. The brute had luckily
got hold, not of her poor little body, but of her bathing-dress, and
held on stupidly. The girls pulled; the bathing-dress, which was,
luckily, of thin cotton, was torn off; the Huillia slid back again
with it in his mouth into the dark labyrinth of the mangrove-roots;
and the girl was saved. Two minutes' delay, and his coils would
have been round her; and all would have been over.

The sudden daring of these lazy and stupid animals is very great.
Their brain seems to act like that of the alligator or the pike,
paroxysmally, and by rare fits and starts, after lying for hours
motionless as if asleep. But when excited, they will attempt great
deeds. Dr. De Verteuil tells a story--and if he tells it, it must
be believed--of some hunters who wounded a deer. The deer ran for
the stream down a bank; but the hunters had no sooner heard it
splash into the water than they heard it scream. They leapt down to
the place, and found it in the coils of a Huillia, which they killed
with the deer. And yet this snake, which had dared to seize a full-
grown deer, could have had no hope of eating her; for it was only
seven feet long.

We set out down a foul porter-coloured creek, which soon opened out
into a river, reminding us, in spite of all differences, of certain
alder and willow-fringed reaches of the Thames. But here the wood
which hid the margin was altogether of mangrove; the common
Rhizophoras, or black mangroves, being, of course, the most
abundant. Over them, however, rose the statelier Avicennias, or
white mangroves, to a height of fifty or sixty feet, and poured down
from their upper branches whole streams of air-roots, which waved
and creaked dolefully in the breeze overhead. But on the water was
no breeze at all. The lagoon was still as glass; the sun was
sickening; and we were glad to put up our umbrellas and look out
from under them for Manatis and Boas. But the Manatis usually only
come in at night, to put their heads out of water and browse on the
lowest mangrove leaves; and the Boas hide themselves so cunningly,
either altogether under water, or with only the head above, that we
might have passed half a dozen without seeing them. The only
chance, indeed, of coming across them, is when they are travelling
from lagoon to lagoon, or basking on the mud at low tide.

So all the game which we saw was a lovely white Egret, {278} its
back covered with