168 
THE UPPER AMAZONS. 
Chap. IIT. 
Vicente shook his head when he saw me one day eating 
a quantity of the Urucuri plums. I am not sure they 
were not the cause of a severe indigestion under which 
I suffered for many days afterwards. 
In passing slowly along the interminable wooded 
banks week after week, I observed that there were 
three tolerably distinct kinds of coast and corresponding 
forest constantly recurring on this upper river. First, 
there were the low and most recent alluvial deposits, — 
a mixture of sand and mud, covered with tall, broad- 
leaved grasses, or with the arrow-grass before described, 
whose feathery-topped flower-stem rises to a height of 
fourteen or fifteen feet. The only large trees which 
grow in these places are the Cecropise. Many of the 
smaller ?lnd newer islands were of this description. 
Secondly, there were the moderately high banks, which 
are only partially overflowed when the flood season is 
at its height ; these are wooded with a magnificent, 
varied forest, in which a great variety of palms and 
broad-leaved Marantacese form a very large proportion of 
the vegetation. The general foliage is of a vivid light- 
green hue ; the water frontage is sometimes covered 
with a diversified mass of greenery ; but where the 
current sets strongly against the friable, earthy banks, 
which at low water are twenty-five to thirty feet high, 
these are cut away, and expose a section of forest where 
the trunks of trees loaded with epiphytes appear in 
massy colonnades. One might safely say that three- 
fourths of the land bordering the Upper Amazons, for a 
thousand miles, belong to this second class. The third 
description of coast is the higher, undulating, clayey 
