shore growing out toward our starboard bulwark all along, crowded with wet green woods, up into steaming high ground--all to eastward a dazzle of light, with two or three faint mountain-peaks shooting up far off in it, and a woody blue hill or so between; while here and there a broad bright hazy spoke off the sun came cutting down into the forest, that brought out a patch full of long big leaves, ten times greener than the rest, and let you look off the deck into the heart of it amongst the stems over the bank. The jabber in the woods had passed off all at once with the dusk, the water deepening over the bar, and the tide running slower, so that every one's confused face turned breathless with delight as it grew stiller and stiller. The whole breadth of the river shone out by this time, full and smooth, to the opposite shore three times as far away, where the wood and bulrushes seemed to grow out of the water; a long thick range of low, muddy-looking mangroves, with a cover of dark-green, rounding from the farthest point one saw, down to some sandy hummocks near the mouth, and a ridge of the same, drifted up by the wind off the beach. Beyond that side there was nothing, apparently, but a rolling sweep of long coarse grass, with a few straggling cocoa-nut trees and baobabs, like big swollen logs on end, and taken to sprouting at top: a dun-coloured heave of land in the distance, too, that came out, as it got hotter, in a long desert-like, red brick-dust sort of a glare. The sole living things to be seen as yet, were some small birds rising up out of the long grass, and the turkey-buzzards sailing high over all across, as if on the look-out.