The magical beauty of tropical vegetation reveals itself in all its glory to the traveller who steers his boat through the solitudes of these aquatic mazes. Here the forest forms a canopy over his head; there it opens, allowing the sunshine to disclose the secrets of the wilderness; while on either side the eye penetrates through beautiful vistas into the depths of the woods. Sometimes, on a higher spot of ground, a clump of trees forms an island worthy of Eden. A chaos of bushropes and creepers flings its garlands of gay flowers over the forest, and fills the air with the sweetest odours. Numerous birds, rivalling in beauty of colour the passifloras and bignonias of these hanging gardens, animate the banks of the lagune, while gaudy macaws perch on the loftiest trees; and as if to remind one that death is not banished from this scene of paradise, a dark-robed vulture screeches through the woods, or an alligator rests, like a black log of wood or a sombre rock, on the dormant waters. [Illustration: BLUE MACAW.] The inundations of the Amazons essentially modify the character of the bordering forest; for it is only beyond their verge that the enormous fig and laurel trees, the Lecythas and the Bertholletias, appear in all their grandeur. As here the underwood is less dense and more dwarfish, it is easy to measure the colossal trunks, and to admire their proportions, often towering to a height of 120 feet, and measuring fifteen feet in diameter above the projecting roots. Enormous mushrooms spring from the decayed leaves, and numberless parasites rest upon the trunks and branches. The littoral forest, on the contrary, is of more humble growth. The trunks, branchless in their lower part, clothed with a thinner and a smoother bark, and covered with a coat of mud according to the height of the previous inundation, stand close together, and form above a mass of interlacing branches. These are the sites of the cacao-tree and of the prickly sarsaparilla, which is gathered in large quantities for the druggists of Europe. Leafless bushropes wind in grotesque festoons among the trees, between whose trunks a dense underwood shoots up, to perish by the next overflowing of the stream. Instead of the larger parasites, mosses and jungermannias weave their carpets over the drooping branches. But few animals besides the numerous water-birds inhabit this damp forest zone, in which, as it is almost superfluous to add, no plantation has been formed by man. The many islands of the delta of the Amazons are everywhere encircled by mangroves; but sailing stream upwards, the monotonous green of these monarchs of the shore is gradually replaced by flowers and foliage, which, in every variety of form and colour, for hundreds and hundreds of miles characterise the banks of the river.