"Faro is isolated," Machado explained. "It has poor communication with the rest of the world. The municipality itself is broke; what little money comes from Brasilia has to be shared with the four other communities in its jurisdiction, including Terra Santa. We are the 'poor father.' The Indian influence is predominant here. Most of the people have no initiative, and for those with initiative there is nothing to do."

     Joao, who had gone to find D' Antona's guide, the man named Preginho, returned with him. Preginho was a carpenter (preginho means "little nail"); he said he was busy and couldn't go with us but had talked to his brother, who was available and would meet us in the morning. Preginho looked trustworthy, so it seemed safe to assume that we would be in good hands with his brother. This settled, we went back down the lake several miles to the town of Nhamunda, to top off the fuel supply (this being our "last chance for gas"), and to see a man named Nogueira, who had a floating store permanently moored at the Nhamunda dock and was said to own a frog muiraquitii. Nhamunda is on the Amazonas side of the river-the right bank-and is about the same size as Faro.

     Nogueira's merchandise took up two decks of a large motor and spilled over onto an adjacent barge. (Nogueira and his family lived on the third deck.) There were sacks of rice, beans, and farinha; dried and salted slabs of pirarucu, an enormous primitive fish; rope, hoses, shoes, hats; fresh eggs, candy; a pharmacy in one cabin with all kinds of colorfully packaged medicines; a restaurant and bar; lots of mestiqo children running around; a dozen full-time employees; a halfdozen men snoozing on railings with straw or leather hats pulled down over their eyes; two guitarists playing chorinhos, an extravagantly romantic, highly syncopated type of Brazilian music.. Life on Nogueira's boat seemed like a continuous party. I bought a kilo of onions, and Quersin bought a black rubber slingshot to drive the pigeons off his roof when he got back to Zaire. We found Nogueira, a blithespirited man in the white uniform of a pharmacist, and the mayor of Nhamunda, a sullen young man, sitting in sundeck chairs at the prow. Nogueira told us that he lived on a boat "for philosophical reasons" and that his muiraquitii was frog-shaped and smoky gray. He couldn't show it to us, he said, because it was in a safe in Belem.
In the morning, we found Preginho's brother waiting at the dock with a shotgun and a ditty bag. He introduced himself as Edson Carvalho, but, as we later discovered, to everybody up the river he was known by his Indian name, Songa. He was thirtythree, quiet, handsome, and stronglooking. Although he was a Maue on his mother's side and had grown up in one of the tribe's villages, he was no more Indian in appearance than the average caboclo.

     With a fourth person in the boat, it rode very low, and even when Joao turned the throttle to full and held it there we went very slowly through the water. We crossed the lake at a diagonal and continued along the Amazonas side. After ten miles or so, we had to stop and transfer gas from one of the large plastic drums to the metal tank that fed the engine. Quersin and I stepped out into the warm black water; it was so inviting that we sank into it. The shore here was clean
white sand in which a low, dry type of forest known as campina, bristling with branches and festooned with air plants-orchids, bromeliads, fernsmanaged to grow. A nearby bird, a trogon, hidden in the trees, kept calling, usurping the silence as completely as the pulsing shrieks of a police car.

      After skirting for several hours a series of low, flat-topped serras that broke off at the water's edge and were spattered with violet-blossomed Tabebuia trees, we approached the Serra do Espelho, the Mountain of the Mirror, at the foot of which was the lake that had been the seat of the women-with out-husbands myth for at least the last hundred years. From afar ,the serra looked no different from the others we had been passing; it gave no indication of its legendary importance. On the bank below it, a man who Songa told us was named Chico de Brito was standing before his hut, trying to make us out. Songa shouted to him that we had come to see the lake and would stop to visit him on the way back, and then we entered a channel that came into the river just below the hut.

     After about a hundred yards, the channel widened into a pool that doglegged to the right. The pool was maybe two hundred yards in diameter and, as D' Antona had said, it was still, murky, and full of leaves. So this was it. I wouldn't even have called it a lake; to me it was a pond. (The word lago can mean "pond" as well as "lake.") The French explorer Henri Coudreau, who went up the Nhamunda in 1899 with his wife, described the lake, with understandable exasperation, as a mauvais petit lac, writing in his journal, "If. ..the Amazons discovered or invented by Senor Orellana and cultivated by so many lovers of the marvellous ever manufactured the sacred stone"-the muiraquitii"and invoked the moon from the borders of this mauvais petit lac, it must be well recognized that time has completely effaced all trace of their passage." Coudreau asked the local people if they remembered Barbosa Rodrigues, who had visited the lake twenty years earlier and had found no trace of either the women or the stones. They had no memory of him, and they themselves had never seen a muiraquitii; they had only heard of the amulets from "people who came from the city."

