its own canal into the Atlantic."

"And what a mouth! An arm of the sea in which one island, Marajo, has
a circumference of more than five hundred leagues!"

"And whose waters the ocean does not pond back without raising in a
strife which is phenomenal, a tide-race, or _'pororoca,'_ to which
the ebbs, the bores, and the eddies of other rivers are but tiny
ripples fanned up by the breeze."

"A river which three names are scarcely enough to distinguish, and
which ships of heavy tonnage, without any change in their cargoes,
can ascend for more than three thousand miles from its mouth."

"A river which, by itself, its affluents, and subsidiary streams,
opens a navigable commercial route across the whole of the south of
the continent, passing from the Magdalena to the Ortequazza, from the
Ortequazza to the Caqueta, from the Caqueta to the Putumayo, from the
Putumayo to the Amazon! Four thousand miles of waterway, which only
require a few canals to make the network of navigation complete!"

"In short, the biggest and most admirable river system which we have
in the world."

The two young men were speaking in a kind of frenzy of their
incomparable river. They were themselves children of this great
Amazon, whose affluents, well worthy of itself, from the highways
which penetrate Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, New Grenada, Venezuela, and
the four Guianas--English, French, Dutch and Brazilian.