By Mariana Enriquez It's harder to breathe in the humid north, up there so close to Brazil and Paraguay, the rushing river guarded by mosquito sentinels and a sky that can turn from limpid blue to stormy black in minutes.
The Coalition try control the river but are constantly being shot by Iranian river guards and Al Qaeda.
With 284 miles of open river to guard, along with 19 South Texas counties from Wharton County, below Houston near the Gulf of Mexico, to the Falcon Dam on the Mexican border below Laredo, the nine stations of the sector are stretched thin in the best of times.
This was the tamest of a gantlet of rapids that are typical of Suriname's rivers and guard the interior as effectively as castle ramparts.
(Sarkozy's headquarters, in a tougher neighborhood across the river, are guarded like a fortress; and Royal's inner sanctum, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, is closed to anyone who is not invited).
This fort, built after 1640, covered a bridgehead over the Guadiana river, thus guarding access to the city.
In another part of town, across the Tigris River from Saddam Hussein's former palace -- the area now called the green zone and occupied by the United States and its allies -- helicopters patroled the river as a guard on a platform aimlessly pounded an empty water bottle on the top of a concrete blast wall in the gathering heat.
The rivers banks dropped guard completely and we soon found ourselves in chest-high waters.
We came across herds of elephant kicking up grasses for food, hippos wallowing in the river and leopards guarding their kill.
"Frost and Snow, Falling" begins: "That is, a quality of man and his becoming, / beautiful, or the decoration of some light and /fixed decision, no less fluent than the river / which guards its name".
