forest, and it was
dark and cool as it had been brilliant, dazzling with light and heat,
on the lake. A dim, green twilight reigned here, and the river went
with a swift, dark rush, past the roots of the overhanging trees. How
they stooped over the water! Swinging down, interlacing boughs from
which vine and flowering creeper trailed. The standing figure of the
boatman had to bend down and sway from side to side to avoid the
clinging wreaths or mossy boughs and be wary with his paddle to escape
the snags projecting from the banks.

How grand the great spanning arches of the trees were, above our
heads! Finer than any cathedral roof wrought by man. How soft the
luminous green twilight seemed in the long aisle! And constantly from
bough to bough twined a great scarlet-flowered creeper, glowing redly
in all this mystery of shade. The banks were thick with vegetation,
one thing growing over another, with tropical luxuriance, until
sometimes here and there groups of plants, weary with the struggle
each to assert itself, had all fallen together over the bank and
trailed their long strands wearily in the water.

The stream zigzagged on before us, here darkly green to blackness;
there, where the light pierced through the upper boughs, a golden
bronze; then blue and silver where it caught and eddied and played
round a fallen tree or a stump in the river bed.

We were going fast now, and as we shot along the glimmering stream we
left the thick green part of the forest behind us. The river broadened
out, expanded widely on either side, and in a few more minutes we
seemed on a chain of infinite lakes spreading out on every side under
and through the trees, which, though they met far overhead forming a
perfect and continuous roof, were bare of leaves and flowering vines
beneath. Grey trunks and bare brown branches in bewildering numbers
now surrounded us, and the sheets of water reflected all so perfectly
down to infinite depths that one lost sense of reality. Boughs and
branches, all arching and curving and spreading above us in the
softened light, and boughs and branches and inverted trees below us,
arches and curves and twisted networks; between, those long gleaming
flats of water on which we floated silently without sense of motion,
ever onwards.

"It is a little like the wood at Sitka in times of river flood," Suzee
said to me, as we sat together watching the mirrored stems and
branches glide by beneath our boat.

"Yes?