river called the Parinia
is connected; and from the geological structure of the surrounding
country, is supposed to have been formerly much larger than at present.
Within and around it are islands and, rocks of mica, slate, and talc;
"the materials," observes Humboldt, "out of which has been formed that
gorgeous capital, whose temples and houses were overlaid with beaten
plates of gold." Schombergh, who visited the lake, agrees with the
German philosopher. Another traveller, Hillhouse, in 1830 ascended the
Masaruni, which flows from the northern side of the mountains of
Roraima, among which the lake is situated; and believes that its
romantic valley was once the bed of a large lake twelve miles in width,
and upwards of one hundred miles in length,--which long ago burst its
barriers and gave rise to the fable still preserved among the Indians,
and, till within almost the present century, believed in by the
colonists themselves.

RIVERS:--THE ESSEQUIBO.

Let us take a glance over some of the rivers of the land.

The Essequibo, called by the Indians the "younger brother of the
Orinoco," first claims attention. The mouth has rather the appearance
of a vast lake than a river, its shores bordered by thick groves of that
tree of curious structure, the mangrove, whose roots or seeds, borne on
the ocean wave, strike wherever they can find a muddy soil, throughout
every part of the tropics. Rising upwards on the roots, which it shoots
downwards as it grows, the base of its stem is often six or eight feet
from the ground--the stem itself seldom more than a foot in diameter,
and from fifteen to twenty feet in height. Its thick stiff ribs, about
eight inches long and nine inches wide, are of a dark sombre hue. This
broad estuary, extending inland for thirty miles or more, with numerous
picturesque islands covered by tropical vegetation rising out of it, is
joined by the united streams of the Masaruni and Cuyuni, its own and
their romantic waterfalls making a continuous navigation up them
impossible. Yet, notwithstanding its impediments, these rivers afford
the only means of communication, except along the foot-tracks of the
Indians, through the dense forests, into the far-off interior. These
forests commence in many parts close to the ocean, spreading often for
thousands of square miles, broken sometimes by swamps, and at others by
wide savannahs, open spaces covered with grasses, and here and there
clumps of trees. Even