the edge of the bank, to the danger of
the eel-like lung fish, which sometimes goes up on to dry land.
Sometimes they saw the Indians in light canoes pursue manatis and
alligators with harpoons for the sake of their flesh, and perhaps they
felt a shiver at the sight of the huge water-snakes of the Amazons
River.

On they went through the immense forest which extends from the foot of
the Andes and the sources of the Madeira to the mouths of the
Orinoco--through this dense, rank carpet which covers all the lowlands
of Brazil with its teeming and superabundant life, and which is so
bountifully watered by tropical rains and flooded rivers. All the rain
that falls on the _llanos_ and the _selvas_ (as the wooded plains are
called) makes its way through innumerable affluents to the Amazons and
enters the sea through its trumpet-shaped mouth. The river, with its
forests, is like a cornucopia of vast, wild, irrepressible nature, where
life breathes and pulsates, where it bubbles and ripples, seethes and
ferments in the soft productive soil, where animals swarm, and beetles
and butterflies are more numerous than anywhere else on our earth, and
are clad in the most gorgeous hues of the tropics. There old trees on
the bank are undermined and washed away, while others decay in the
sultry recesses of the forest. There the earth is constantly fertilised
by the manure of animals and their corpses and by dead vegetation, and
there new generations are continually rising up from the graves in
nature's inexhaustible kingdom.

The Spaniards had no time to make excursions into the country from their
camps. It is difficult to make one's way through this intricate, ragged
network of climbing plants between trunks, boughs, bushes, and
undergrowth. In the interior, far away from the waterways, and
especially between some of the southern tributaries, lie forests unknown
and untrodden since heathen times. Perhaps there are Indian tribes among
them who have not yet heard that America has been discovered, and who
may congratulate themselves that the forests are too much for the white
men.

There palms predominate in a peaceful Eden, and at their feet flourish
ferns with stems as hard as wood. In the bamboo clumps the jaguars play
with their cubs, and on the outskirts of the swamps the peccary, a sort
of small pig, jumps on his long, supple legs. A dark-green gloom
prevails under the tall bay-trees, and their stems stand under their
crowns like