e might have fancied
oneself in the Wash off Sandringham on a burning summer's noon.

Soon logs and stumps, standing out of the water, marked the mouth of
the Caroni; and we had to take a sweep out seaward to avoid its mud-
banks. Over that very spot, now unnavigable, Raleigh and his men
sailed in to conquer Trinidad.

On one log a huge black and white heron moped all alone, looking in
the mist as tall as a man; and would not move for all our shouts.
Schools of fish dimpled the water; and brown pelicans fell upon
them, dashing up fountains of silver. The trade-breeze, as it rose,
brought off the swamps a sickly smell, suggestive of the need of
coffee, quinine, Angostura bitters, or some other febrifuge. In
spite of the glorious sunshine, the whole scene was sad, desolate,
almost depressing, from its monotony, vastness, silence; and we were
glad, when we neared the high tree which marks the entrance of the
Chaguanas Creek, and turned at last into a recess in the mangrove
bushes; a desolate pool, round which the mangrove roots formed an
impenetrable net. As far as the eye could pierce into the tangled
thicket, the roots interlaced with each other, and arched down into
the water in innumerable curves, by no means devoid of grace, but
hideous just because they were impenetrable. Who could get over
those roots, or through the scrub which stood stilted on them,
letting down at every yard or two fresh air-roots from off its
boughs, to add fresh tangle, as they struck into the mud, to the
horrible imbroglio? If one had got in among them, I fancied, one
would never have got out again. Struggling over and under endless
trap-work, without footing on it or on the mud below, one must have
sunk exhausted in an hour or two, to die of fatigue and heat, or
chill and fever.

Let the mangrove foliage be as gay and green as it may--and it is
gay and green--a mangrove swamp is a sad, ugly, evil place; and so I
felt that one to be that day.

The only moving things were some large fish, who were leaping high
out of water close to the bushes, glittering in the sun. They
stopped as we came up: and then all was still, till a slate-blue
heron {122a} rose lazily off a dead bough, flapped fifty yards up
the creek, and then sat down again. The only sound beside the
rattle of our oars was the metallic note of a pigeon in the high
tree, which I mistook then and afterwards for the sound of a horn.

On