I explained how in America the
river boats used search-lights, and was told that on one boat the
State had experimented with a searchlight, but that particular
searchlight having got out of order the idea of night travelling was
condemned.
Ours was a most lazy progress, but one with the most beautiful
surroundings and filled with entertainment. From our private box we
looked out upon the most wonderful of panoramas. Sometimes we were
closely hemmed in by mountains of light-green grass, except where,
in the hollows, streams tumbled in tiny waterfalls between gigantic
trees hung with strange flowering vines and orchids. Or we would
push into great lakes of swirling brown water, dotted with flat
islands overgrown with reed grass higher than the head of a man.
Again the water turned blue and the trees on the banks grew into
forests with the look of cultivated, well-cared-for parks, but with
no sign of man, not even a mud hut or a canoe; only the strangest of
birds and the great river beasts. Sometimes the sky was overcast and
gray, the warm rain shut us in like a fog, and the clouds hid the
peaks of the hills, or there would come a swift black tornado and
the rain beat into our private box, and each would sit crouched in
his rain coat, while the engineer smothered his driving-rods in palm
oil, and the great drops drummed down upon the awning and drowned
the fire in our pipes. After these storms, as though it were being
pushed up from below, the river seemed to rise in the centre, to
become convex.
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