We started at last, and only a few miles of glistening rails had passed beneath us when, finally, proof of the complete schism between police and weather bureaus became evident: the fresh tradewind dispersed the rain! The clouds remained, however--low, swirling masses of ashy-blue, billowing out like smoke from a bursting shell, or fraying in pale gray tatters, tangling the fronds of lofty palms. For the rest of the day the light came from the horizon--a thrillingly weird, indirect illumination, which lent vividness and intensity to every view. The world was scoured clean, the air cleansed of every particle of dust, while the clouds lent a cool freshness wholly untropical, and hour after hour the splendid savannah lands of the coast of Guiana slipped past, as we rumbled swiftly southward along the entire shore-front. At first we passed close to the sea, and this was the most exciting part of the trip. In places the dikes had given way and the turbulent muddy waters had swept inland over rice and cane-fields, submerging in one implacable tide the labor of years. A new dike, of mud and timbers and sweet-smelling hurdles of black sage, had been erected at the roadside, and past this went all traffic. Now and then an automobile had to slow up until a great wave broke, and then dash at full speed across the danger-spot. In spite of the swiftness, the wind-flung spray of the next wave would drench the occupants. The lowering sea-water glistened among the sickly plants, and strange fish troubled the salty pools as they sought uneasily for an outlet to the ocean. A flock of skimmers looked wholly out of place driving past a clump of bamboos. Then the roadbed shifted inland, and lines of patient, humped zebus trailed slowly from their sheds--sheds of larger size and better built than the huts of their owners. These open-work homes were picturesque and unobtrusive; they fitted into the landscape as if, like the palms, they had come into being through years of quiet assimilation of water and warmth. Their walls were of mud, adobe, mere casual upliftings of the sticky soil which glistened in every direction. Their roofs were of _trooly_-palm fronds, brown and withered, as though they had dropped from invisible trees high overhead. Like the coolies themselves, the houses offered no note of discord.