78 



SHALLOWNESS OF RIVER. 



two dogs, but they were probably women. We 

 walked about two miles over the sand, when we 

 arrived at a slight eminence with some bushes on it, 

 whence we could look up and down the river. 

 The real bed of the river, or the space from one 

 bounding cliff to the other, was from half a mile to 

 a mile wide. From the top of the little cliffs forest 

 land stretched into the interior, the trees close toge- 

 ther, and the underwood thick. The intermediate 

 space or river bed contained bare patches and banks 

 of sand, with lines of pebbles, or grassy flats with pools 

 of water and marshy ground. The present stream 

 wound through this intermediate space, from one cliff 

 to the other, with a width of about £200 yards and 

 a depth of about two feet, but with deeper holes oc- 

 casionally, and sometimes a shallow rapid over a 

 bed of pebbles. The height of the bounding* cliffs 

 was from ten to twenty feet above the river, but 

 even on these were marks of occasional inunda- 

 tions, the roots of the trees being matted with drift 

 matter, which was often tangled among the bushes 

 to a height of three or four feet above the cliff. We 

 could see from this spot about two miles further up t he 

 river, for which distance its course was north-west, but 

 then it curved gradually round to the west and south. 



The natives now beckoned us to the shade of a 

 bush, and, smoothing the sand, made signs to us to 

 sit down, which we did, and they sat down with us. 

 One or two of them had skull-caps of net- work, and 

 one fine young man, with a different cast of coun- 



