17 FEBRUARY 1923, Page 23

THE REAL SOUTH AMERICA. By Charles Doraville-Fife. (Routledge. 12s. 6d.

net.)

Mr. Domville-Fife, a late correspondent of the Times in South America, has written an excellent book on that author- ridden continent. Its cosmopolitan fringe, abandoned to commerce and volcanic politics, he leaves to other writers, and gives the reader instead glimpses of the almost unknown interior. Here are water plants with leaves twenty feet in circumference, trees that emit flashes of light " vividly and continuously every night throughout the year." Here also are found Natives who feed on coca leaf and can travel fifty or sixty miles a day without rest or food; head-hunters of the Amazon, who by some unknown process reduce the skulls of their victims to tiny trophies only a few inches in diameter; and here the falls of La Guayra and Iguazu hurl down their lonely waters with a grandeur and volume that dwarf Niagara.