VEGETATION 
vegetation. People imagine Brazil a land of beautiful 
flowers, the forest made up of immense trees with luxuri¬ 
ant foliage, overladen with parasitic orchids — eternally 
in bloom, of course, in the dreamy minds of the untrav¬ 
elled — and just waiting to be picked and to be placed 
in one’s buttonhole. The sky, naturally, over such a 
forest, could only be swarming with birds of all sizes, with 
plumage of the richest colours and hues; and what else 
could such a luxuriant country have in the way of butter¬ 
flies and insects than some which resemble precious gems 
in the iridescent tones of their wings and bodies? 
The following is what you really see. 
The trees, overcrowded everywhere, far from being 
gigantic, are, instead, mean-looking and ansemic — not 
unlike the pallid, overgrown youth of the over-populated 
slums of a great city. Orchids? Yes, there are plenty 
of orchids about, but you never see them unless you go 
on a special search for them with a high ladder or some 
other such means of climbing high trees. In any case, 
you would not detect them unless you had the eye of 
an expert. It is well not to forget that in tropical cli¬ 
mates, as in temperate zones, plants are not always in 
bloom when you happen to be passing. As for the butter¬ 
flies, you seldom see any at all in the actual forest. 
Perhaps one of the most common birds of the Amazon 
is a kind of grey-eyed, noisy, mimicking magpie, locally 
called guache or japim or jappelin (Cassicus icterrano- 
tus ), quite amusing with its energetic movements, its 
observant habits, its familiar interest in everything and 
everybody, and its facility for reproducing correctly 
enough sounds which momentarily attract its attention. 
The wonderful activity of its slender body, clothed in 
velvety black and neatly groomed yellow feathers, and its 
charming wickedness make it, perhaps, one of the most 
attractive birds near settlements on the river. It builds 
elongated nests which are twenty to thirty inches in length, 
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