      In the early fifties, a German archeologist named Peter Paul Hilbert climbed the Serra do Espelho and re
ported that it was a hundred and twenty-eight metres high and was capped by a small, shallow expanse of terra preta, which suggested to him that at one time there had been a settlement there of a few huts-a seasonal farming community, perhaps, occupied at planting and harvest time. For some reason, he didn't investigate the shores of the lake. We discovered more terra preta, covered by half-dead bacaba-palm and hardwood forest, on the north shore. It wasn't extensive; almost immediately it ran up against the flank of the serra, which was too steep for settlement, and seemed hardly enough for a matriarchal chiefdom. If any women without husbands had lived here, there couldn't have been more than a couple of dozen of them. The southern shore had been cleared and planted by Chico de Brito. As there was nothing more to be learned without digging, we went to talk to him.

     De Brito was a sun-beaten, grizzled man of about fifty. He had been living at Espelho for twenty years. His
wife and seven of their children were standing in the doorway of their hut. A metal sign next to the door said, in Portuguese, "MALARIA NOTIFICATION STATION." One of his sons, de Brito explained, had been taught how to draw blood; the samples went to Parintins for analysis. But the results and the medication could take weeks to arrive, he said, by which time the patient might have died.

     "When I got here, old man Rossy was already dead," de Brito told us. "He's buried up on the serra, where his house was. He wouldn't let anybody up there. They say he had a shortwave radio. During the war, two Germans visited him and left him a boat." (We had heard in Obidos that a U-boat had gone up the Jar!, a leftbank tributary of the Amazon close to its mouth, and that one of the crew had died of fever and was buried, under a cross with his name and serial number, on a serra overlooking the river. )

     De Brito took us over to the edge of his yard, where we could see a green pool, maybe fifty yards across, through the trees. 

     "Is this the spring with the golden fish?" I asked.
     De Brito said that it was, but that he had never seen any of the fish himself.  "But Rossy found a lot of muiraquittis in there," he said.
     I asked de Brito if he had ever found any muiraquittis himself, and he said no.
     What about caretas?

     He went into his hut and brought out seven he had picked up on the bank the previous October. Six of the pieces represented animals, among them a catfish and a howler monkey. The catfish was strikingly realistic. The seventh piece was a complete departure in both style and subject: a head of a woman with elaborately coiled hair. No ordinary woman would have had such a hairdo; this woman must have been important. Her mouth and her eyes (overarched with lightly incised brows) were simple slits. This careta looked-more than any native New World art work I was familiar withalmost Grecian. One of the earliest theories about the female warriors in the Amazon Valley was that they were an emigre remnant of the original mythical Scythian Amazons-a theory that can probably be ruled out.

     Very little is known about prehistoric Amazonian hair styles, but it is possible that they were similar to or
influenced by Inca coiffure. The hair of Inca women is known to have been elaborately braided, as is that of the Quechuan women, who are their present-day descendants. Carvajal, it will be recalled, described the women who attacked him and his companions as having "hair very long and braided and wound about the head." Could the sculptor of this careta have been familiar with the Carvajal account or the classical Amazon mythr Back in New York, several experts I showed the piece to suggested that it could have been made after contact with Europeans, and that its design could have been influenced by pictures that the Indians had seen in books or by designs on European armor or weapons. I explored the possibility of having the piece carbon-dated, but it was uncertain whether enough carbon could be extracted from it without destroying it, and whether a reliable date could be obtained, so I decided not to.

     To me, the careta looked just like the head of an Amazon, and it revived my interest in the myth, which had suffered after I saw the lake. As we pulled away from de Brito's dock, I wondered what had been there. The surface of the lake had been absolutely still. On a moonlit night, it would have made a perfect mirror, offering a rare opportunity, in the centuries before the arrival of silvered glass from Europe, for people to examine themselves. In a way, the fact that the lake was nondescript argued in favor of its being the seat of the Amazons. If the legend had been arbitrarily assigned to a place, wouldn't a more picturesque one have been chosen.

     We decided not to climb the serra. It was thickly overgrown, and de Brito assured us that we would find nothing. Instead, we crossed the river and examined an old Uaboi burial ground that was still a cemetery for the local caboclos. In a clearing along the forested bank, there were about a hundred weathered gray wooden crosses, all from this century, some radically tilting. Small waves of warm black water lapped the black-earth shore in quick succession.
 
 

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