For the first hour after leaving the city we pursued a little path that ran almost in a straight line along the banks of the Salty River. Opposite us, across the stream, stretched the long, low contours of the colonnades and temples I had inspected soon after arriving in Atlantis; and at our feet the waters shot swiftly by, with gentle swishing and murmuring, a green-gray expanse several hundred yards across, but differing from all other rivers I had ever beheld in that it was of the same width at all points and flowed in a straight and orderly manner without any twists, turns or meanderings. All this, of course, I had already observed; and my first surprises were not to come until at length the road bent abruptly northward away from the river and we entered what was for me a virgin territory. As we advanced, the vegetation became denser and more curious; tall reeds, bushes and trees began to cluster about us until I had the impression of being lost in a jungle. But it was a jungle such as no explorer has ever viewed in the wilds of Africa, New Guinea, or Brazil, for the plants were so fantastic that even the strange undersea vegetation I had already beheld seemed commonplace by comparison. Here, for the first time, the trees were of a vivid green, and a normal foliage was abundant; yet there was so much which looked abnormal that I could only stare and stare in amazement. Some of the trees had branches symmetrically woven into the likenesses of great cobwebs, and from those cobwebs at regular intervals dangled dusters of grape-like fruits; other trees were cactus-like and leafless, with huge round protuberances at regular intervals along their spiny boles; still others were almost concealed amid thick meshes of vines, or were adorned with multicolored cup-shaped blossoms larger than a man’s head, or dominated by scores of succulent-looking stalks like gigantic asparagus. Then again some were little more than great rounded and compressed masses of leafage, reminding me of ten-foot cabbages; and some would have struck me as nothing more than ordinary mushrooms, had they not reached as high as my waist; and some of the shrubs and creepers bore pods resembling those of beans and peas, except that they were over a foot in length. But the most conspicuous fact about this strange assemblage of plants was that the vast majority seemed to be fruit-bearing; and on all sides one could observe a multitude of green fruits of all sizes and shapes, as well as a profusion of the ripening and ripe product, some of it small as cherries and some large as watermelons, some pale green and some gaudy red, some lemon-hued and some a modest pink and some a deep purple, but all striking one by a contrast and a variety as pleasing to the eye as it was extraordinary.