“A river whose course is developed over more than thirty degrees of latitude.”
“And in a basin which from south to north does not comprise less than twenty-five degrees.”
“A basin!” exclaimed Benito. “Can you call it a basin, the vast plain through which it runs, the savannah which on all sides stretches out of sight, without a hill to give a gradient, without a mountain to bound the horizon?”
“And along its whole extent,” continued Manoel, “like the thousand tentacles of some gigantic polyp, two hundred tributaries, flowing from north or south, themselves fed by smaller affluents without number, by the side of which the large rivers of Europe are but petty streamlets.”
“And in its course five hundred and sixty islands, without counting islets, drifting or stationary, forming a kind of archipelago, and yielding of themselves the wealth of a kingdom!”
“And along its flanks canals, lagoons, and lakes, such as cannot be met with even in Switzerland, Lombardy, Scotland, or Canada.”
“A river which, fed by its myriad tributaries, discharges into the Atlantic over two hundred and fifty millions of cubic meters of water every hour.”
“A river whose course serves as the boundary of two republics, and sweeps majestically across the largest empire of South America, as if it were, in very truth, the Pacific Ocean itself flowing out along its own canal into the Atlantic.”
“And what a mouth! An arm of the sea in which one island, Marajo, has a circumference of more than five hundred leagues!”
“And whose waters the ocean does not pond back without raising in a strife which is phenomenal, a tide-race, or ‘pororoca,’’ to which the ebbs, the bores, and the eddies of other rivers are but tiny ripples fanned up by the breeze.”