THE EQUATORIAL ZONE. 307 



exclusion of almost everything else ; it covers the country 

 for miles together. " Like many of the other inhabitants 

 of the Catingas, its flowers appear before the leaves ; they 

 are of a greenish-yellow colour, and of a very sweet scent, 

 and grow in large panicles. The fruit is a large, dry, tri- 

 angular capsule, filled with broad flat seeds, from the ker- 

 nels of which a kind of soap is manufactured by the na- 

 tives." 



Not only do strange contrasts exist in the appearance of 

 vegetation at different periods of the year, owing to the 

 alternation of long rainy and dry seasons ; but in the coun- 

 try round the great Bio San Francisco, during the period 

 of its inundation, the strange anomaly presents itself to the 

 eye at one glance, of a scorched-up vegetation on the 

 upper country, surmounting the most luxuriant verdure on 

 the level plain below. The reason is, that the rainy season 

 is not simultaneous in the different provinces of Brazil ; so 

 that during the dry season in Bahia and Pernambuco, 

 between which the widest part of the Bio San Francisco 

 rolls, the southern provinces, where the springs of the great 

 river rise, are daily deluged with rain, which for some six 

 months together gradually swells the river, till, at the widest 

 part of all, it floods all the country round. 



