On the north shore of the lake, there was a hill that was of particular interest, because it is called the Serra de Cunuri-a variant of the name that keeps cropping up in connection with the Amazon women. Conori was the queen in Carvajal's account, and Cunuris was both the first recorded name of the Nhamunda and the name of a tribe that lived up the river in the seventeenth century. In this century, Nimuendaju classified as Conduri not only the prehistoric inhabitants of the Trombetas and Nhamunda Valleys but also contemporaries who lived south of the Amazon and west of Santarem and made the same sort of stippled, amusingly grotesque caretas.

      The meaning of the name variously written as Conori, Cunuris, and Conduri can only be guessed at, because the language of theConduri was never recorded, but the sounds are suggestive. A cunha is an Indian or halibreed girl. Cuna muchu is Inca for "great lady." The cunauaru is an Amazonian tree frog-which is interesting in light of the connection between the Amazons and frog amulets. The croaking of this frog, which figures in many Indian myths, is supposed to sound like cunha cunha.

     The Serra de Cunuri rose a little over three hundred feet. We asked a local caboclo to take us to the top. He led us through scrubby pasture, shooing away emaciated zebu cattle, which kicked up black dust as they trotted off. The terra preta here was extensive-this must have been one of their main centers. It went back more than a mile from the lakeshore
and stopped just below the summit of the serra, where it gave way to red upland soil. Here the going got rough. The final rise became steep, and was covered with near-impenetrable grass that towered over our heads. After fifty feet of flailing with machetes in the searing midday heat, we decided to take the caboclo's word for it that there was nothing up there. In any case, nothing was going to be learned here without digging, and that required time, training in modern stratigraphic archeology, and permits, none of which we had. No Conduri site has been systematically dug. The best study of Conduri pottery, which was published in 1955, was based only on surface finds, like the caretas we had been given. So no one knows what heights the Conduri may have reached in the centuries before the Europeans arrived.

     We picked up another boto story from an old man who had planted a grove of rubber trees in his terra preta, farther along the lakeshore. "Once, I was turning a tracajii"-a large river turtle-"on the beach," he told us as we sat in his outdoor kitchen. "I looked up and saw a man heading into the swamp nearby. My dogs went after him and dragged him down into the water, and he turned into a boto and swam away." The eyes and mouths of his grandchildren, who had crowded around the table, were wide open. "When the boto turns into a man, the first thing he does is stun the woman, so she can't move," he continued. "Then he does what he wants. When the woman revives, she turns yellow. He takes her blood, the boto does. If you don't kill him while he's on land, as a man, the woman dies. His children are born crazy, writhing, screaming, with a hole on top of the head just like his blowhole."

     At dusk, we pulled up to the dock of a friend of Antonio Gado's named J oao Bente, and asked if we could spend the night. Bente's hut was out on a point at the mouth of a creek. It was idyllic, like the lone-hut-in-the jungle Amazon scenes that are standard decor in bars and restaurants all over Brazil. As we got out of the boat, the mosquitoes launched a concerted attack, and for several minutes we felt as if we were on fire. Bente had been drinking and was at first belligerent,
 but, at the urging of his wife, he gradually became more than hospitable. We ended up sleeping, at his insistence, in their bedroom, while they hung their hammocks in the hall.

     In the morning, we made our way over to a smaller lake to the southwest, the Lago de Pirarucua, crossed it, and entered a black-water channel that wasn't much wider than the boat and went on for maybe ten miles. It was lined with floodedjauari palms, whose segmented trunks bristled with black needles. In several places, a palm had fallen in the way, and we had to stop until Orlando could hack out a passage. Sometimes grass got caught in the propeller, and Francisco had to dive under the boat and take it off. The brothers' teamwork-with Orlando yanking the bell cord and Francisco accelerating, reversing, or cutting the engine in response-was smooth and tight. At one point, the channel opened into a pool, and we watched an osprey swoop down, snatch a large fish from the water, and flyaway with it in its claws. Shortly before noon, we reached the town of Terra Santa, on a beautiful blackwater lake.

     There had been an outbreak of yellow fever a few months earlier in one of Terra Santa's outlying communities. Six of thirteen confirmed cases had been fatal, and a rash of psychosomatic cases-people with colds thinking they had come down with it-had followed. The Brazilian health agency, SUCAM, had vaccinated the population and sprayed houses to kill the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which transmit the virus. Several years earlier, SUCAM had stopped spraying, because yellow
fever, which had taken thousands of lives in the Amazon in the last century, was thought to have been eradicated; but this year the virus had reappeared in several remote communities, here and across the Amazon. A specialist had come from France to investigate the outbreak in Terra Santa. He had stayed at the Loureiros' house, the only lodging in town, and had been the last foreign visitor before us, we were told by a short, dark woman in her mid-thirties named J oselia Loureiro, who showed us to a room where we could hang our hammocks.

