Everything, from the little sheet-iron church
to the pig-sty, is built on poles. Indeed, if there is anything in
the theory of evolution, it will not be many generations before the
inhabitants and domestic animals are born equipped with stilts.
Opposite Remate de Males, across the Itecoahy, is a collection of
some ten huts that form the village of Sao Francisco, while across
the Javary is the somewhat larger village of Nazareth. Like every real
metropolis, you see, Remate de Males has its suburbs. Nazareth is in
Peruvian territory, the Javary forming the boundary between Brazil and
Peru throughout its length of some 700 miles. This same boundary line
is a source of amusing punctiliousness between the officials of each
country. To cross it is an affair requiring the exercise of the limits
of statesmanship. I well remember an incident that occurred during my
stay in the village. A sojourner in our town, an Indian rubber-worker
from the Ituhy River, had murdered a woman by strangling her. He
escaped in a canoe to Nazareth before the Brazilian officials could
capture him, and calmly took refuge on the porch of a house there,
where he sat down in a hammock and commenced to smoke cigarettes,
feeling confident that his pursuers would not invade Peruvian soil.
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