We returned to the steamer in the late afternoon, bringing with us two Brazilian pilots, who were to take us as far as Itacoatiara. We sailed next morning for the interior. Para, like all the towns on the Amazon, has but one way out of it. There is a continent behind Para, but you cannot go that way; when you leave the city you must take the river. Para stands by the only entrance to what is now the greatest region of virgin tropics left in the world. Always at anchor off the city's front are at least a dozen European steamers, most of them flying the red ensign. A famous engineering contractor, also British, is busy constructing modern wharves there; and Thames tugs and mudhoppers, flying the Brazilian flag, as the law insists, but bawling London compliments as they pass your ship, help the native schooners with their rakish lateen sails, blue and scarlet, to make the anchorage brisk and lively. Looking out from the "Capella's" bridge she appeared to be within a lagoon. The lake was elliptical, and so large it was a world for the eye to range in. It was bound by a low barrier of forest, a barrier distant enough to lose colour, nature, and significance. Para, white and red, lay reflecting the sunset from many facets in the south-west, with a cheerful array of superior towers and spires. From the ship Para looked big, modern, and prosperous; and with those vast rounded clouds of the rains assembling and mounting over the bright city, and brooding there, impassive and dark, but with impending keels lustrous with the burnish of copper and steel, and seeing a rainbow curving down from one cloud over the city's white front, I, being a new-comer, and with a pardonable feeling of exhilaration which was of my own well-being in a new and a wide and radiant place, thought of man there as a conqueror who had overcome the wilderness, builded him a city, bridled the exuberance of a savage land, and directed the sap and life, born in a rich soil of ardent sun and rain, into the forms useful to him. So I entered the chart-room, and looked with a new interest on the chart of the place. Then I felt less certain of the conqueror and his taming bridle. I saw that this lagoon in which the "Capella" showed large and important was but a point in an immense area of tractless islands and meandering waterways, a region intricate, and, the chart confessed, little known. The coast opposite the city, which I had taken for mainland, was the trivial Ihla des Oncas. The main channel of the river was beyond that island, with the coast of Marajo for the farther shore; and Marajo also was but an island, though as large as Wales. The north channel of the Amazon was beyond again, with more islands, about which the chart confessed less knowledge. One of the pilots was with me; and when I spoke of those points in the ultimate Amazons, the alluring names on maps you read in England, here they were, at Para, just what they are at home, still vague and far, journeys thither to be reckoned by time; a shrug of the shoulders and a look of amusement; two months, Senhor, or perhaps three or four. The idea came slowly; but it dawned, something like the conception of astronomy's amplitudes, of the remoteness of the beyond of Amazonas, that new world I had just entered.