“...Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-shadowed distances. In silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would on a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, til you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps ... And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” p42/48