As the gloomy, bottomless ravines descend, the forest becomes more dense, with murmurs of flowing water everywhere. Mists hang from above, barely concealing the jagged, black peaks. Sheets of continuous foam veil the side of a polished cliff. Water drips over every precipice. Cascades tumble from one mossed basin to another or let fall a clear column into a rock-pool deeply buried in tropical vegetation. Finally mountains and ravines subside, and with the energy of one final, mighty leap, the rushing water plunges into the heart of the jungle, comes to rest, then glides out with the flush of a flood-tide across the Land of Water. “As the serpents of this basin exceed all other serpents in size, so does the Amazon exceed all other rivers.” As the whirl of branches is to the trunk of a tree, as everything in nature is tributary to something else, so are streamlets in the mountains of the snowy desert to this mighty river. Collecting itself upon the frozen _puna_ far up among the clouds, it gets an impetus which makes fresh, wide stretches of ocean thousands of miles away. So vast is the Amazon that, like the Andes which form a barrier to separate two worlds, different species of animals inhabit its opposite banks. It swarms with fish that will fight for a right to live, and some of them, the _paichi_, for instance, reach the length of ten feet and must be caught by harpooning. The water is full of swimming animals. There are river-cows like sea-lions, and oceanic fauna such as frigate birds and flying-fish. In the mud along the banks are tracks of crocodiles and tortoises. The Amazon has gained mastery over the land and has turned it into a sposhy ocean, interspersed with flats of jungle flowers. A watery labyrinth, “an aquatic not a terrestrial basin,” it is the Mediterranean of South America. The greatest river in the world twists and turns about, makes short cuts across its own bends and leaves behind a delicious lagoon here, or a little, land-locked inlet there. The Victoria Regia spreads its great, leathery leaves, and scarlet ibises tilt about upon them. This land beyond the Andes is known as the “rain-shadow.” The already overflowing rivers are constantly swelling, since it rains so violently that a stream of the Amazon valley can rise fifteen feet in a single night. A passing and re-passing is continually going on, for, as the water flows back toward the ocean, the winds above it are returning from the Atlantic, bringing rain to moisten the jungle and to be stopped only by the wall of the Andes. Rain discloses the resources of the jungle. Plants push, burst upward in astonishing growth. Flowers paint themselves with ineffable new colors distilled from the rain, and those whose day has come and gone lie in heaps of yellow, pink, and white petals on the ground, fallen from beyond the tree-tops.