The Highland Wilderness 179 



whom Mr. Savage Landor stands in unpleasant prom- 

 inence. 



From the Sepotuba rapids our course at the outset lay 

 westward. The first day's march away from the river 

 lay through dense tropical forest. Away from the broad, 

 beaten route every step of a man's progress represented 

 slashing a trail with the machete through the tangle of 

 bushes, low trees, thorny scrub, and interlaced creepers. 

 There were palms of new kinds, very tall, slender, 

 straight, and graceful, with rather short; and few fronds. 

 The wild plantains, or pacovas, thronged the spaces 

 among the trunks of the tall trees ; their boles were short, 

 and their broad, erect leaves gigantic ; they bore brilliant 

 red-and-orange flowers. There were trees whose trunks 

 bellied into huge swellings. There were towering trees 

 with buttressed trunks, whose leaves made a fretwork 

 against the sky far overhead. Gorgeous red-and-green 

 trogons, with long tails, perched motionless on the lower 

 branches and uttered a loud, thrice-repeated whistle. We 

 heard the calling of the false bell-bird, which is gray in- 

 stead of white like the true bell-birds; it keeps among 

 the very topmost branches. Heavy rain fell shortly after 

 we reached our camping-place. 



Next morning at sunrise we climbed a steep slope to 

 the edge of the Parecis plateau, at a level of about two 

 thousand feet above the sea. We were on the Plan 

 Alto, the high central plain of Brazil, the healthy land 

 of dry air, of cool nights, of clear, running brooks. The 

 sun was directly behind us when we topped the rise. 

 Remmg in, we looked back over the vast Paraguayan 

 marshes, shimmering in the long morning lights. Then, 



