292 TlMEHRI. 
my illness to the effects of over-exertion and peculiarity 
of food, rather than to any climatic influence. 
It appears to me that the charms of a prospector's 
life in this colony must be utterly unknown or mis- 
understood by most persons, else we should find many 
more enthusiastic and adventurous spirits engaging in 
it. The admirer of nature, the ardent sportsman, 
and the lovers of natural history, can each and all find the 
amplest scope for gratifying their natural tastes. Many 
of the scenes in the interior, in their solitary loveliness, 
are beautiful as fairyland, and no one can travel on the 
Upper Massaruni or Essequebo, but must feel how appli- 
cable are the lines, 
" The river nobly foams and flows, 
The charm of this enchanted ground, 
And all its thousand turns disclose 
Some fresher beauty varying round," 
And though we may possess no 
" Peasant eirls with deep blue eyes 
And hands that offer early flowers," 
to complete the picture, yet nevertheless it is worthy 
the description of an earthly paradise. Whoever exults to 
feel his pulse thrill with some 
" Vague emotion of delight 
In gazing up an Alpine height" 
may indulge his passion to satiety amid the mountains and 
precipices, the romantic gorges, and majestic water-falls 
of Guiana. How powerfully to the imagination appeals 
cloud-robed Roraima, the Indians' il ever fruitful mother of 
waters — " that imposing and mysterious pile, whose pre- 
cipitous walls frowning through the twilight of antiquity 
across the waves of a forgotten sea, were long believed 
to isolate within their inaccessible fastnesses surviving 
