The expedition had that afternoon to land their stores once more to avoid rapids, and a little before sunset they encamped near to the edge of a beautiful wood well back from the banks of the Madeira.
The night passed without adventure of any kind, and everyone awoke as fresh and full of life and go as the larks that climb the sky to meet the morning sun.
Another hard day's paddling and towing and portage, and they found themselves high above the Madeira Falls in smooth water, and at the entrance to a kind of bay which formed the mouth or confluence of the two rivers, called Beni and Madro de Dios. This last is called the Maya-tata by the Bolivians.
It is a beautiful stream, overhung by hill and forest, and rises fully two hundred miles southward and west from a thousand little rivulets that drain the marvellous mountains of Karavaya.
The Beni joins this river about ten or twelve miles above the banks of the Madeira. It lies farther to the south and the east, and may be said to rise in the La Paz district itself, where it is called the Rio de la Paz.
To the north-west of both these big rivers lies the great unexplored region, the land of the Bolivian and Peruvian cannibals.
Small need have we to continue to hunt and shoot in Africa, wildly interesting though the country is, when such a marvellous tract of tens of thousands of square miles is hidden here, all unvisited as yet by a single British explorer.
And what splendid possibilities for travel and adventure are here! A land larger than Great Britain, France, and Ireland thrown together, which no one knows anything about; a land rich in forest and prairie; a land the mineral wealth of which is virtually inexhaustible; a land of beauty; a land of lake and stream, of hills and rocks and verdant prairie, and a veritable land of flowers!
A land, it is true, where wild beasts lurk and prowl, and where unknown tribes of savages wander hither and thither and hunt and fight, but all as free as the wind that wantons through their forest trees.
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