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Nicholeto Chordiman Directory 06
Page 07
As they had not been able to spend a single penny since we had left Diamantino they had accumulated a considerable sum of cash. I warned them, as I had done with Benedicto, to be careful and not waste their money. They went out for a walk. Some hours later they returned, dressed up in wonderful costumes with fancy silk ties, patent leather shoes, gold chains and watches, and gaudy scarf-pins. In a few hours they had wasted away nearly the entire sum I had paid out to them. Everything was extremely expensive in Para--certainly three or four times the price which things would fetch in London or New York.
Once in a generation, a Wallace may be found physically, mentally, and morally qualified to wander unscathed through the tropical wilds of America and of Asia, to form magnificent collections as he wanders, and withal to think out sagaciously the conclusions suggested by his collections; but, to the ordinary explorer or collector, the dense forests of equatorial Asia and Africa, which constitute the favorite habitation of the Orang, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla, present difficulties of no ordinary magnitude; and the man who risks his life by even a short visit to the malarious shores of those regions may well be excused if he shrinks from facing the dangers of the interior; if he contents himself with stimulating the industry of the better-seasoned natives, and collecting and collating the more or less mythical reports and traditions with which they are too ready to supply him.
While there is no necessity for supposing an elevation greater than that required to lay bare a passage for animals back and forth, yet soundings undertaken by the British government have established the fact, that the ocean deepens very gradually away from the shores of the main-land until a depth of six hundred feet is reached, when the shore falls away very suddenly. This is supposed to be the sea-coast of that time. The English Channel would then have existed as the valley of the Seine, and the Rhine have prolonged its flow over the present bed of the North Sea. As the land stood at this height through a large portion of the Glacial Age, it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that primitive tribes hunted back and forth along these valleys, and so doubtless many convincing proofs of their presence at that early day lie buried underneath the waves of the sea. In like manner, at the south, we know that elephants, lions, and hyenas passed freely from Africa to Spain, Italy, and the Island of Crete,<7> and, consequently, the Mediterranean Sea must have been bridged in one or two places at least.
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