reached the forest, and wandered into a green twilight under the dense
canopy of leaves, which formed an unbroken roof a hundred feet over
our heads. With "green twilight" the obvious epithet should be "cool";
that is exactly what it was not, for if the green canopy shut out the
sun, it also shut out the air, and the heat in that natural leafy
cathedral was absolutely overpowering. We wandered on and on, till I
began to grow giddy and faint with the heat. I asked Lyon how he was
feeling, and he owned that the heat had affected him too, so we sat
down on a rock to recuperate.

"It is a solemn thought," observed Lyon, after a long silence, "that
we are perhaps the first human beings to have set foot in this forest.
We simply must pull ourselves together, for it might be months before
any one passed here, and you know what that means." I assented
gloomily, as I formed melancholy mental pictures of ourselves as two
mature Babes-in-the-Wood, speculating whether, in the event of our
demise in these untrodden wilds, any Brazilian birds, brilliant of
plumage but kindly of heart, would cover us up with leaves. These
great forest tracts were producing an awe-inspiring effect on us as we
realised our precarious position, when we suddenly heard Toot! toot!
toot! and to our inexpressible amazement we saw a tramcar approaching
us through the trees. The car came within twenty feet of us, for the
track had been quite hidden by some rising ground; we hailed it, and
returned to Petropolis prosaically seated on the front bench of a
tramcar. We afterwards found that the untrodden wilds of our virgin
forest were traversed by a regular hourly service of tramcars; alas
for vanished illusions!

There is a street in Port-of-Spain which used to be known as the
"Calle de los Presidentes," or Presidents' Street, for it was here