These reptiles are so numerous in many parts as to be a great pest; they often carry off sheep and cattle, and not unfrequently women and children who incautiously go into or even near the water. The Malagasy, however, have a superstitious dread of these monsters, which prevents them from attempting to kill them. They rather try to propitiate the creature by prayers and offerings thrown into the water, and by acknowledging its supremacy in its own element. At Itàsy, a lake fifty miles west of the capital, the people believe that if a crocodile be killed a human life will, within a very short time, be exacted by the animal’s brother reptiles, as an atonement for his death. Two or three French travellers once shot a crocodile in this lake, and such was the people’s consternation and dread of the consequences that their visitors found it expedient to quit the neighbourhood as quickly as possible. The eggs of the crocodile are collected and sold for food in the markets, and are said to be perfectly good, but I confess I never brought myself to test their merits. We kept near the banks of the river, and so were able to examine and admire the luxuriant vegetation with which they were covered. In many places the bamboo is conspicuous, with its long-jointed, tapering stem, and its whorls of minute leaves, of a light delicate green; but it is small here compared with what we afterwards saw in the main forest. Plantations of sugar-cane and manioc were mingled with banana-trees, palms, pandanus and other trees, many not unlike English forms. Numbers of great water-lilies with blue flowers were growing in the shallow water, and convolvuli, as well as numerous other flowers of new kinds and colours, everywhere met the eye. The shores were flat at first, but became more hilly, and the scenery more varied, as we proceeded. [Sidenote: THE TRAVELLER’S TREE]