      When we told Joselia that we wanted to go up the Nhamunda, she said it would be hard to find a boat and provisions in Faro or Nhamundatowns twenty miles to the west, above the point where the Nhamunda begins to break up into the many channels of its delta. We were hoping to get at least as far as the first rapids-about two hundred miles. Joselia introduced us to a man named Emir D' Antona, the son of Terra Santa's pharmacist, who had spent a month the year before exploring the Nhamunda and its tributaries for gold and diamonds. He had taken an outboard instead of a motor, and he said that with three hundred litres of gas we could get to the first rapids and back, no problem. An outboard, he went on, had advantages: you could make side trips up creeks and into oxbow lakes, and you went twice as fast.

     Joselia arranged for us to rent the municipal outboard of Terra Santa, which was aluminum, seated six, and had "ADMINISTRACAO DO TEODORO LOBATO" stencilled on the side. Her younger brother Joao, a currently un
employed gold prospector, was interested in going along. "Fantastico," I said. But Joao had never been up the Nhamunda, so we would have to find somebody in Faro or Nhamunda who knew the river. D'Antona recommended his guide, a man in Faro named Preginho.

      While Joao saw to the gas, Joselia took us to a friend who sold provisions, and he fixed us up with eight kilos of rice, four kilos of ground and roasted manioc farinha, two kilos of salt, six kilos of sugar, three hundred oranges, a dozen limes, six bottles of cachaqa, two cans of cooking oil, ten cans of meat-and-bean feijoada, three hundred grams of seasoning, a dozen tins of sardines, two packets of coffee, six packets of tobacco, some thick monofilament fishing line, a dozen large fishhooks, and two wide-brimmed straw hats. Another man lent us a map of the Nhamunda that he had drawn himself. It was much more detailed than our map, which was based on high-altitude infrared photographs. It named the major bends and creeks along the first hundred miles or so; then it became increasingly sketchy.

      After we had got our supplies, D' Antona invited us to a bar. He was thirty and had gone to high school in Belem, then travelled all over Brazil. About a year before, his mother had fallen ill, and he had returned to Terra Santa to take care of her. Sixteen weeks ago, he had started a weekly newspaper called Solidariedade, which the local padre let him run off on his mimeograph machine. Its circulation was up to two hundred and fifteen. "The population of Terra Santa is about seventy-five hundred, not counting hundreds of street dogs they just shot thirty dogs yesterday," he told us. "We have five dancing clubs, and a hundred and twenty-five festas during the year-generally three a week. In January, there is the feast of St. Sebastian for two weeks, and then, sometimes in February and sometimes in March, pre-Carnaval and Carnaval. May is the month of flowers. June has the June festival. July is the feast of St. Isabel, the patron saint of Terra Santa. Each outlying community and creek mouth has its saint. There are two cars, four horse carts, four boatbuilders, two soccer fields, one grandstand, six football teams, one youth club, one mothers' club, and about twenty people you can carryon a conversation with in Terra Santa. People with better incomes send their children to Belem, Manaus, or Parintins"-the nearest big city, out the delta and across the Amazon, about four hours away by boat-"for high school, and they usually don't come back, so there isn't much influx of new ideas. Everybody is a known entity. Because the television reception is unpredictable-and there are only two sets in town, anyway-the main entertainment for grownups is gossip, and for children it's a soccer ball and a fishing line. Sex starts at twelve."

      The year before, D' Antona told us, the state telecommunications franchise had installed a telephone in Terra Santa, and it was now possible to call anywhere in Brazil-or, for that matter, the world. When Quersin heard this, he went to see if he could reach his wife, who lives in a village in Vaucluse, in France. It was her birthday. (He came back about an hour later, beaming: he had got through.)

      D' Antona told me that he had been to the Lake of the Mirror of the Moon. It was under a mountain on the right bank, not far above Faro. "It isn't very big, just a few hundred yards across," he said. "The day I saw it, there was no breeze, and the water was dead calm, full of leaves, and pretty dirty. As I understand it, it was called the Lake of the Mirror of the Moon because the Indians used to make up their faces in it before ceremonies."

