JLaLe Amucü, Ehe Cktptig Inianjö Sea. 
307 
861. Although it took but a few hours to recognise in him a Jack-of- 
all-trades, who not only played the guitar in a masterly fashion, but was 
also just as clever at shoemaking, tailoring, carpentering, turning, in 
fact at everything else, his cringing friendliness and complaisance 
especially towards the officers, nevertheless shewed up his 
perverse and unprincipled character: yet, in spite of everything, he knew 
how to ingratiate himself so effectively with them, that the order for his 
expulsion was not carried into effect, although there could be no doubt 
that he had only been left behind as a spy. 
862. I still call back to mind with deep pleasure that first morning 
in Pirara when at break of day I jumped out of my hammock and 
hastened in front of the village to gaze, undisturbed, on the wide wide 
savannah. I stood here on soil rich in fable and myth, at my very feet 
the “Mar de aquas blancas,” the “Mar del Dorado,” the “golden edged 
lake,” the “city of Manoa glittering with gold,” whither the boldest 
adventurers of Spain, Portugal and England had wandered ever since 
the 16th century, including the four expeditions undertaken between 
1595 and 1617 by the great yet unfortunate Walter Raleigh who knew 
how to inflame Queen Elizabeth’s imagination and ambition to so extreme 
a degree. Lying ahead of me was Amucu, a small lake the existence of 
which as an extensive inland sea where the great streams of South 
America — the Essequibo, Orinoco and Amazon- — were said to take their 
rise, had already been shewn to be pure myth at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century by the truly prophetic instinct of Alexander 
von Humboldt: yes, lying before me was the cryptic inland sea that for 
ages past, had been eluding and yet ever alluring Spaniards, Portuguese, 
Englishmen, and even Germans, and which even up to the most recent 
times could not be dropped out of the maps. P>ut T looked in vain for the 
“golden-edged lake.” the imperial “city of Manoa glittering with gold.” 
My eyes only remained fixed on the dark rushes and giant grasses that 
fringed the swampy borders of its surface that now had become so 
insignificant in the dry season of the year. And yet around me lay a 
landscape which my soul enjoyed to its very depths : a park of immense 
extent bounded, on the north by the bleak Pacaraima, on the east by the 
detached Makarapan Range that was blurred in the dim distance, and on 
the south by a huge forested oasis that, commencing tolerably close to 
Pirara, was illimitable towards the west where my vision rambled over 
a wide and boundless pasture. Here in level flats and there in 
lovely undulating rises, like the gently swaying waves of a mildly moving 
sea, the spacious grassy plains stretched away in front of and past me, 
while forested oases varying from a mile to but insignificant circumfer- 
ence, built up of noble and tall trees, and edged with giant Cactus and 
Agave, like islands in an ocean, broke the continuity of the yellowish- 
green of the pasture. The somewhat uniform tinge of the flats received 
however a certain additional variation from the small isolated bushes of 
Malpigliiaceae, Apocyneae, Leguminosae, Compositae, Malvaceae 
and Convolvvlaceac in between which families rose 15 to 18 feet high 
trees of Caratclla , Psidinm , Ttowditchia, as well as occasionally a few 
venerable palms, including Astrocaryum Tacit nia Mart, a species that is 
only present in the open pasture and almost always appears on the 
