I hate traveling and explorers, and yet I am preparing to tell my adventures. But how much time it took me to decide! 

Fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time, and during all this time I often thought of writing this book, but every time a kind of shame and disgust prevented me. Why, I wondered, should I narrate with such precision so many trivial details from insignificant events? Adventure has no place in the profession of an ethnographer, it is only a compulsion that weighs on creative work with the burden of weeks or months that passed slowly, hours in which the explorer gets lost in hunger, fatigue, and sometimes illness. 

Then these countless hardships destroy the creativity of the days and turn the dangerous life in the heart of the virgin forest into an imitation of military service... The many efforts and expenses made to reach the object of our studies are not only unrewarded but rather considered the negative side of our profession. 

The truths, which we seek so far away, have value only when stripped of this shell. We can dedicate six months of travel, deprivation, and unbearable fatigue to collect and record (which only requires a few days or even hours) some unpublished myth, a new marriage rule, a whole list of names of a clan, but is the barren narrative of so many poor impressions like: "At five-thirty in the morning we entered the bay of Resif while seagulls were crying around us and a skiff from ships loaded with exotic fruits were sailing around the boat," something worth taking my pen and capturing it as a memory?