BLUE MACAW. 



42 THE TROPICAL WORLD. 



V 



one that death is not banished, from this scene of paradise, a 

 dark-robed vulture screeches through the woods, or an alligator 

 rests, like a black log of wood or a sombre rock, 

 on the dormant waters. 



The inundations of the Amazons essentially 

 modify the character of the bordering forest ; 

 for it is only beyond their verge that the 

 enormous fig and laurel trees, the Lecythas 

 and the Bertholletias, appear in all their 

 grandeur. As here the underwood is less dense 

 and more dwarfish, it is easy to measure the 

 colossal trunks, and to admire their propor- 

 tions, often towering to a height of 120 feet, 

 and measuring fifteen feet in diameter abova 

 the projecting roots. Enormous mushrooms spring from the de- 

 cayed leaves, and numberless parasites rest upon the trunks 

 and branches. The littoral forest, on the contrary, is of more 

 humble growth. The trunks, branchless in their lower part, 

 clothed with a thinner and a smoother bark, and covered with a 

 coat of mud according to the height of the previous inundation, 

 stand close together, and form above a mass of interlacing 

 branches. These are the sites of the cacao-tree and of the 

 prickly sarsaparilla, which is gathered in large quantities for 

 the druggists of Europe. Leafless bushropes wind in grotesque 

 festoons among the trees, between whose trunks a dense under- 

 Avood shoots up, to perish by the next overflowing of the stream. 

 Instead of the larger parasites, mosses and jungermannias 

 weave their carpets over the drooping branches. But few 

 animals besides the numerous water-birds inhabit this damp 

 forest zone, in which, as it is almost superfluous to add, no 

 plantation has been formed by man. 



The many islands of the delta of the Amazons are everywhere 

 encircled by mangroves ; but sailing stream upwards, the mono- 

 tonous green of these monarchs of the shore is gradually re- 

 placed by flowers and foliage, which, in every variety of form 

 and colour, for hundreds and hundreds of miles characterise the 

 banks of the river. 



During the dry season prickly astricarias, large musaceae, 

 enormous bamboo-like grasses, white plumed ingas, and scarlet 

 poivreas, are most frequently seen among the numberless plants 



