■iß,-' 



Travels in the Brazils. 29 



the sugar works lie at the foot of a green hill, upon the top of 

 which is built the house of the possessor, surrounded by about 20 

 small huts of his people and negro slaves. The great sugar plan- 

 tations surround the Fazenda ; on one side of it are thick high 

 woods, and before the sugar- works is a meadow full of marshes 

 and ponds, enlivened by marsh and water birds, which we 

 could readily have shot from the window. After breakfasting 

 next morning with our polite host, we distributed ourselves in 

 the woods. Mr. Sellars and I went through the sugar-planta- 

 tions, and some other small Fazendas, which are surrounded by 

 pretty orange groves, and then plunged into one of the darkest 

 woods, with which I was ever entertained during our stay in 

 Brazil. High, dead stumps of trees on the border of it still shew- 

 ed, by their marks of burning, the mode in which the soil had been 

 rendered arable. The wood itself was an opaque wilderness of 

 colossal trees ; here grew the mimosa, jacaranda, bombax, big- 

 noniy and other trees, also the pao brazil {cossalpinus brasiliensis.) 

 Upon them again was a heap of cactus, bromelia, epidendrum, pas- 

 siflora, bauhinia, barrister ia, and other kinds whose tendril-stems 

 grew below on the ground, but whose leaves and flowers were at 

 the tops even of the highest trees. They cannot be examined, 

 without hewing down these gigantic trees, in doing which the iron 

 of the best axe is liable to break, such is the hardness of the wood. 

 Creeping plants wind round the trees, in a truly curious manner. 

 Among them a baulinia is very remarkable ; its firm woody ten- 

 drils are continually growing into arches^ which succeed each 

 other ; the concavity of every arch is as artificially followed, as if 

 the chissel of a statuary had been used, and upon the opposite 

 convex side is a short obtuse thorn. This wonderful plant, which 

 might be easily mistaken for a work of art, rises to the tops of 

 the highest trees. Its leaf is small and split, (bilobum,) but I 

 have never seen the flower, although the plant is common. Other 

 kinds of creeping plants distinguish themselves by a smell or scent, 

 particularly strong, partly agreeable, and partly otherwise. The 

 cipo cravo smells fragrant, something like the clove ; another, on 

 the contrary, which La Condamine* mentions as growing luxu- 

 riantly on the banks of the Amazon, smells like garlick. Many of 

 these singular plants have long branches hangins: down, which 

 again taking root, block up the passenger s way. We were obliged 

 to cut them down with a facas, to be able tojproceed. Hanging 

 branches of this description, which, when the wind agitates them, 

 will often strike the traveller on the head, are common on all the 

 forest-roads of Brazil. The vegetation in this part of the South 

 American hemisphere is so luxuriant, that every lofty old tree be- 

 comes the emblem of a little world, a botanical garden of plants, 

 truly rare, and certainly of an unknown kind. The yellow-bel- 

 * S. De la Condamine Voyage, etc. p. 7^. 



