the river there was an opportunity of seeing a pair of the
king of the vultures; they were sitting on the naked branch of a tree,
with about a dozen of the common ones with them. A tiger had killed a
goat the day before; he had been driven away in the act of sucking the
blood, and not finding it safe or prudent to return, the goat remained in
the same place where he had killed it; it had begun to putrefy, and the
vultures had arrived that morning to claim the savoury morsel.

At the close of day, the vampires leave the hollow trees, whither they
had fled at the morning's dawn, and scour along the river's banks in
quest of prey. On waking from sleep, the astonished traveller finds his
hammock all stained with blood. It is the vampire that has sucked him.
Not man alone, but every unprotected animal, is exposed to his
depredations; and so gently does this nocturnal surgeon draw the blood,
that instead of being roused, the patient is lulled into a still
profounder sleep. There are two species of vampire in Demerara, and both
suck living animals; one is rather larger than the common bat; the other
measures above two feet from wing to wing extended.

Snakes are frequently met with in the woods betwixt the sea-coast and the
rock Saba, chiefly near the creeks and on the banks of the river. They
are large, beautiful, and formidable. The rattlesnake seems partial to a
tract of ground known by the name of Canal Number Three; there the
effects of his poison will be long remembered.

The camoudi snake has been killed from thirty to forty feet long; though
not venomous, his size renders him destructive to the passing animals.
The Spaniards in the Oroonoque positively affirm that he grows to the
length of seventy or eighty feet, and that he will destroy the strongest
and largest bull. His name seems to confirm this; there he is called
"matatoro," which literally means "bull-killer." Thus he may be ranked
amongst the deadly snakes: for it comes nearly to the same thing in the
end, whether the victim dies by poison from the fangs, which corrupts his
blood and makes it stink horribly, or whether his body be crushed to
mummy and swallowed by this hideous beast.

The whipsnake, of a beautiful changing green, and the coral with
alternate broad transverse bars of black and red, glide from bush to
bush, and may be handled with safety; they are harmless little creatures.

The labarri snake is speckled, of a dirty brown colour, and c