18 Annual Reports of Academy of 
chaos of lower ranges and ridges, each in itself a great mountain 
mass. Peering over the edge of San Lorenzo into nearly solid cloud 
banks below, we would see through a rift in the mist here a group 
of wax palms, another there, then the up-rush of the mist would 
swallow us and the whole mountain top. The cloud eclipse would last 
minutes or hours; and cold and wet, one would occasionally get a 
glimpse through a rift in the fog, far below us and off to the north, 
of the yellow glare of the hot and dry country about Santa Marta. 
When the clouds would leave the summit we could see, off to the 
westward, patches of the great lowland forest, tongues of which 
reach over from the middle Magdalena region, the last of the types 
of country we had planned to examine. 
To reach this lowland forest we returned to Santa Marta and 
travelled over the Santa Marta Railway to Aracataca, fifty-five 
miles from Santa Marta, somewhat to the southwest of the Sierra 
Nevada itself and virtually due south of San Lorenzo, which from 
there dominated the view to the north. When conditions were 
favorable the snows of the Sierra Nevada were visible, and one day 
the setting sun turned these summits, over sixteen thousand feet 
above us, into cones of burnished silver. 
Aracataca is a typical Colombian village, and here we were favored 
by being guests of the United Fruit Company, which controls the 
Santa Marta Railway and, at a number of points of which Araca¬ 
taca is one, has extensive banana plantations. Much of the coun¬ 
try about Aracataca itself has been cleared and is in bananas or 
used as pasture land, many of the wine palms or “palma de vino” 
of the original forest still dominating the landscape. The heavy 
forest, however, was but a few miles away, and for two weeks we 
worked steadily in this environment, the great lowland forest of 
ceiba bongo, ceiba blanca, macundo, palma de vino, palo sancta, 
platanillo, or wild banana, and numerous other trees. The great 
macundos and ceibas tower a hundred feet or more without a branch, 
their trunks like great columns of some old temple, their heads 
short, broad and relatively flat. The undergrowth is very dense 
and almost impenetrable in places, while a perpetual twilight exists 
in much of this vegetable paradise. 
Great macaws screamed overhead in this forest, the howling mon¬ 
keys roared in the distance, and the leaf-cutting ants were every¬ 
where busily engaged in cutting leaves and transporting them under¬ 
ground to their chambers. Ants which stung and bit, ticks, mos- 
