THE FOEESTS OF AMAZONIA. 



519 



spot of ground, a clump of trees forms an island worthy of Eden. A chaos of bush- 

 ropes and creepers flings its garlands of gay flowers over the forest, and fills the air 

 with the sweetest odor. Numerous birds, partly rivaling in beauty of color the passi- 

 floras and bignonias of these hanging gardens, animate the banks of the lagune, while 

 gaudy macaws perch on the loftiest trees ; and, as if to remind one that death is not 

 banished from this scene of Paradise, a dark-robed vulture screeches through the 

 woods, or an alligator rests, like a black log of wood or a sombre rock, on the tranquil 

 waters. Well he knows that food will not be wanting ; for river tortoises and large 

 fish are fond of retiring to these lagunes. 



The inundations of the Amazon, which often extend many miles inland, essentially 

 modify the character of the bordering forest ; for it it only beyond their verge that the 

 enormous fig and laurel trees appear in all their grandeur. As here the underwood is 

 less dense and more dwarfish, it is easy to measure the colossal trunks, and to admire 

 their proportions, often towering to a hight of 120 feet, and measuring fifteen feet in 

 diameter above the projecting roots. Enormous mushrooms spring from the decayed 

 leaves, and numberless parasites rest upon the trunks and branches. The littoral for- 

 est, on the contrary, is of more humble growth. The trunks, branchless in their lower 

 part, clothed with a thinner and a smoother bark, and covered with a coat of mud 

 according to the hight of the previous inundation, stand close together, and form above 

 a mass of interlacing branches. These are the sites of the cacao-tree and of the prickly 

 sarsaparilla, which is here gathered in large quantities for the druggists of Europe. 

 Leafless bush-ropes wind in grotesque festoons among the trees, between whose trunks 

 a dense underwood shoots up, to perish by the next overflowing of the stream. In- 

 stead of the larger parasites, mosses and jungermannias weave their carpets over the 

 drooping branches. But few animals besides the numerous water-birds inhabit this 

 damp forest zone, in which, as it is almost superfluous to add, no plantation has been 

 formed by man. 



The many windings of the water channels which traverse the littoral woods are so 

 overgrown with bushes, that the boat can only with difficulty be pushed onwards 

 through these retreats, whose silence is only broken by the splashing of a fish or the 

 snorting of a crocodile. The many islands of the delta of the Amazon are every- 

 where encircled by mangroves ; but sailing stream upwards, the monotonous green of 

 these monarchs of the shore is gradually replaced by flowers and foliage, which, in 

 every variety of form and color, for hundreds and hundreds of miles characterize the 

 banks of the river. 



During the dry season prickly astricarias, large musaceae, enormous bamboo-like 

 grasses, white plumed ingas, and scarlet poivreas, are most frequently seen among the 

 numberless plants growing along the bank of the stream, or projecting over its margin; 

 while above the shrubbery of the littoral forest numberless palms tower, like stately 

 columns, to the hight of a hundred feet ; others of a lower stature are remarkable for 

 the size of their trunks, on which the foot stalks of the fallen leaves serve as supports 

 for ferns and other parasites. On the trees which often lie floating on the river, 

 though still attached by their roots to the bank on which they had flourished, petrels 

 or scarlet ibises frequently perch ; and as a boat approaches, hideous bats, disturbed 

 in their holes, fly out of the mouldering trunks. 



It stands to reason that in a length of more than 3,000 miles the species of plants 



