Here sleeps the Mother of Waters, congenially imbedded, her shining coils slipping about over each other--the great _yacumama_--the mighty boa-constrictor, who can swallow almost any creature whole, and whose breath withers any beast lured within reach by her fascinating poison. Humanely she intoxicates before squeezing the unyielding bones to pulp of digestible consistency. Sometimes she unfolds her darkly iridescent coils out into the hospitable closeness of the jungle. Laboriously she winds upward in over-arching trees; but, as if too languid, leaves part of her frightful weight dragging below. She looks moss-grown, like the stem of an old tree, and treelike, remains motionless for days at a time. When she does wander forth in search of prey, a track follows through the lush, yielding vegetation--her huge weight lingering heavily upon succulent stems. II The atmosphere is full of color--weird, miasmic exhalations. Next to the shade lingering under the dark velvet foliage on the edges of streams, the glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light or reflect a “russet glamour” from their under sides. Beds of yellow butterflies settle along river banks and concentrate the sunlight with blinding intensity. Every leaf seems to blaze like a gem; even the black shadows pulsate with inner light. It is part of jungle mystery that even the light comes in iridescence. Legions of beautifully colored spiders silently spin their geometric webs. Insects all dipped in silver, with waving antennae laid back along their heads, red beetles with golden heads and wings of chintz, buzz to and fro. Moss-grown leaf-insects--ossified, living scarabs--walk about on tree-trunks. Stinging bees and wasps fill chinks of jungle trees with wild honey. Myriads of ants swarm: driver ants; parasol ants carrying a bit of leaf about over their heads; fever-bearing ants, and ants that live in the hollow, white stems of the cecropia tree and furnish the sloth’s food. Centipedes hurry by, legs moving with “invisible rapidity like a vibration,” and numerous flies, ticks, mosquitoes, cicadas, dragon-flies. Some of these strange beings need two or three years of larval life to prepare for a flight of a single hour, possibly after sunset. What a limited idea of the world must they have who never see the light of day! We are assured that the unseen world is a very substantial place; so is the microscopic. And an ear-trumpet reveals a new universe of sound. What a region of ultra-violet murmurings must lie beyond that we never catch at all! If only an elemental apperception can grasp the vastness of the jungle, what can be said of the delicacy of its silver-point drawing? For here is greatness on the invisible scale, “a creation at the same time immense and imperceptible.”