Within her wide area Brazil encloses a great variety of soils and climates: she has no snow line, because she has no great mountain heights; a peak less than three thousand metres high, Itatiaya, in the Mantiqueiras, is the point of greatest altitude. But she has almost every other climatic gift that can be included within the fifth degree of North and thirty-third of South Latitude; between the eighth degree East and thirtieth West Longitude of the meridian of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is a vast plateau with a steep descent to the sea along half her coast, and a flat hot sea margin of varying widths; this plateau, scored by great rivers, sweeps away in undulating prairies, sloping in two principal directions—inland, in the centre and south, to the great Paraná valley; and in the upper regions, northward to the immense Amazon basin. This is not a basin so much as a wide plate, for not only is the course of the huge _rio-mar_ almost flat for the last thousand miles of its journey to the sea (Manáos is only 85 feet above sea-level) but this practically level ground extends northward all the way to the confines of Venezuela and the three Guianas, and southward until the Cordilheiras of Matto Grosso are encountered. Great expanses of this plate are filled with the sweltering forests of tropical tradition, forests containing a thousand kinds of strange orchids, immense and curious trees, insects, reptiles and animals; from Orellana and Lopez de Aguirre to Humboldt, Bates, Wallace and Agassiz, from the Lord de la Ravardière to Nicolas Hortsman the practical Dutchman who announced that El Dorado did not exist, to Charles Marie de la Condamine, Martius, Spix, Admiral Smith, Lister Maw, Schomburgk and Wickham, every traveller upon the Amazon has tried to describe the indescribable Amazonian forest. Deep, monotonous, silent, dark and changeless, the forest unconquerable walls in the uncountable rivers traversing it from the snows of Peru and the interior plateau of Brazil, closing in upon the little cities where man has settled himself in a puny attempt to steal treasures out of its mighty heart. There is a remarkable contrast between this humid forestal area of the north and the cool high cattle lands of the centre, the pine and matte woods and wheat lands of the south and the hot coastal belt of the great promontory with its deep fringe of coconuts, its sugar country, tobacco fields and cacao plantations; between the coffee country of São Paulo and the regions of the carnauba palm and the babassú. No physical contrast could be more acute than that of the flat tropic swamps of Pará and the austere, fantastic and beautiful granite peaks of the Serra do Mar near Rio—the slender Finger of God in the Orgão Mountains, the curved up-rearing of the Corcovado, the cloud-wreathed head of Tijuca.