A GOLD MINE IN THE WILDERNESS. 191 



sides. The hammocks are hung beneath this and an open 

 fire is built in the centre. The Guiana Indians are unequalled 

 exponents of the simple life. 



In the deep jungle we are constantly impressed with the 

 straightness of all the trunks. The lianas and bush-ropes 

 may be scalloped or spiral, or with a multitude of little steps 

 like the Monkey Ladder, and still easily reach the life-giving 

 light high overhead. But the trees can afford no bends or 

 curves or gnarly trunks; they rise like temple columns. 

 Cell must be on cell, each to aid in the life race upward. 

 There are seldom high winds here in this great calm hot- 

 house. Everywhere between the great trunks whitish 

 in the Crabwood, smoothed and noded in the Congo Pump, 

 and deeply fluted in the Paddle woods between all these 

 mast-like forms, are draped the slender ratline threads and 

 cables of the aerial rigging. 



We seat ourselves on a prostrate trunk free of scorpions, 

 at one side of the corduroy road, and watch and listen. 

 Beside us on a tiny, dull red Mora sprout, eating voraciously 

 is a caterpillar, branched and rebranched with a maze of 

 nettle-hairs, while near it is another a fuzzy fellow who 

 gives us one of the most unexpected surprises of the whole 

 trip. As we first see him he is palest lavender in color, 

 covered with long straight hairs, longer than those of our 

 familiar black and brown woolly bear caterpillar of the north. 

 Five minutes later we look again and see a third caterpillar 

 or no, it is the second one, but remarkably changed a crea- 

 ture flat and immovable, covered with a score of recurved 

 pink tufts of curled hair. The caterpillar chameleon has 

 flattened his longer pelage of lavender into a thin line of 

 prostrate down, bringing into view the recurved pink tufts, 

 and thus has become an entirely different object, both as 

 to shape, color and pattern. There must be a special set of 

 muscles controlling these hairs. Even if a bird had appetite 



