The last black pushed off with his pole about eight o’clock and we settled ourselves for our last day of river travel. The stream became narrower and more diversified, in places being not more than twenty-five feet from bank to bank, then spreading out to twice that width with strange keel-like sharp rocks projecting from its surface. We elbowed our way through a perfect maze of dovetailed tacubas and slanting tree-trunks, which we went around or rubbed along or scraped over. Sometimes we all had to crouch flat down to the level of the gunwale to pass under a low trunk, or again even to climb out on to the log and down into the ballyhoo on the other side. Now and then a pole would be wrenched from a negro’s hand as the current or impetus of the boat twisted it to one side, or the man himself would be flicked overboard amid roars of laughter from his mates, who, when he climbed dripping on board again, would inquire the cause for the sudden desertion of his post. [Illustration: FIG. 120. TREE-FERNS ON THE LITTLE AREMU.] These tacubas, which are really fallen trees, are the most apparent danger in the jungle, although the chances of accident from them are very slight. Along the bank were many slanting trees, bound sooner or later to give way. On our return journey down the Aremu we passed, or rather scraped under, a huge trunk which completely spanned the creek. It must have fallen about two days before and we had to push through a perfect tangle of orchids and lianas. Tree-ferns twelve feet high draped the banks; spiders of weird shapes dropped upon us, buoyed up by their long silken cables; brush-tipped aërial roots dangling at the ends of plummet lines fifty feet long were drawn from stem to stern of the boat and across the pages of our journals as we wrote. Half an hour after starting we discovered a Three-toed Sloth (_Choloepus_) high up in a tree almost over the water. Mr. Howell shot the creature and we found it to be of large size, with long reddish-brown hair. The face, expressionless as it always is in these animals, had small eyes of a warm hazel color. Later we had it cooked and found it quite palatable. In many of these tropical growths the new or first leaf-shoots are pale or brilliant red, this holding good in the case of the giant moras, several trees with locust-like foliage, and even the flat, leaf-vines, _Monstera_ or shingle plants, crawling up the trunks. One small tree with entire leaves and covered with sweet-scented tassel-shaped flowers, had at least half its foliage of a pale yellow-green. This is the spring of this region in so far as such a region of never ending warmth and moisture may be said to have a spring. On every hand flowers were in abundance. All were unknown to us, but most were of large size and varied odor and color. All the tales of the rarity of flowers in the tropics had not fitted in with our experiences. [Illustration: FIG. 121. A SLOTH IN ACTION.]