24 TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON. \Ju7ie, 
peculiar. Some of these buttresses are much longer than 
they are high, springing from a distance of eight or ten 
feet from the base, and reaching only four or five feet 
high on the trunk, while others rise to the height of 
twenty or thirty feet, and can even be distinguished as 
ribs on the stem to forty or fifty. They are complete 
wooden walls, from six inches to a foot thick, sometimes 
branching into two or three, and extending straight out 
to such a distance as to afford room for a comfortable 
hut in the angle between them. Large square pieces 
are often cut out of them to make paddles, and for other 
uses, the wood being generally very light and soft. 
Other trees, again, appear as if they were formed by a 
number of slender stems growing together. They are 
deeply furrowed and ribbed for their whole height, and 
in places these furrows reach quite through them, like 
windows in a narrow tower, yet they run up as high as 
the loftiest trees of the forest, with a straight stem of 
uniform diameter. Another most curious form is pre- 
sented by those which have many of their roots high 
above the surface of the ground, appearing to stand on 
many legs,, and often forming archways large enough for 
a man to walk beneath. 
The stems of ail these trees, and the climbers that 
wind or wave around them, support a multitude of de- 
pendants. Tillandsias and other Bromeliacem, resembling 
wild pine- apples, large climbing Anms, with their dark 
green arrowhead- shaped leaves, peppers in great variety, 
and large-leaved ferns, shoot out at intervals all up the 
stem, to the very topmost branches. Between these, 
creeping ferns and delicate little species like our Hyrne- 
