'If the wealth of the mountains is boundless and virgin, if on the slopes and on the plateaus and the neighbouring valleys all the agricultural products useful to man may be grown--and the forests teem with wealth that belongs to him who first takes it--if the rocks likewise cover or bear immense deposits of all the metals and minerals useful to man, the lowlands and the plains offer grazing-ground for untold herds of cattle and horses, and further to the south beyond the Amazon, running southward, not eastward like the Orinoco and the Amazon, the Parana unrolls its waves, which, after leaving the tropic, enter the southern temperate zone, irrigating for untold miles the endless pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. In very truth, this continent is the Promised Land.
'In your pilgrimage along the waters of the Orinoco, you will see all the wonders of tropical Nature. Now the forests will stand on either bank close along the shores in serried file, and moving mirrors of the waters will reflect the murmuring tops of the trees, noisy and full of life as the winds sweep by in their flight, or else the frowning rock, bare and rugged, will stand forth from the current like the wall of a medieval castle. Now the trees will open a gap through which, as from under a triumphal arch, the current of a river, a wanderer from the mysterious and unknown depths of the neighbouring forests, pours forth into the main stream and mingles with the passing waters, joining his fate to theirs, even as the High Priest of some unknown creed might issue from the temple and mingle with the passing crowd. Some rivers that reach the main artery have had but a short pilgrimage, the junction of their many waters having taken place at no great distance from the main stream; others have had a long wandering, sometimes placid and serene, sometimes amidst rocks and boulders, with an ever frenzied and agitated course like the lives of men striving and struggling till the last great trumpet sounds. The course of the river will be studded with islands large enough for the foundation of empires, and before reaching the sea the river will extend and spread its current into a thousand streams, as if loth to part from the Mother Earth it sought to embrace more firmly in its grasp, and our waters will flow into the unplumbed deep, there to mingle with those of all the rivers, whether their course has been through lands alive with civilization, swarming with multitudes of men on their shores, laden with the memories of centuries and famous in history, or whether they, like us, have wandered through vast solitudes where Nature is still supreme in her primeval pride, as yet unpolluted by the hand of man. There we all meet, and to us what men call time and its divisions exist not, for all the transformations that affect mankind are as naught to us who form part and parcel of Nature itself, who only feel time after the lapse of æons which to the mind of man are practically incomprehensible. Seek to learn the lesson of humility, to acknowledge the power of the Creator, who gave to man what we rivers and all other material things can never hope for--a future beyond this earth, higher, brighter, infinite, eternal.'