roots formed an impenetrable net.  As far as the eye could pierce into the tangled thicket, the roots interlaced with each other, and arched down into the water in innumerable curves, by no means devoid of grace, but hideous just because they were impenetrable.  Who could get over those roots, or through the scrub which stood stilted on them, letting down at every yard or two fresh air-roots from off its boughs, to add fresh tangle, as they struck into the mud, to the horrible imbroglio?  If one had got in among them, I fancied, one would never have got out again.  Struggling over and under endless trap-work, without footing on it or on the mud below, one must have sunk exhausted in an hour or two, to die of fatigue and heat, or chill and fever.

Let the mangrove foliage be as gay and green as it may—­and it is gay and green—­a mangrove swamp is a sad, ugly, evil place; and so I felt that one to be that day.

The only moving things were some large fish, who were leaping high out of water close to the bushes, glittering in the sun.  They stopped as we came up:  and then all was still, till a slate-blue heron {122a} rose lazily off a dead bough, flapped fifty yards up the creek, and then sat down again.  The only sound beside the rattle of our oars was the metallic note of a pigeon in the high tree, which I mistook then and afterwards for the sound of a horn.

On we rowed, looking out sharply right and left for an alligator basking on the mud among the mangrove roots.  But none appeared, though more than one, probably, was watching us, with nothing of him above water but his horny eyes.  The heron flapped on ahead, and settled once more, as if leading us on up the ugly creek, which grew narrower and fouler, till the oars touched the bank on each side, and drove out of the water shoals of four-eyed fish, ridiculous little things about as long as your hand, who, instead of diving to the bottom like reasonable fish, seemed possessed with the fancy that they could succeed better in the air, or on land; and accordingly jumped over each other’s backs, scrambled out upon the mud, swam about with their goggle-eyes projecting above the surface of the water, and, in fact, did anything but behave like fish.

This little creature (Star-gazer, {122b} as some call him) is, you must understand, one of the curiosities of Trinidad and of the Guiana Coast.  He looks, on the whole, like a gray mullet, with a large blunt head, out of which stand, almost like horns, the eyes, from which he takes his name.  You may see, in Wood’s Illustrated Natural History, a drawing of him, which is—­I am sorry to say—­one of the very few bad ones in the book; and read how, ’at a first glance, the fish appears to possess four distinct eyes, each of these organs being divided across the middle, and apparently separated into two distinct portions.  In fact an opaque band runs transversely across the corner of the eye, and