Great caution and care were required in venturing far into this wild, tropical forest, not so much on account of the beasts that infested it as the fear of getting lost.
It was very still and quiet here, however, and Bill had taken the precaution to leave a man in the boat, with orders to keep his weather ear "lifting", and if he heard four shots fired in rapid succession late in the afternoon to fire in reply at once.
It was now the heat of the day, however, and the hairy inhabitants of this sylvan wilderness were all sound asleep, jaguars and pumas among the trees, and the tapirs in small herds wherever the jungle was densest.
There was no chance, therefore, of getting a shot at anything. Nevertheless, the boys and Peggy were not idle. They had brought butterfly-nets with them, and the specimens they caught when about five miles inland, where the forest opened out into a shrub-clad moorland, were large and glorious in the extreme.
Indeed, some of them would fetch gold galore in the London markets.
But though these butterflies had an immense spread of quaintly-shaped and exquisitely-coloured wings, the smaller ones were even more brilliant.
Strange it is that Nature paints these creatures in colours which no sunshine can fade. All the tints that man ever invented grow pale in the sun; these never do, and the same may be said concerning the tropical birds that they saw so many of to-day.
But no one had the heart to shoot any of these. Why should they soil such beautiful plumage with blood, and so bring grief and woe into this love-lit wilderness?
This is not a book on natural history, else gladly would I describe the beauties in shape and colour of the birds, and their strange manners, the wary ways adopted in nest-building, and their songs and queer ways of love-making.
Suffice it to say here that the boys were delighted with all the tropical wonders and all the picturesque gorgeousness they saw everywhere around them.