98 



TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON. 



[September^ 



indurated clay, in some places very hard, in others soft and 

 friable : they were clothed with wood to their summits, and 

 had a very picturesque appearance. 



The village of Montealegre is situated on a hill about a 

 quarter of a mile from the water's edge. The ascent to it is 

 up a shallow ravine, and the path is entirely covered with deep, 

 loose sand, which makes the walk a very laborious one. On 

 each side are numbers of large cactus-plants, of the branched 

 candelabrum form, and twenty to thirty feet high : they grow 

 in immense masses, having great woody stems as thick as a 

 man's body, and were quite a novel feature in the landscape. 

 The village itself forms a spacious square, in which the most 

 conspicuous object is the skeleton of a large and handsome 

 church of dark sandstone, which was commenced about twenty 

 years ago, when the place was more populous and thriving, 

 and before the revolutions which did so much injury to the 

 province ; but there is little prospect of its ever being finished. 

 The present church is a low, thatched, barn-like edifice, and 

 most of the houses are equally poor in their appearance. 

 There are no neat enclosures or gardens, — nothing but weeds 

 and rubbish on every side, with sometimes a few rotten palings 

 round a corral for cattle. 



The trade of this place is in cacao, fish, calabashes, and 

 cattle. The cacao is grown on the low lands along the banks 

 of the rivers. It is here planted on cleared ground fully 

 exposed to the sun, and does not seem to thrive so well as 

 when in the shade of the partially cleared forest, which is the 

 plan we had seen adopted in the Tocantins. When an Indian 

 can get a few thousand cacao-trees planted, he passes an idle, 

 quiet, contented life : all he has to do is to weed under the 

 trees two or three times in the year, and to gather and dry the 

 seeds. The fruit of the cacao-tree is of an oblong shape, about 

 five inches long, and with faint longitudinal ribs. It is of a 

 green colour, but turns yellow as it ripens, and it grows on the 

 stem and larger branches by a short strong stalk, never on the 

 smaller twigs ; it grows so firmly, that it will never fall off, but, 

 if left, will entirely rot away on the tree. The outer covering 

 is hard and rather woody. Within is a mass of seeds, which 

 are the cacao-nuts, covered with a pure white pulp, which has 

 a pleasant sub-acid taste, and when rubbed off in water and 

 sweetened, forms an agreeable and favourite drink. In pre- 



