Excerpt from In the Wilds of South America: Six Years of Exploration in Colombia, Venezuela, British Guiana, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil The purpose of this narrative is to. Follow the course of these explorations into the tropical jungles of the Amazon, Paraguay, Orinoco, and others of South America's master rivers, and to the frigid heights of the snow-crowned Andes. In these jungles one hears the hoarse cough of the jaguar and the scream of long-tailed, multicolored macaws as they y two by two overhead; the extraordinary chorus of frogs and insects may lull the weary senses to sleep at night fall, but the dismal roar of howling monkeys is sure to awaken one at dawn. To start at the sudden, long-drawn hiss of a boa or the lightning-like thrust of the terrible bush master, the largest of poisonous snakes, and a creature so deadly that a man may die within ten minutes after the fatal stroke, and to shudder as the wild, insane cackle of the wood-rails shatters the brooding silence of the forest, are merely incidents of the explorer's every-day life; and so, too, are visits to deep lagoons teeming with crocodiles, can nibal fishes, and myriads of water-fowl lengthy sojourns in gloomy forests where orchids droop from moss-draped branches, brilliant butter ies shimmer in the subdued light. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."