It is an earthly paradise, where bloodsucking bats emerge at night and lightning rages uncontrolled, destroying trees and cracking open precipices. Pumas live in these clefts hewn through the mountains, and they spring on to the shoulders of a victim, drawing back the head until the neck snaps. _Pumayacu_ is the stream of the puma, with its tumultuous torrent whose very stones are treacherous. Such are the rain-soaked slopes of the Andes, a tangled mass of jungle. The woods are all enchanted. Thousands of fairies dance in the sunbeams, and during the rain myriads of them hide in the flowers. If disturbed, they disappear underground. One can never be sure that “what one surveys is what it purports to be, nor even, that in surveying nothing, one is not gazing through an invisible being,” as Guenelette observed so long ago. The half-Indian guide began to speak, taking a coca-leaf from his fawn-skin pouch. “Pigmies live in the undergrowth. They are not more than so tall, ... and very, very wild. No, they’re not monkeys. They have a language, although we cannot understand it. How do I know they live here? Why! I know! Have I ever seen them? No. But--I’ve seen their shadows. “And then there are jaguars near here, jaguars with the hoofs of bullocks. At night I can hear them springing upon the thatch of my thin roof. They roar and roar and one might call them the devil himself if one did not know that they were jaguars with the feet of bullocks. Have I ever seen them?... No, but then--I’ve seen the prints of their hoofs. “Here in the bottom of the river, lying full length, lives the great Mother of Waters. She is so long that she could stretch from bank to bank and lie sleeping on either side at the same time. That is why she lies lengthwise in the river bed. Sometimes there is an awful, rumbling noise, like an approaching earthquake. Then the waters of the river are churned like the smallest mountain torrent tumbling over a rock in mid-stream. The great snake lifts her head, then her heavy body from the stream bed, and crashes off through the jungle. The track she leaves behind her is a desert waste; no growing thing is left, and the wake is as broad, why, as broad as this stream, under which she is now lying,” and he pointed with wide eyes to the water, rushing headlong to join the Amazon. All the snakes of that particular locality did miracles, so I was told by a wise man who could himself turn men into beasts at will. “This river,” the guide concluded, “used to flow up on one side and down on the other, until white men sailed upon it. Then one half turned about, and the river now flows in but one direction, as you can see.”