has its place. Both stand in sharpest contrast with the actions of
those alleged explorers, among whom Mr. Savage Landor stands in
unpleasant prominence.

From the Sepotuba rapids our course at the outset lay westward. The
first day's march away from the river lay through dense tropical
forest. Away from the broad, beaten route every step of a man's
progress represented slashing a trail with the machete through the
tangle of bushes, low trees, thorny scrub, and interlaced creepers.
There were palms of new kinds, very tall, slender, straight, and
graceful, with rather short and few fronds. The wild plantains, or
pacovas, thronged the spaces among the trunks of the tall trees; their
boles were short, and their broad, erect leaves gigantic; they bore
brilliant red-and-orange flowers. There were trees whose trunks
bellied into huge swellings. There were towering trees with buttressed
trunks, whose leaves made a fretwork against the sky far overhead.
Gorgeous red-and-green trogons, with long tails, perched motionless on
the lower branches and uttered a loud, thrice-repeated whistle. We
heard the calling of the false bellbird, which is gray instead of
white like the true bellbirds; it keeps among the very topmost
branches. Heavy rain fell shortly after we reached our camping-place.

Next morning at sunrise we climbed a steep slope to the edge of the
Parecis plateau, at a level of about two thousand feet above the sea.
We were on the Plan Alto, the high central plain of Brazil, the
healthy land of dry air, of cool nights, of clear, running brooks. The
sun was directly behind us when we topped the rise. Reining in, we
looked back over the vast Paraguayan marshes, shimmering in the long
morning lights. Then, turning again, we rode forward, casting shadows
far before us. It was twenty miles to the next water, and in hot