      THE town of Faro started as a mission for the Uaboi Indians.  In 1758, it was secularized and became a town, and in 1798 its authorities began to make frequent use of a pillory; as a result, three years later the U aboi bolted en masse into the forest. They haven't been heard of since 1840. There is good linguistic evidence that they regressed to hunting and gathering and became the Hixkaryana.
The Faro that Barbosa Rodrigues found in 1878 was so depressed and demoralized that he was moved to compare it with the "campus ubi Tt:oya fuit." He had come up the river in a long dugout manned by ten tapuios, or detribalized Indians, and from a distance Faro presented "a most agreeable aspect;" its setting, with a view across miles of water to hilly forest on the other side, was spectacular. But when he got there and walked the town's three parallel streets he found that twenty-one of a total of seventy-five houses he counted (all but twelve of which were crudely made thatch huts) were in ruins and many of the others abandoned. The walls of the church were crumbling, and the municipal chambers were in such a precarious state that the local administrators had been holding their meetings in some one's house. There were only five commercial establishments. The inhabitants-about a hundred in the town and about thirtythree hundred scattered over the municipality-were apathetic; they lived by fishing and raising cattle, and weren't interested in growing anything.

       Barbosa Rodrigues was unable to find anybody on the Lower Nhamunda who remembered the women without husbands, or even recognized the term for them in lingua geral-icamiabas -and he succeeded in picking up only a few stories about them.  One he heard from a ninetyyear-old Indian woman in Faro, who told him that the women without husbands got their muiraquitas, which they gave to the men who fathered their children, from the Lago Yacyuarua, the Lake of the Mirror of the Moon; the muiraquitas were originally alive, she said, swimming around in the form of various animals. When a woman saw a muiraquita that she wanted, she would cut herself and let her blood drip into the water over the creature; that would stun it, and as she brought it up into the air it would turn to stone.

       In the century since Rodrigues's visit, Faro has fared little better. At one point, the urban population seems to have dropped to twelve. During the thirties, a family of Germans from Sao Paulo named Rossy came up to Faro and began to harvest the trees of the Nhamunda Valley-especially paurosa, a tree in the laurel family whose essential oil is a valuable raw material for some perfumes. The Rossys employed many people at their sawmill, and the town became dependent on them. But by 1970 the pau-rosa was gone, and Mario Rossy, one of the sons, moved the sawmill across the Amazon to Parintins, whereupon Faro went into decline again. In the early seventies, a comprehensive survey of the Amazon Valley by a government commission described Faro as "a stagnant town making a comeback."

       The following morning, Joao, Quersin, and I set out for Faro in the municipal outboard. A series of grasschoked channels led from the labyrinthine delta of the Nhamunda into the river's lower section, which seemed like a vast lake and is, in fact, known as the Lago de Faro. Like most of the Lower Amazon's tributaries, the Nhamunda is a "drowned river" for some distance from its mouth. At the end of the last Ice Age, around ten thousand years ago, sea level rose some three hundred feet, and the Nhamunda's waters backed up and flooded its valley.

       On our way up the Lago de Faro, we saw two canoes under sail. The sails were square and red. One man paddled at the bow of each canoe while another, at the stern, held his paddle as a rudder. The Lago de Faro is one of the few places in the Amazon where these craft, which are known as igarites, haven't been displaced by boats with engines. Continuous strong breezes and poverty have delayed their disappearance here. On the left bank, beyond the canoes, was Faro, as austere in its monumental surroundings as an Alpine village.

       Knowing that the mayor of Far!;) was away, Joselia had written a letter to the vice-mayor, Roduval Machado, identifying us as researchers and asking him to put us up on the second floor of the municipal building, since there were no lodgings in the town. Machado, a languid young man with a pencil mustache, turned out to be one of half a dozen citizens standing on the dock when we arrived. The floor of the room to which he took us was littered with bat droppings that had fallen through a large hole in the ceiling. "We don't get many foreigners," Machado told us as the custodian swept them up. "Six years ago, I think, two Germans came looking for a tree that flowers blue in October."

       When Machado learned what we were after, he said, "I am in doubt about the Amazons." As he under stood it, the women had made up their faces in the Lake of the Mirror of the Moon, and, according to an account he had read by a Frenchman who claimed to have been captured by them and held as their sexual slave (earlier in this century, as he recalled), they had gone in for headshrinking. "Old man Rossy had a plantation on top of the mountain overlooking the lake, and he drained the lake to see if there were any muiraquitas in it," he went on. "I don't know if he found any. There is supposed to have been a smaller lake on top of the mountain, but I walked across the mountain one time and didn't find a thing. There is also a story about a spring there that gushes out of a stone and never dries up and has brilliant golden fish in it. I didn't find that, either."

    
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