In the time of the ancient glory of Mesopotania when Babylon and Nineveh crowned the plains, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowed in separate channels to the Persian Gulf. Now, however, owing to the silting up of the old beds, their waters unite a few miles from the coast into one stream, the Shat-el-Arab. This shallow, muddy river is bordered for miles with groves of date palms. The plantations stretching off into the country on either side supply the greater part of the world with dates.
The Amazon River is the largest in the world; it is not the longest for the Missouri-Mississippi River is longer, but it contains more water than any other river in the world. The amount of fresh water brought to the mouth of the river is so great that for more than 100 miles out to the sea the water is fresh. The Amazon is about 4,000 miles long, which is 600 miles more than the distance from New York to Liverpool. For 250 miles upstream from the mouth this river is 50 miles wide, so that it looks like a broad bay rather than a river. The main stream and the twenty-nine larger tributaries have 27,000 miles of navigable waters, which is more than any other river system in the world. If the Hudson River, which empties into the Atlantic at New York were a great stream flowing through our continent from the west so that we could enter it and sail clear across the land to Salt Lake City on a steamer, we should have about the same condition of transportation as prevails on the Amazon. Para, in the Amazon Valley, is the chief rubber port of the world. The rubber is made from the sap of the Siphonia elastica, a forest tree which grows wild in this region. Para is also noted for the quantity of cacao exported. About half a million dollars' worth of it is shipped every year, and the product all told amounts to thousands of tons. From the Amazon lowlands which are overgrown with tropical forests, mahogany, rosewood, ebony, drugs, and Brazil nuts are found.
The Kongo, while not so long as the Nile, is greater in volume than any other river in Africa, is greater in volume than the Mississippi, and is second only to the Amazon. It drains a basin as large as half of the United States proper. The river has many tributaries, and its navigable water ways, if stretched out in one line, would reach about halfway around the globe. From its mouth at Matadi, about one hundred miles inland, the Kongo is more like a long lake than a river. It is five or six miles wide, and in many places three hundred feet deep. From Matadi to Stanley Pool, about two hundred miles, there is a series of cataracts; but above that to Stanley Falles are more than one thousand miles of open river, upon which steamboats can travel as well as upon the Mississippi or the lower parts of the Hudson. On the south the head waters of its tributaries are not far from the watershed of the Zambezi; on the north the headwaters come very close to those of Lake ALbert, Lake Victoria and the other headwaters of the Nile. The Kongo River is the only road by which the products of this vast region can get out to the ocean; and some large European trading companies have established factories and warehouses upon its banks. The most valuable product which the Kongo now gives to the world is rubber, after which come palm nuts and palm oil and ivory in the shapre of elephant tusks. Other exports are peanuts and coffee and copal, a gum that is used to make varnish. Tobacco is grown in all the native villages, and it may become an important article of trade.
