A Collecting Trip to Colombia 19 



and spent a pleasant hour with I\Ir. Carlos Nieto, a commission merchant 

 with whom we had formed an acquaintance enroute up the river. That night 

 our boat tied up at a cattle chute below Magangue. About daybreak they 

 began loading seventy-five cattle on board, and, this accomplished, we reached 

 Calamar about three p. m. We remained at Calamar until about two a. m., 

 February 26, when we started for Barranquilla. The long delay we ex- 

 perienced in getting out of the canal leading to Barranquilla was repeated 

 on our return. About eight a. m. the yacht Ideal, running as a ferry be- 

 tween Barranquilla and Cienaga, passed us in the canal, and, after prolonged 

 shoutings and wavings on our part, returned, picked us up, and landed us 

 at Cienaga about four p. m. We caught an extra mail train from Cienaga 

 about seven p. m. and slept that night in our old rooms at the bachelors' 

 quarters of the United Fruit Company at Santa Marta. 



While ascending and descending the Rio Magdalena the objects probably 

 most interesting both to the other passengers and ourselves were the large 

 number of flowering trees in the forest. Other trees were also interesting 

 but for other reasons. Frequently along the water's edge and just back 

 from it were dense stands of small or moderately sized trees with very light 

 colored trunks and branches and large leaves, known as the guarumo. 

 Overtopping the forest, and sometimes standing out alone in beautiful ma- 

 jesty, were the bonga trees, at times with unbranched trunks rising one hun- 

 dred feet, the perfect mushroom-shaped tops adding another fifty feet to 

 their heights. The trunks exude a latex widely used by the natives in the 

 treatment of boils. The wood is soft and useless. A number of flowering 

 trees, as seen from the river steamer, seemed to rise to about the same 

 height in the forest. One rare kind was_ a snowy white ; another commoner 

 kind was a bright dandelion yellow ; another was blue ; another dark blood 

 red; and a very common and very beautiful one was a peach pink. There 

 was little uniformity among the names given these trees by various pas- 

 sengers on the boats. A small broad tree which was very common had 

 orange yellow flowers and orange brown buds in great profusion. Another 

 common small tree had flowers in clusters, some of them red and 

 some white or greenish. What we at first thought were the dull reddish 

 bronze flowers of a tree, we found, on a closer view, to be the flowers of 

 a vine which in some cases almost concealed the tree top over which it 

 spread. Once at Maraquita we saw an ant trail where the petals of one of 

 the pink trees were carried in a continuous narrow ribbon of color; a short 

 distance away another ribbon of color, in this case bright yellow, moved 

 slowly but uninterruptedly along. 



It must be understood that the flowering trees mentioned above were 

 not dominant in the forests along the Magdalena at the season we saw them. 

 These forests were, like all lowland tropical forests we have seen, rather 

 sombre masses of varying shades of green only rarely relieved by other 

 and brighter colors. That enraptured vision which beholds tropical rivers 

 flowing through ever-changing vistas of brilliant flowers of every conceivable 

 hue has never been vouchsafed us. Neither have we been gifted with those 

 supernatural powers of sight and hearing which some travellers possess and 



