There seems to be no autumn in this land, and death comes only to single leaves, while the variegated scarlet and yellow hues of new sprouting foliage made brilliant every bend of the stream. The Moriche or Eta Palm is dominant here and the vegetation of these lesser streams is dense and bushy,—intimate and delightful, rather than grand and awe-inspiring as along the forest rim of the Barama. Toucans and Ant-birds darted across the water ahead of us; tree-ferns stretched out their graceful fronds and sifted their pollen down upon us. The bird songs of this region are not long and elaborate, but there was no dearth of most delightful, liquid phrases, usually loud and penetrating. Six songs, all wholly unlike one another, reached us that day, all unknown, mysterious. We steered close to the bank and picked a wild cocoa pod but found it unripe and the beans had only a raw aroma. Two long-snouted weevils crawled from the heart of the pod, one of the myriad hidden forms of life of this wonderland. [Illustration: FIG. 91. WAKE OF A MANATEE SWIMMING UP RIVER.] Now and then we passed a little open grassy savanna where the water was no longer brown, but a clear black from the steeping of the decaying vegetation. In many places the water leaves showed where manatees had been browsing, and occasionally we caught sight of the huge ungainly creatures, as they swam slowly up stream or nosed the vegetation along the bank. All this and much else we passed in an hour, and at five o’clock entered a third stream—the Barrabarra. The whole country hereabouts is swampy, so when at dark we stopped for our evening meal we did not land but rested quietly among the lily pads. The Indians ate, as they did everything else, silently, with only now and then some low guttural ejaculation. [Illustration: FIG. 92. MANATEE BROWSING CLOSE TO THE BANK.] We flashed our powerful electric light upon the lily pads and found that the water was full of active life. Scores of little fishes were resting motionless in the thin film of water covering the lily leaves, some with the basal half of the body and two lines up and down from the eyes, black. Marciano called them _Salaver_. In addition to other very slender fish, there were numbers of little fresh-water prawns shooting about among the maze of fanwort beneath the pads. The glint of strange shapes came to us—tiny Cyclops and others which the human eye was powerless to name without a microscope. We sat in the darkness listening to the sounds of the swampy jungle. Not a mosquito hummed, and the frogs eclipsed all other, lesser noises, calling in basso and treble, with tinkling bells and a clear ringing chime like the æolian singing of a telegraph wire.