On leaving the Island del Diamante, where the Zambos, who speak Spanish, cultivate the sugar-cane, we entered into a grand and wild domain of nature. The air was filled with countless flamingoes (_Phœnicopterus_) and other water-fowl, which seemed to stand forth from the blue sky like a dark cloud in ever-varying outlines. The bed of the river had here contracted to less than 1000 feet, and formed a perfectly straight canal, which was inclosed on both sides by thick woods. The margin of the forest presents a singular spectacle. In front of the almost impenetrable wall of colossal trunks of Cæsalpinia, Cedrela, and Desmanthus, there rises with the greatest regularity on the sandy bank of the river, a low hedge of Sauso, only four feet high; it consists of a small shrub, _Hermesia castanifolia_, which forms a new genus[68] of the family of Euphorbiaceæ. A few slender, thorny palms, called by the Spaniards Piritu and Corozo (perhaps species of _Martinezia_ or _Bactris_) stand close alongside; the whole resembling a trimmed garden hedge, with gate-like openings at considerable distances from each other, formed undoubtedly by the large four-footed animals of the forests, for convenient access to the river. At sunset, and more particularly at break of day, the American Tiger, the Tapir, and the Peccary (_Pecari_, _Dicotyles_) may be seen coming forth from these openings accompanied by their young, to give them drink. When they are disturbed by a passing Indian canoe, and are about to retreat into the forest, they do not attempt to rush violently through these hedges of Sauso, but proceed deliberately along the bank, between the hedge and river, affording the traveller the gratification of watching their motions for sometimes four or five hundred paces, until they disappear through the nearest opening. During a seventy-four days’ almost uninterrupted river navigation of 1520 miles up the Orinoco, to the neighbourhood of its sources, and along the Cassiquiare, and the Rio Negro—during the whole of which time we were confined to a narrow canoe—the same spectacle presented itself to our view at many different points, and, I may add, always with renewed excitement. There came to drink, bathe, or fish, groups of creatures belonging to the most opposite species of animals; the larger mammalia with many-coloured herons, palamedeas with the proudly-strutting curassow (_Crax Alector_, _C. Pauxi_). “It is here as in Paradise” (_es como en el Paradiso_), remarked with pious air our steersman, an old Indian, who had been brought up in the house of an ecclesiastic. But the gentle peace of the primitive golden age does not reign in the paradise of these American animals, they stand apart, watch, and avoid each other. The Capybara, a cavy (or river-hog) three or four feet long (a colossal repetition of the common Brazilian cavy, (_Cavia Aguti_), is devoured in the river by the crocodile, and on the shore by the tiger.