostly animal figurines, from local people, who attached no value to them (and, in fact, though they are pre-Columbian and wonderfully imaginative, they have almost no monetary value, because no market has been established for them) and simply gave them to me as a gesture of friendship, as I handed out postcards. They called them caretas (contorted faces); archeologists refer to them as adb'rnos. I wrapped them in tissue and packed them carefully in a rusty kerosene can. After my trip, I showed them to Anna Roosevelt, and she dated all but perhaps one from somewhere between 500 and 1500 A.D.
 

     THE Lago de Sapucua is the largest expanse of open water in the soggy maze of lakes, islands, and interconnecting channels between the Trombetas and the Nhamunda, and one of the largest lakes in the state of Para. Mayor Oliveira told us that the name Sapucua comes from sapo (Portuguese for "frog") and qua (the sound of a frog croaking). The boat that was waiting for us at six the next morning was a lot smaller than the cattle boat. Its crew consisted of two withdrawn young brothers, Orlando and Francisco, with whom conversation during the next two days was minimal; our guide was an old fisherman. named Antonio Gado. Our plan was to tour the terras pretas do indio -the ancient dwelling sites along the lake, capped with a foot or so of rich, black soil, which are now inhabited by scattered families of caboclos but until about the sixteenth century had been the sites of substantial settlements of the Uaboi or Conduri ,Indians, about whom very little is known. Similar black-earth districts, the former dwelling places of the Tapaj6 people, are found along the right bank of the Amazon. Bits of pottery, particularly caretas, usually litter the black-earth sites. There is even a ditty in the Trombetas-Nhamunda area to the effect that wherever there are terras pretas you will find caretas. The blackness of the earth is a result of human occupation, of cinders from centuries of fires binding to the soil particles.

      At the entrance to the lake, we saw silhouetted against the sky, on the highest branch of a dead tree, a pair of vigilant orange-billed toucans; and for a moment we were caught in a blizzard of monstrous green dragonflies. Then we went on to the first terra preta, a settlement called Uaimy, of about thirty inhabitants, most of them named Sousa. The air smelled of wood smoke mixed with the fragrant black resin of the breu tree, which a man was heating up to caulk his canoe with. The history here was as obscure as it had been at the Costa do Paru. Nobody remembered a jade frog muiraquita that a woman at Uaimy named Catita Arara had sold in the twenties to the great Amazonian anthropologist Curt Nimuendaju. I had read about the transaction in a fiftyyear-old paper on the frog motif among South American Indians. One old woman, though, remembered Catita Arara, who was long gone; she was amazed when I produced the name. She told us that, according to her mother, the Indians who had lived here stole children. r asked her about the boto. "A woman who has been with the boto slowly grows pale and dies, unless she is treated by a spiritist with the help of certain leaves," she said. "The boto can do the same thing to a man. He can come to you in your dreams." A woman who lived nearby had had a baby who was "spotted like a cali" and was considered to be a child of the boto; the dolphin, it seemed, was also used to explain illness and birth defects. The matitapere, the old woman said, came during the floods, "whistling a seductive tune,"but nobody at Uaimy had actually seen her. The old woman gave me a careta, which Anna Roosevelt later tentatively identified as the head of a king vulture. 
 

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