Читать книгу Through British Guiana to the summit of Roraima онлайн

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The Demerara River has several large creeks, navigable by corials or even motor-boats for many miles, but their mouths, screened by mokka-mokka plant, are mostly impossible to distinguish from the deck of a river steamer. The only one of these streams I have explored is the Kamuni creek, which my husband and I once visited in order to see the now almost deserted Chinese settlement of Hopetown. Strange that such lonely jungle should ever have had attractions for Chinese settlers! Everywhere broods the heavy silence of the tropical “bush,” broken now and then by the whir of a beetle or the cry of a bird swooping across the creek; nor does this forest afford any variations of colour save in the intense green of the overarching foliage, reflected leaf for leaf in the still, black water. Now and then some glorious orchid decorates a decaying tree-trunk, or the blossoms of some brilliant flowering creeper, fallen from the distant tree-tops, float down the stream. Here and there a splendid blue butterfly flits into the sunshine, and an occasional splash betrays an alligator subsiding into a dark pool.