“The Matto Grosso,” began Dickpa when they had made themselves comfortable, “is nominally a province of Brazil. Actually it is almost the whole vast centre of the South American continent. To the north lies the sss, to the west the great Cordillera of the Andean Range, and to the south lies another vast tract of unexplored country. It is hard to describe in terms of figures the magnitude of the place. You see, Brazil is larger than the whole of the United States of America. Try and grasp what that means. The area of England is just over 50,000 square miles; Brazil covers 3¼ million square miles. The Matto Grosso is nearly a million square miles in extent, which means that it is nearly twenty times as large as England, and except for a few insignificant places it is unexplored. It is the wi
