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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1881 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. THE GARRAL FAMILY. The village of Iquitos is situated on the left bank of the Amazon, near the seventy-fourth meridian, on that portion of the great river which still bears the name of the Mara- non, and of which the bed separates Peru from the Republic of Ecuador. It is about five-and-fifty leagues to the west of the Brazilian frontier. Iquitos, like every other collection of huts, hamlet, or village, met with in the basin of the Upper Amazon, was founded by the missionaries. Up to the seventeenth year of the century the Iquito Indians, who then formed the entire population, were settled in the interior of the province at some distance from the river. But one day the springs in their territory all dried up under the influence of a volcanic eruption, and they were obliged to come and take up their abode on the left of the Maranon. The race soon altered through the alliances which were entered into with the riverine Indians, Ticunas, or Omaguas, mixeddescent with a few Spaniards, and to-day Iquitos has a population of two or three families of half-breeds. The village is most picturesquely grouped on a kind of esplanade, and runs along at about sixty feet from the river. It consists of some forty miserable huts, whose thatched roofs only just render them worthy of the name of cottages. A stairway made of crossed trunks of trees leads up to the village, which lies hidden from the traveller's eyes until the steps have been ascended. Once at the top he finds himself before an enclosure admitting of slight defence, and consisting of many different shrubs and arborescent plants, attached to e...

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