s; our horses were saddled, and we
started.

It was a picturesque cavalcade. The native hunters, of every shade
from white to dark copper, all wore leather leggings that left the
soles of their feet bare, and on their bare heels wore spurs with
wheels four inches across. They went in single file, for no other mode
of travel was possible; and the two or three leading men kept their
machetes out, and had to cut every yard of our way while we were in
the forest. The hunters rode little stallions, and their hounds were
gelded.

Most of the time we were in forest or swampy jungle. Part of the time
we crossed or skirted marshy plains. In one of them a herd of half-
wild cattle was feeding. Herons, storks, ducks, and ibises were in
these marshes, and we saw one flock of lovely roseate spoonbills.

In one grove the fig-trees were killing the palms, just as in Africa
they kill the sandalwood-trees. In the gloom of this grove there were
no flowers, no bushes; the air was heavy; the ground was brown with
mouldering leaves. Almost every palm was serving as a prop for a fig-
tree. The fig-trees were in every stage of growth. The youngest ones
merely ran up the palms as vines. In the next stage the vine had
thickened and was sending out shoots, wrapping the palm stem in a
deadly hold. Some of the shoots were thrown round the stem like the
tentacles of an immense cuttlefish. Others looked like claws, that
were hooked into every crevice, and round every projection. In the
stage beyond this the palm had been killed, and its dead carcass
appeared between the big, winding vine-trunks; and later the palm had
disappeared and the vines had united into a great fig-tree. Water
stood in black pools at the foot of the murdered trees, and of the
trees that had murdered them. There was something sinister and evil in
the dark stillness of the grove; it seemed as if sentient beings had
writhed themselves round and were strangling other sentient beings.

We passed through wonderfully beautiful woods of tall palms, the
ouaouaca palm--wawasa palm, as it should be spelled in English. The
trunks rose tall and strong and slender, and the fronds were branches
twenty or thirty feet long, with the many long, narrow green blades
starting from the midrib at right angles in pairs. Round the ponds
stood stately burity palms, rising like huge columns, with great
branches that looked like fans, as the long, stiff blades radiated
from the end of the midrib. On