"Hardly has one crossed the Cordillera when on all sides, on the flanks of the mountains, far off on the plains, in the valleys, the vast virgin forests show as great sombre patches emerging from fields of verdure. Varied as the vegetation which composes them, some seem impenetrable, their huge trees garlanded with lianas and loaded with innumerable parasites. These trees are not of great diameter because, being huddled so closely together, they struggle upward to seek the air and the light. "Others, undulating in the wind, waving their palmated crests, seem like the parks of some destroyed Eden; they are often so burdened with flowers that when the wind blows it is as though the snow were falling. Some of these forests are incessantly alive with myriads of splendidly coloured birds and monkeys of every species; others, on the contrary, are so full of silence and shadow and mysterious solitude that the traveller might believe himself in a virgin world. "Everywhere innumerable watercourses drain the country; some contain flakes of gold, but the true wealth of the country is in its vegetation, so marvellously vigorous and varied that even in America the forests of the Amazonian basin are proverbial. "Although this region lies wholly within the Tropics, it contains every plant and animal to be found under the sun--from the cedar to the banana with its velvet leaves, which never thrives but under the Equator; from the jaguar to the heat-loving monkey gambolling in the sun, and even, in the great plains of the east, from the shepherd watching his flocks to the collector of rubber and the planter of cocoa established beside the rivers or in the depths of the odorous valleys. "Despite these natural advantages, the greatest to be found on earth, civilized man inhabits this region only at rare and isolated points. This portion of Bolivia is still a wilderness almost unknown, into which the Bolivians of the high plateau, attracted and held by the metalliferous strata from which they strive to tear their treasure, only come by chance to tempt fortune by the exploitation of rubber. As men are everywhere prone to generalize, the territory of Colonias has the reputation of being full of mosquitoes, Indians and wild beasts, each category more dangerous than the other. There is a manifest exaggeration here. Certainly the mosquitoes are an objectionable race, but they are not found everywhere, and as for the Indians, if they have on occasion displayed a certain malevolence--possibly justified, but of which they themselves are always the first victims--they are as a rule invaluable as boatmen and collectors of rubber, and it is regrettable that they are not more numerous. Remain the dangerous wild beasts: well, they fear man far more than he fears them, and moreover they speedily desert such localities as man inhabits or frequents.