Brasyl

SEPTEMBER 16- I7, 1732

Robert Francois St.Honore Falcon: Expedition Log

A wonder a day and I do not doubt we should all live forever! I am comforttably domiciled in the College adjoining the Carmelite Church of Nossa Se

Captain Acunha, desiring to show a proud Frenchman a marvel of his land, called me to the prow to observe the extraordinary sight of two rivers, one black, one milky white, flowing side by side in the same cha

Now by contrast I consider São José Tarumás do Rio Negro. A fort, ma

Father Luis Qui

Father Qui

(Addendum)

I am troubled by a scene I glimpsed from my window in the College.

Raised voices and a hellish bellowing made me glance out; by the light of torches, a fat ox had been manhandled into the pracça before the church, a rope to each hoof, horn, and nostril and men hauling on them, yet scarcely able to control the bellowing, terrified beast. A man stepped forth with a poleax, set himself before the creature, and brought his weapon down between the ox’s ears. Seven blows it took before the maddened animal fell and was still. I turned away when the men started to dismember the ox in the praça, but I am certain that it was stricken with the plague, the madness. It has reached São José Tarumás, the last place in the world, it would seem, or is it from here that it originates?

I trust the bloody barbarism does not upset my appetite for the friar’s hospitality.

The men fell on them at the landing. Faces hidden behind kerchiefs, the three attackers stepped out from the cover of the pontoon houses on either side of the bobbing gangplank. Flight, evasion, was impossible in so narrow a pass. Qui

“Hold off or you die this instant,” he commanded. The man glowered at him, shook his head, and pressed forward. Falcon flickered his thumb over the wheel lock. Now the third assassin elbowed his colleague out of the road. He held a naked knife, faced Falcon at breath distance, hands held out in the knife-fighters pose seeming half-supplication.

“I hardly think — ”

The man struck. Falcon saw the top finger-length of the pistol fall to the wood. Worked hardwood, steel, and brass had been cut through as cleanly as silk. The man gri