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How fast the boat sped on over the surface of the whirling stream that rushed by those red banks, swift as the flash of life, hurrying on to lose itself in the ocean as life hurries on to lose itself in the infinite. The banks were getting flatter, here and there the stream widened, the wild tamarisk, child of the desert, disappeared and gave way to cultivated fields and wide tracts of the maguey plant, dear and valuable to the Mexican as the date-palm to the East-Indian. Rough yellow adobe huts stood here and there, their crude colouring of unbaked mud turned into gold by that great painter, the tropical sun; and sometimes a palm stood by a hut, cutting the fierce light blue of the sky with its delicate, fine, curved, drooping branches; sometimes the dark, glossy green of the organ cactus rose like jade pillars beside it. All these sped by us quickly, though at times the scene was so engaging I could have held it with my eyes; but ruthlessly we were whirled forward and the scenes on the bank kept slipping behind us, just as our dearest scenes and incidents in life keep slipping past, swallowed up by the ever-pursuing distance. Our red banks had been growing flatter and flatter and now they seemed to disappear, and the river instantly broadened itself out and spread into a lake, as if glad of the expansion. Over each bank, far on either side, it rolled itself out in great shining flats of water, glittering and dazzling, impossible to look at in this hour of noon; and as if tranquillity had come to it with its greater freedom, the river flowed more slowly and gently. Our boatmen stood at ease at their paddles, pushing quietly along, and I looked round with interest. We were in the centre of a great lake in which here and there submerged trees and bushes made green islands. An endless lake it seemed, a great waste of gleaming water. We floated along gently like this for some time, and then almost suddenly when I looked ahead, I saw the end of the lake was closing in, there were woods and forests now upon its margin; a few more strokes of the paddle and we were in shade, heavy, cool shade, where the water gleamed with a bronze shimmer. Narrower still the lake end became, the margins drew together, and with a swift push forwards, like the bolt of a rabbit to its hole, our boat shot forwards into a little tunnel of darkness before us over which the interlacing boughs of the trees made a perfect arch. We were in the
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