A year—that is a very long time to spend wandering in any part of the world, you are thinking? Well, it has been my good-fortune to have journeyed along all the highways and byways which I am now to have the delight of revisiting as your guide, so I feel I may promise you that we shall not be losing any of our time by losing our way, or through not knowing how many opportunities are provided by railway and shipping companies for the rapid covering of distances in and around South America. Also, I have called upon fractions, even, to help me reckon the greatest distance we can travel across a page of this book by steamer, train, motor-car, horse, mule, bullock-cart and tent-boat—our friend, the publisher, warned me kindly but firmly that we must arrive home on page number 88—and I am stretching to the utmost day the length of our holiday. Further, by the light of my own experiences, which packed with pleasure and interest every moment of a much longer period than we can spend together, I have planned and replanned our circular tour, trying to draw up a programme for enabling you to get the fullest possible measure of enjoyment from the trip. But the vastness of South America compels me to confess to you, at the very beginning of our holiday, that I dare not promise to do more than try to give you the merest peep at that great Continent in the short time at our disposal. Even so we must, as a rule, keep to the highways, giving preference to routes that are served by fast boats and express trains.

Did I hear murmurs of "Only going to see towns—how dull!"

As I am heart and soul with those of you who love the country, the wilder the better, I am particularly glad to be able further to say, in connection with our programme, that the principal highways of South America run through some of the grandest and wildest scenery in the world. There is the famous natural highway of the Amazon, for instance, along which we shall journey for nearly a thousand miles in an ocean-going liner; although we shall be living in luxury on board the steamer, we shall be watching a succession of forest splendours to right and left on the banks of the river, and novel scenes, such as shooting fish with bow and arrow, in the everyday life of the scattered hut-dwellers whose business it is to gather Brazil nuts and collect wild rubber. Again, we shall cross South America by the overland highway known as the Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway. Once more we shall travel under modern conditions of comfort and convenience, this time in a train deluxe; but the route first crosses the wide-sweeping Pampas plains, then scales the giant Andes Mountains. After being carried at express rate for nearly twenty-four hours through the heart of rich prairie-lands, which are the great grazing-ground of the Argentine, we shall be slowly hauled up rugged rocks, over yawning chasms and through lava beds, into a wondrously savage region where volcanoes belch forth smoke amidst eternal snow scenes, and afterwards dropped suddenly, through a marvellous series of tunnels, from a height of just 10,500 feet almost to sea-level in fertile Chile. Yet again, we shall make a two days' journey by train from the Pacific Coast to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, but the railway track to that most elevated capital city in the world is merely a thread of civilization, which engineering genius has carried up the Andes to a height of 13,000 feet and across the Bolivian desert. We shall return to the coast by boat across Lake Titicaca, and by another railway-line over the Andes, passing en route through the romantic land of the Incas. And we shall make a nine days' trip in a houseboat up the highway of the River Magdalena to Bogota, the capital of Colombia, and the most remote capital city in South America. That is an experience which, I feel sure, even the most adventuresome of you will consider worthy of being called exciting.

You have, I hope, gleaned a rough, general idea that the highways of South America traverse very different country from that in which you are accustomed to find roads, railways, and rivers, and that the great difference in surroundings means you will be travelling on water-ways that Nature has fashioned under peculiarly interesting conditions, and by overland routes which could never have been brought into existence unless numbers of men had pluckily fought many a gallant fight with brains and muscles to overcome extraordinarily difficult obstacles.

For the special information of the adventure-lovers among you, let me throw a little more light on our programme. Interesting as are the South American highways—indeed, they can be described, without exaggeration, as unique—under no circumstances would anyone be justified in attempting to show you South America, even though you are promised but a peep, without taking you for some excursions off the beaten track. In travelling along the routes that have been opened up by the march of civilization, you gradually come to think of South America as a very big land mass, learn to appreciate that much has been done to develop the Continent, and begin to realize that there are many fine opportunities awaiting a much larger population of all classes. But to feel the vastness of South America as something which figures can never be expected to describe, to realize that its possibilities for the production of wealth are practically boundless, and to understand how defiantly strong are the natural difficulties which oppose every new effort to open up the Continent, you must go into wilds which man has not yet attempted to subdue to his welfare.

There was no doubt in my mind, therefore, that our programme must include some excursions off the beaten track, and so narrow is the boundary line in many places between the modern and the primeval, between an up-to-date city and trackless mountains or virgin forests, that many such excursions can be made from highway centres in a few hours. I have a suspicion, though, that the wish was father to the thought when I arranged where we should spend the last days of our holiday; pressure of time necessitated a choice between a railway journey along yet another magnificent highway to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, and a glorious expedition into the interior of British Guiana—I unhesitatingly chose the latter.