168 THE UPPER AMAZONS. Chap. IIT. 



Vicente shook his head when he saw me one day eating 

 a quantity of the Urucuri plums. I am not sure they 

 were not the cause of a severe indigestion under which 

 I suffered for many days afterwards. 



In passing slowly along the interminable wooded 

 banks week after week, I observed that there were 

 three tolerably distinct kinds of coast and corresponding 

 forest constantly recurring on this upper river. First, 

 there were the low and most recent alluvial deposits, — 

 a mixture of sand and mud, covered with tall, broad- 

 leaved grasses, or with the arrow-gra,ss before described, 

 whose feathery-topped flower-stem rises to a height of 

 fourteen or fifteen feet. The only large trees which 

 grow in these places are the Cecropise. Many of the 

 smaller and newer islands were of this description. 

 Secondly, there were the moderately high banks, which 

 are only partially overflowed when the flood season is 

 at its height ; these are wooded with a magnificent, 

 varied forest, in which a great variety of palms and 

 broad-leaved Marantacese form a very large proportion of 

 the vegetation. The general foliage is of a vivid light- 

 green hue ; the water frontage is sometimes covered 

 with a diversified mass of greenery ; but where the 

 current sets strongly against the friable, earthy banks, 

 which at low water are twenty-five to thirty feet high, 

 these are cut away, and expose a section of forest where 

 the trunks of trees loaded with epiphytes appear in 

 massy colonnades. One might safely say that three- 

 fourths of the land bordering the Upper Amazons, for a 

 thousand miles, belong to this second class. The third 

 description of coast is the higher, undulating, clayey 



