We were camped close beside a great creek which reached the affluent of the Amazon, and along these creeks, as along the river proper, were gigantic serpents. The anaconda is as much at home on land as in water. Those big constrictors of the southern part of this great hemisphere are dreadful. They prey upon the deer and upon a thousand other things. They are a terror everywhere, and, though we did not know it at the time, there was concealed in that tree beneath which poor Alan was lying, a very healthy specimen of this powerful reptile. That was what we concluded afterward, although the great snake may not have been there when we left, and may have come afterward. Anyway, what happened must have been just this: The great serpent saw the sleeping man, and looked upon him as his prey. He saw what was his food breathing stertorously, and he dropped from the tree or came up from the river beside him. He began to swallow the man. [Illustration: "THE GREAT SNAKE BEGAN ITS WORK OF DEGLUTITION"] It was unfortunate for this particular anaconda that the reptilia are not great reasoners. He should have begun upon the man's head. Then it would have been a simple thing. The man would have been engulfed, the serpent would have crawled sluggishly a hundred yards or so away and begun his period of digestion, and that would have been the end of the incident. Instead of that, he started on a foot, and began swallowing from that point. Now, it is a well-known fact that this swallowing of a body by any of the constrictor family, except as to contraction and eventual suffocation, is harmless, because the jaws of this class of serpents are unconnected. The upper jaw slips forward, hooks onto the body with its fangs and draws it into an enormously distended throat. Then the under jaw slips forward in the same manner, hooks its fangs, and draws it back in the same way. So, inch by inch, a body is engulfed. Anything with a nonsensitive exterior can be swallowed by an anaconda, a boa, or a python without knowing about it until a lack of air becomes apparent. MacGregor wore a pair of very heavy leather trousers he had secured to guard him against the undergrowth with which we had to worry. So the great snake began his work of deglutition, and Alan lay there, unconscious of what was going on. Still that snake swallowed Alan as fast as he could. He swallowed him as far up as the leg went and then stopped, from the simple fact that the rest of Alan lay at right angles across his mouth, and he could not swallow any further. But a snake does not reason much, and this particular anaconda lay there contented, perhaps in his dim way knowing that he had got something good as far as it went, and that he was satisfied. And the process of digestion went on.