RANGED around the world TIME has the largest corps of correspondents reporting to any single publication --more than 440 fulltime and part-time reporters. Most of their time is spent in the hard, not necessarily glamorous job of reporting, observing, analyzing--and thinking--about the news. But at times, perhaps more often than the reporters for most other publications, they have a story that leads to real adventure. Such was the case with this week's color-picture story on the vast, wild Amazon River basin.

Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief George de Carvalho, with New York Photographer Anthony Linck, traveled 10,000 miles for almost a month by motor launch, native dugout canoe, truck, jalopy and a variety of barely airworthy small planes, visited scores of river towns, oil and mineral exploration camps, pioneer farms, mines, missionary stations and Indian villages deep in the jungle. Once, to photograph a tribe of Mato Grosso Indians, De Carvalho and Linck hiked nine miles through thick jungle and at dusk hiked out again, preceded by a native guide armed with a flashlight and rifle. At the camp of a seismographic crew, they just missed a battle in which seven Indians were killed during a surprise attack on a geologist.

Beyond the borders of civilization, they encountered primitive Indians in long, swishing costumes of grass (to keep away insects), others who wore only strings of polished fish scales or small stones around their necks and hips. At some stops, their presents of candy, fishhooks and pocket mirrors were rewarded by exhibitions of war dances and feats of bravery. One great problem was food and drink. They sat down to meals of diced wild turtle, and wild boar hash ("Good, too," said De Carvalho), but politely declined offerings of broiled green lizard and a drink called chicha, which native women made by chewing corn, spitting it into a bowl and giving the product time to ferment.

Last week, back at his base in Rio, De Carvalho dutifully reported on the former U.S. army colonel who calls the Amazon city of Belem "better than ten New Yorks put together," and on the doctor who said that the town of Manaus "is really a fine place to live--all it takes is some psychological adjustment." As for his own views, Correspondent de Carvalho left the clear impression that he felt both the cities and the jungle around them were interesting places to visit, but he would not care to live there.

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