Extending for seventeen hundred miles along the banks of the Solimoës, now wider on the northern, now stretching farther back from the southern side, this semi-submerged forest is found, its interior almost as unknown as the crater-like caverns of the moon, or the icy oceans that storm or slumber round the Poles,--unknown to civilized man, but not altogether to the savage. The aboriginal of Amazonia, crouching in his canoe, has pierced this water-land of wonders. He could tell you much about it that is real, and much that is marvellous,--the latter too often pronounced fanciful by lettered _savans_. He could tell you of strange trees that grow there, bearing strange fruits, not to be found elsewhere,--of wonderful quadrupeds, and _quadrumana_, that exist only in the Gapo,--of birds brilliantly beautiful, and reptiles hideously ugly; among the last the dreaded dragon serpent, "Sucuriyu." He could tell you, moreover, of creatures of his own kind,--if they deserve the name of man,--who dwell continuously in the flooded forest, making their home on scaffolds among the tree-tops, passing from place to place in floating rafts or canoes, finding their subsistence on fish, on the flesh of the _manatee_, on birds, beasts, reptiles, and insects, on the stalks of huge water-plants and the fruits of undescribed trees, on monkeys, and sometimes upon _man!_ Such Indians as have penetrated the vast water-land have brought strange tales out of it. We may give credence to them or refuse it; but they, at least, are firm believers in most of the accounts which they have collected. It is not to be supposed that the Gapo is impenetrable. On the contrary, there are several well-known water-ways leading through it,--well known, I mean, to the Indians dwelling upon its borders, to the _tapuyos_, whose business it is to supply crews for the galateas of the Portuguese traders, and to many of these traders themselves. These water-ways are often indicated by "blazings" on the trees, or broken branches, just as the roads are laid out by pioneer settlers in a North American forest; and but for these marks, they could not be followed. Sometimes, however, large spaces occur in which no trees are to be seen, where, indeed, none grow. There are extensive lakes, always under water, even at the lowest ebb of the inundation. They are of all sizes and every possible configuration, from the complete circle through all the degrees of the ellipse, and not unfrequently in the form of a belt, like the channel of a river running for scores of miles between what might readily be mistaken for banks covered with a continuous thicket of low bushes, which are nothing more than the "spray" of evergreen trees, whose roots lie forty feet under water!