ON THE AMAZON, 197 
with its prickly glutinous fruits and small white flowers; a creeping 
Mimosa, with long prickly pods ; a Labiate plant, not unlike one of our 
Mints; a prickly Cucumber, climbing and winding over the ruined shed 
at my right, with others, too numerous to be even briefly enumerated. 
On a gently-swelling knoll to the north-west is a group of picturesque 
houses, some merely consisting of a tiled or thatched one-sided roof, sup- 
ported on poles, and some with such superfluities as mud-walls and win- 
dows ; while here and there a group of bare poles standing, indicates the 
position of a house now abandoned and stripped of its covering. The 
houses in the centre of the town are of a better class, but, upon the 
whole, Obidos seems to have been less prosperous, and to have been 
gradually falling into disrepair, ever since the disturbances of 1835. 
To return to our pieture: the hill beyond these fragments of houses 
is thickly clad with virgin forest, and near its centre rises, towering 
above all its neighbours, the round head of a Samaumeira (Eriodendron 
Samauma, Mart.), now thinly clad with young leaves of delicate brown, 
and showing every branch of its skeleton. How remarkable that this 
tree, wherever it grows, rarely puts forth a branch until it has sur- 
mounted all the neighbouring trees ; hence it may infallibly be known 
ata great distance. Truly it is the monarch of the forest! If we 
now look eastward, we have in the foreground the pretty church of 
Santa Anna, and springing out of the forest beyond, a bold wooded 
hill, called Serra d'Escamas. To the right we catch another view of 
the Amazon, stretching eastward to the utmost limits of vision. The 
virgin forest extends to the outskirts of the town on every side but 
that of the river; and we were often disturbed in our hammocks, 
before the morning dawn, by the howling of guaribas quite near to us. 
My letters from the President to the authorities of Obidos procured 
us prompt attention and assistance. There was no house at liberty; 
but the Commandante, Major Joao da Gama, lent us a room in a house 
of his own, as well as a mulatto boy to cook our food, so that we were 
enabled at once to commence operations. I was glad to make the 
acquaintance of the Vigario, Sr. Raimundo Sanches de Brito, an — 
amiable old man, well read in Portuguese and French literature. He 
has had the church nearly forty years, and well recollects Martius and 
Spix visiting Obidos thirty years ago, but remaining only a few hours 
to repair their helm. Obidos, however, is a wretched place for 
strangers, who, if they have not good stomachs, are likely to die of 
