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they realize how enormous it was. "When we walked along the whole length of its body it seemed as if it would never end."
    What Bonacase found most impressive was the thing's head. To demonstrate, the size of the head, Bonacase stretched out his arms in front of himself, with his hands together. This formed a triangle with two-foot sides and an 18-inch base.
    Bonacase's group didn't have anything to measure the snake with except a piece of string about three feet long. Using it, they estimated that the creature was between 72 and 75 feet in length.
    None of the group had a camera. There was no possibility of carrying back a snake of that size and weight. But why didn't they bring back its skin, or head? Bonacase said no one thought it would be worth the trouble. They didn't think there was anything that unusual about the creature.
    "The Brazilian officials who had spent much of their lives in this country did not seem to be particularly surprised. As for me, I had heard so many tales of giant snakes that I supposed the whole of the Amazon was crawling with monsters of this size."
    Try to imagine a snake 75 or 80 feet long. That is almost four times as long as the longest snake you have ever seen, or have ever seen a picture of. The longest snake kept in a zoo was a mere 22 feet. A 75- or 80-foot anaconda is a real monster.
    And there is more. There are rumors of another, even larger snake in South America. It is supposed to be some sort of water snake that lives in the Amazon River and its tributaries. Stories make the thing sound so big that it has been called an inland sea serpent.

    The giant andaconda of South America
    A priest, Father Victor Heinz, reported seeing this monster twice. The first time was on May 22, 1922. He was riding in a canoe
    down the Amazon when he saw a giant water snake drifting quietly and gently downstream. "I reckoned that its body was as thick as an oil-drum and its visible length was some 80 feet."
    Father Heinz' next meeting with the monster came in 1929. He was on the river at night. Suddenly, his crew became very frightened. They began to row madly toward shore.
    "What is it?" Father Heinz cried.
    "There is a big animal," they muttered, very excited.
    At the same moment he heard the water move. It sounded as if a steamboat was passing. Then he saw two bluish-green lights several feet above the water. He thought they were lights on a riverboat. The two lights, however, came from the monster's eyes which glowed in the dark. The monster simply avoided Father Heinz' canoe and swam over to the other side of the river.

    There have been many stories about giant snakes attacking people and other animals.
    Glowing eyes figure in many accounts of this giant water snake. On July 6, 1930, a Portuguese merchant named Reymondo Zima was going down the river at night in his motorboat. He was looking for a house on the right bank. He saw a light near the shore. Thinking it was the house, he steered toward it. Then he switched on his own searchlight. Suddenly, the light began charging his boat at a high speed. It turned out to be a giant water snake, which had only one glowing eye. Zima assumed that the animal had somehow lost the other eye. He thought the creature had mistaken his searchlight for the eye of a fellow snake. The creature nearly overturned Zima's little boat, but he managed to make it safely to shore.
    Another priest, Father Protesius Frickel, said he saw one of the monsters lying in the water near the bank. He got within about a dozen steps of the beast, but it did not move. "It's eyes," he wrote, "were as large as plates."
    In addition to the many reports of giant water snake sightings, there are also supposed to have been two photographs. The first was taken in 1933. The group that took the photo said that they had killed the monster with a machine gun. Before it died, however, it lifted its head 30 feet in the air. When it fell it crushed bushes and trees. Four men were unable to lift the