_Jan. 30._ Talk enough there has been of a place called Porto Velho, a name I heard first when I signed the articles of the "Capella" at Swansea, and of what would happen to us when we arrived. But I am looking upon it all as a strange myth. There has been time to prove those superstitions of Porto Velho. And what has happened? There was a month we had of the vacant sea, and one day we came upon a low coast where palms grew. There has been a month which has striped the vacant mind in three colours, constant in relative position, but without form, yellow floor, green walls, and a blue ceiling. Plainly we have got beyond all the works of man now. We have intrigued an ocean steamer thousands of miles along the devious waterways of an uninhabited continental jungle, and now she must be near the middle of the puzzle, with voiceless regions of unexplored forest reeking under the equatorial sun at every point of the compass. The more we advance up the Amazon and Madeira rivers the less the likelihood, it seems to me, of getting to any place where our ship and cargo could be required. We shall steam and steam till the river shallows, the forest closes in, and we are trapped. Yet the Madeira looks now much the same as when we entered it, still as broad and deep. I was thinking this morning we might go on so for ever; that this adventure was all of the casual improbabilities of a dream was in my mind when, smoking the after breakfast pipe on the bridge, we turned a corner sharply, and there was the end of the passage within a mile of us, Porto Velho at last.
The forest on the port side ahead was uplifted on an unusually high cliff of the red rock. Beyond that cliff was a considerable clearing, with many buildings of a character different from any we had seen in the country. At the end of the clearing the forest began again, unconquered still, standing across our course as a high barrier; for, leaving Porto Velho, the river turned west almost at a right angle, and vanished; as though now it were done with us. We had arrived. A rough pier was being thrown out on palm boles to receive us, but it was not ready. We anchored in five fathoms, about thirty yards from the shore, and in the quiet which came with the stop of the ship's life we waited for the next thing, all hands lining the "Capella's" side surveying this place of which we had heard so much.