ot vary more
than two or three degrees. The climate is more equable than that of any
other observed part of the New World.[147] The greatest heat is reached
at two o'clock, but it is never so oppressive as in New York. The
greater the heat, the stronger the sea-breeze; and in three hundred out
of three hundred and sixty-five days, the air is farther cooled by an
afternoon shower. The rainiest month is April; the dryest, October or
November. Lying in the delta of a great river, in the middle of the
tropics, and half surrounded by swamps, its salubrity is remarkable. We
readily excuse the proverb, "_Quem vai para Para para_" ("He who goes to
Para stops there"); and we might have made it good, had we not been
tempted by the magnificent steamer "South America," which came up from
Rio on the way to New York. On the moonlit night of the 7th of January,
when the ice-king had thrown his white robes over the North, we turned
our backs upon the glimmering lights of Para, and noiselessly as a canoe
glided down the great river. As the sun rose for the last time to us
upon the land of perpetual verdure, our gallant ship was plowing the
mottled waters on the edge of the ocean--mingled yellow patches of the
Amazon and dark streaks from the Para floating on the Atlantic green.
Far behind us we could see the breakers dashing against the Braganza
Banks; a moment after Cape Magoary dropped beneath the horizon, and with
it South America vanished from our view.

[Footnote 147: "The traveler, in going from the equator toward the
tropics, is less struck by the decrease of the mean annual temperature
than by the unequal distribution of heat in different parts of the
year."--_Humboldt_. The great German fixes the mean temperature of the
equator at 81.5 deg.; Brewster, at 82.8 deg.; Kirwan, 83.9 deg.; Atkinson, 84.5 deg..]

CHAPTER XVIII.

The River Amazon.--Its Source and Magnitude.--Tributaries and
Tints.--Volume and Current.--Rise and
Fall.--Navigation.--Expeditions on the Great River.

Near the silver mines of Cerro Pasco, in the little Lake of Lauricocha,
just below the limit of perpetual winter, rises the "King of
Waters."[148] For the first five hundred miles it flows northerly, in a
continuous series of cataracts and rapids, through a deep valley between
the parallel Cordilleras of Peru. Upon reaching the frontier of Ecuador,
it turns to the right, and runs easterly two thousand five hundred miles
across the gr