BEAUTY OF THE LANDSCAPE. 315 



into our blanket bags with disgust, but with the 

 hope that in the morning a passage might still be 

 found. 



August 4. — Daylight brought no better hopes 

 of our taking the boats higher up by this branch, as 

 a succession of large trees lay across it a quarter of 

 a mile above. It was a gloomy corner we had got 

 into, and so sheltered that it seemed as though a 

 breath of wind had never swept through it ; the 

 leaves of the low spreading palms that drooped over 

 the water, damp with the morning dew, had un- 

 broken edges, as if an eternal quietude had per- 

 vaded the spot. This triste appearance wore off 

 as the] sun rose, and the scenery under his smiles 

 was soon clothed with beauty. Trees with every 

 variety of foliage overhung each other, connected, 

 as it were, by bowers of creepers depending in 

 festoons and concealing odd-shaped fragments of 

 fallen timber, which here and there reared their 

 blackened heads out of the water, the unruffled 

 smoothness of which was occasionally disturbed by 

 the splash of some wild-fowl, and chequered with 

 alternate spots of gold and gloom by the sun's rays, 

 as they pierced through the dense surrounding 

 foliage. 



Returning, we entered the south branch ; the 

 opening of which was almost equal in beauty, as the 

 reader will perceive from the view in the beginning 

 of the first volume ; but we were again stopped by 

 fallen trees after proceeding about a mile and a half. 



Here we observed driftwood and rushes in the 



