In Brazil

The coppery cannibal Indians of upper Brazilian Guiana, squatting at their fires, their poisoned arrows handy on the ground, are not perturbed when a cobra slithers into camp, or a scorpion stings a foot, or a stream of venomous winged ants pours out of the jungle to dispute possession of the clearing. They are used to these annoyances, and could themselves be annoying if you should ascend the Parima River to its source and find them at home, before they have made their annual pilgrimage over the Sierra Parima to the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela. But these placid cannibals were most likely at a loss, last winter, when they pricked their ears to the distant humming of a billion ants on the move, a humming that became the drone of a host of baritone bees, of one giant bee, of a visible giant bee with a tail like a scorpion, of the first airplane those cannibals had ever seen. Down from heaven fell red parachutes at their feet -bales of beads, knives, gewgaws. "Glug," mused the cannibals, "glug, glug." The chances were that the next big bee that might happen along would be well received, even if he alighted.

That was the idea of Captain A. W. Stevens, official photographer of Dr. A. Hamilton Rice's expedition, and his pilot, Lieut. Walter Hinton, famed flier of the Atlantic-crossing NC-4. Back in Manhattan last week, Captain Stevens told how he aiid Hinton, the latter suffering continually from malaria, flew from Manaos, on the Rio Negro, up the Rio Branco to the Rio Uraricoera, to the Rio Parima, to the Parima's source, hitherto unvisited by whites. With an aerial camera in their seaplane, they mapped a 1,000-mile stretch accurately for the first time, returning every few days to Dr. Rice with fresh pictures of what lay before him. A radio operator, John Swanson, also flew in the plane. His makeshift stations erected in the jungle effected the first direct wireless communication between South America and London.

Behind the fliers went one Charles Bull, onetime Harvard athlete, to establish gasoline bases for them. Bull traveled in a canoe alone with his native crew for 700 miles, stripped stark as they to the tropical sun and rain.

Doctor-Explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice is gathering ethnological, geological, commercial data (rubber, gutta-percha). It is his eighth trip to tropical South America, where he has already mapped some 500,000 sq. mi.