195 



strong and slender, and tlie fronds were branches twenty or thirty feet long, with 

 the many long, narrow green blades starting from the midrib at right angles -in 

 pairs. Round the ponds stood stately burity palms, rising like huge columns with 

 great branches that looked like fans, as the long, stiff blades radiated from the 

 end of the midrib. One tree was gorgeous with the brilliant hues of a flock of 

 party-colored macaws. Green parrots flew shrieking overhead." 



In this same book of Brazilian exploration, Colonel Roosevelt 

 gives a fascinating picture of a journey up a stream picturesquely 

 described as the " Ri\er of Tapirs." He and his party went 

 up this river in a launch, and the Colonel's description of the 

 scene reminds one of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." 



"Ahead of us," wTote the Colonel, "the brown water stream stretched incurves 

 between endless walls of dense tropical forest. It was like passing through a gigan- 

 tic greenhouse. Wawasa and burity palms, cecropias, huge figs, feathery bamboos, 

 strange foliage as delicate as lace, trees with buttressed trunks, trees with boles 

 rising smooth and straight to lofty heights, all woven together by a tangle of 

 vines, crowded down to the edge of the river. Their drooping branches hung 

 down to the water, forming a screen through which it was impossible to see the 

 bank. Rarely one of them showed flowers — large white blossoms, or small red or 

 yellow blossoms. More often the lilac flowers of the begonia-vine made large 

 patches of color. Innumerable epiphytes covered the limbs, and even grew on 

 the roughened trunks." 



There are frequent references to the wawasa palms and the 

 Colonel noticed on one of them, a veritable giant in height, a 

 mass of purple orchids growing from the side of the trunk, 

 half-way to the top. On another big tree, not a palm, he saw 

 more than a hundred troupials' nests (the troupial is the South 

 American oriole). He also mentions seeing palms of different 

 varieties with short fronds. Wild plantains were plentiful and 

 there were huge trees like those that grow in California. 



At other times the trees would be few and far between, or 

 .else they would be scrubby and unprepossessing. 



"Day after day; we rode forward across endless flats of grass and of low open 

 scrubby forest, the trees standing far apart and in most places being but little 

 higher than the head of a horseman. Some of them carried blossoms, white, orange, 

 yellow, pink; and there were many flowers, the most beautiful being the morning 

 gloiies. Among the trees were bastard rubber trees, and dwarf palmetto; if the 

 latter grew more than a few feet high their tops were torn and dishevelled by 

 the wind." 



Members of the Roosevelt party also found many fossil-tree 

 trunks which the Colonel believed to be of Cretaceous age. 



