136 
TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON. 
[August, 
repeated continually till the tide turned, when we could 
not make way against the current. In many parts of 
the channel I was much pleased with the bright colours 
of the leaves, which displayed all the variety of autumnal 
tints in England. The cause however was different : 
the leaves were here budding, instead of falling. On 
first opening they were pale reddish, then bright red, 
brown, and lastly green ; some were yellow, some ochre, 
and some copper-colour, which, together with various 
shades of green, produced a most beautiful appearance. 
It was about ten days after we left Para that the 
stream began to widen out and the tide to flow into the 
Amazon, instead of into the Para river, giving us the 
longer ebb to make way with. In about two days more 
we were in the Amazon itself, and it was with emotions 
of admiration and awe that we gazed upon the stream 
of this mighty and far-famed river. Our imagination 
wandered to its som’ces in the distant Andes, to the 
Peruvian Incas of old, to the silver mountains of Potosi, 
and the gold-seeking Spaniards and wild Indians who 
noAv inhabit the country about its thousand sources. 
What a grand idea it was to think that we now saw the 
accumulated waters of a course of three thousand miles ; 
that all the streams that for a length of twelve hundred 
miles drained from the snow-clad Andes were here con- 
gregated in the wide extent of ochre-coloured water j] 
spread out before us ! Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, ^ 
Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil — six mighty states, spreading 4 
over a country far larger than Europe — had each contri- 3 
buted to form the flood which bore us so peacefully on J 
its bosom. 
