Our boatmen stood at ease at their paddles, pushing quietly along, and I looked round with interest.  We were in the centre of a great lake in which here and there submerged trees and bushes made green islands.  An endless lake it seemed, a great waste of gleaming water.  We floated along gently like this for some time, and then almost suddenly when I looked ahead, I saw the end of the lake was closing in, there were woods and forests now upon its margin; a few more strokes of the paddle and we were in shade, heavy, cool shade, where the water gleamed with a bronze shimmer.  Narrower still the lake end became, the margins drew together, and with a swift push forwards, like the bolt of a rabbit to its hole, our boat shot forwards into a little tunnel of darkness before us over which the interlacing boughs of the trees made a perfect arch.  We were in the forest, and it was dark and cool as it had been brilliant, dazzling with light and heat, on the lake.  A dim, green twilight reigned here, and the river went with a swift, dark rush, past the roots of the overhanging trees.  How they stooped over the water!  Swinging down, interlacing boughs from which vine and flowering creeper trailed.  The standing figure of the boatman had to bend down and sway from side to side to avoid the clinging wreaths or mossy boughs and be wary with his paddle to escape the snags projecting from the banks.

How grand the great spanning arches of the trees were, above our heads!  Finer than any cathedral roof wrought by man.  How soft the luminous green twilight seemed in the long aisle!  And constantly from bough to bough twined a great scarlet-flowered creeper, glowing redly in all this mystery of shade.  The banks were thick with vegetation, one thing growing over another, with tropical luxuriance, until sometimes here and there groups of plants, weary with the struggle each to assert itself, had all fallen together over the bank and trailed their long strands wearily in the water.

The stream zigzagged on before us, here darkly green to blackness; there, where the light pierced through the upper boughs, a golden bronze; then blue and silver where it caught and eddied and played round a fallen tree or a stump in the river bed.

We were going fast now, and as we shot along the glimmering stream we left the thick green part of the forest behind us.  The river broadened out, expanded widely on either side, and in a few more minutes we seemed on a chain of infinite lakes spreading out on every side under and through the trees, which, though they met far overhead forming a perfect and continuous roof, were bare of leaves and flowering vines beneath.  Grey trunks and bare brown branches in bewildering numbers now surrounded us, and the sheets of water reflected all so perfectly down to infinite depths that one lost sense of reality.  Boughs and branches, all arching and curving and spreading above us in the softened light, and boughs and branches and inverted trees below us, arches and curves and twisted networks; between, those long gleaming flats of water on which we floated silently without sense of motion, ever onwards.