Pinched from my modest poke.
O. S.
MR. ROOSEVELT'S DISCOVERIES.
Scrapping the Map in Brazil.
We are glad to be able to supplement with some further interesting details the meagre accounts of Mr. Roosevelt's explorations in Brazil which have appeared in the daily papers.
Not only did Mr. Roosevelt add to the map a new river nearly a thousand miles long, but he has discovered a gigantic mountain, hitherto undreamt of even by Dr. Cook, to which he has attached the picturesque name of Mount Skyscraper. The lower slopes were thickly infested with cannibals, whom Mr. Roosevelt converted from anthropophagy by a sermon lasting six hours and containing 300,000 words—almost exactly as many as are contained in Mr. de Morgan's new novel.
The middle regions are densely covered with an impenetrable forest inhabited by rhomboidal armadillos and gigantic crabs, to which Mr. Roosevelt has given the name of Kermit crabs, to commemorate the escape of his son, who was carried off by one of these monsters and rescued by a troglodyte guide after a desperate struggle. On emerging from the forest the travellers were faced by perpendicular granite crags, which they ascended on the backs of some friendly condors.... The summit proved to be an extensive plateau, the site of a prehistoric city, built of pedunculated wood-pulp. Lying among the ruins was a gigantic mastodon in excellent preservation, which Mr. Roosevelt brought down on his shoulders.
It was after the descent from Mount Skyscraper, which was accomplished in parachutes, that Mr. Roosevelt struck the new river, the upper parts of which were utterly unknown except to some wild rubber-necked Indians. In consequence of its character and size Mr. Roosevelt originally thought of calling it the Taft, but finally decided on the Rio Encyclopædia in virtue of its volume.
The journey was made in canoes and was full of incident. Descending the great Golliwog Falls Mr. Roosevelt's canoe was smashed to atoms, but the ex-President escaped with only slight injury to his eyeglasses, after a desperate conflict with a pliocene crocodile. The Encyclopædia River, as described by Mr. Roosevelt, resembles the Volga, the Hoang-ho and the Mississippi; but it is richer in snags and of a deeper and more luscious purple than any of them. Near its junction with the Mandragora it runs uphill for several miles, with the result that the canoes were constantly capsizing. The waters of Mandragora are of a curiously soporific character, while those of the River Madeira have a toxic quality which renders them dangerous when drunk in large quantities.