XIX 
IN THE ECUADOREAN ANDES 
177 
Bafios awaiting the fate of my goods. After so 
long a voyage I was much fallen in flesh, and my 
thin face nearly hidden by a beard of three months' 
growth. The cold at Bafios I found almost in- 
sufferable — thermometer sometimes as low as 
48|-° at daybreak, and at its maximum not passing 
64° — rains still continuing. I was attacked by 
catarrh, with a cough so violent as often to bring 
up blood from both nose and mouth. Perhaps I 
should never see again my books, journals, instru- 
ments, my Peruvian mosses, and other things 
which no money could replace — all perhaps rotting 
on the shores of the Topo. There was not a book 
in all Banos, save breviaries and "doctrinas." 
The weather scarcely allowed me to get out, or 
I might have put off sad thoughts by the sight of 
new plants. I had no drying -paper, but I found 
some coarse calico, and with this began to dry the 
mosses and ferns I found on the dilapidated walls 
of my garden. I had also to lay out the mosses 
I had snatched up as we came along from Canelos, 
and which by chance had been brought along with 
my bed, and this occupation diverted my thoughts 
from my painful situation. The Cryptogamic vege- 
tation of some parts of the Montana of Canelos is 
wonderful. There is one mountain, called Abitagua, 
which though not more perhaps than 5000 feet 
high, is continually enveloped in mists and rains. 
The trees on it, even to the topmost leaves, are 
so thickly encased in mosses that a recognisable 
specimen of them would be scarcely procurable, if 
indeed they ever flower, which must be very 
rarely. I gathered a tuft of everything I saw in 
fruit and stowed it in a pouch by my side. In the 
VOL. II N 
