and
naturalists of the right type have open to them in South America a
field of extraordinary attraction and difficulty. But to excavate
ruins that have already long been known, to visit out-of-the-way towns
that date from colonial days, to traverse old, even if uncomfortable,
routes of travel, or to ascend or descend highway rivers like the
Amazon, the Paraguay, and the lower Orinoco--all of these exploits are
well worth performing, but they in no sense represent exploration or
adventure, and they do not entitle the performer, no matter how well
he writes and no matter how much of real value he contributes to human
knowledge, to compare himself in anyway with the real wilderness
wanderer, or to criticise the latter. Such a performance entails no
hardship or difficulty worth heeding. Its value depends purely on
observation, not on action. The man does little; he merely records
what he sees. He is only the man of the beaten routes. The true
wilderness wanderer, on the contrary, must be a man of action as well
as of observation. He must have the heart and the body to do and to
endure, no less than the eye to see and the brain to note and record.

Let me make it clear that I am not depreciating the excellent work of
so many of the men who have not gone off the beaten trails. I merely
wish to make it plain that this excellent work must not be put in the
class with that of the wilderness explorer. It is excellent work,
nevertheless, and has its place, just as the work of the true explorer
has its place. Both stand in sharpest contrast with the actions of
those alleged explorers, among whom Mr. Savage Landor stands in
unpleasant prominence.

From the Sepotuba rapids our course at the outset lay westward. The
first day's march away from the river lay through dense tropical
forest. Away from the broad, beaten route every step of a man's
progress represented slashing a trail with the machete through the
tangle of bushes, low trees, thorny scrub, and interlaced creepers.
There were palms of new kinds, very tall, slender, straight, and
graceful, with rather short and few fronds. The wild plantains, or
pacovas, thronged the spaces among the trunks of the tall trees; their
boles were short, and their broad, erect leaves gigantic; they bore
brilliant red-and-orange flowers. There were trees whose trunks
bellied into huge swellings. There were towering trees with buttressed
trunks, whose leaves made a fretwork against the sky far ov