62 Travels and Adventures 



necessaries of life are very scarce for many weeks 

 together. Bread is not to be had, and flesh-meat 

 is equally scarce, excepting game shot in the forest. 

 The principal articles of consumption are maize, 

 turtles' eggs, fish, and bananas. Here I was treated 

 to a dish which, up to the present, had been entirely 

 unknown to me. This is the flesh of a lar^e 

 lizard, about three feet and a half in length, shot 

 by one of the natives in an adjoining tree. After 

 some trouble in skinning and preparing it, I was 

 induced by the cravings of a well- whetted appetite 

 to put aside all scruples of delicacy or custom and 

 discuss the merits of the flesh of the celebrated 

 iguana, which to many of the natives is a dish of 

 the greatest delicacy. I found the flesh very tender 

 and palatable, and, had it not been for the trouble 

 recently experienced in skinning the scaly gentleman, 

 I might have believed it to be the fattest of some 

 well-reared brood of chickens. I spent three clays 

 here preparing for the journey and getting acquainted 

 with the situation. Perhaps what surprises the 

 traveller here is to find in this forest-wilderness 

 several railway waggons and about a thousand steel 

 rails, all in a pitiful state of wreck and dilapidation, 

 caused by the heavy rains. These, I am told, are 

 the remains of a scheme originated by the excellent 

 Colombian general, Solan Wilches, to carry the 



