Part 3 - Chapter 16. Wonders Of The Forest

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_ PART THREE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. WONDERS OF THE FOREST

Of the palms alone, upwards of a hundred species are found in these forests. These supply the Indian with nearly all he wants to support existence. Their fruit, or pith, or crowns, furnish him with an abundance of food. He builds his hut and floors it with their wood, and thatches it with their leaves. From the trunks of some species he forms his canoes, of different sizes. He obtains from them oil, cord, thread, wine--or a beverage which answers the purpose--wax, mats, baskets, arrows for his sumpitan or bow, and numberless other articles. Pure, clear oils are made from some of the nuts and palm fruits; while many palms yield a fibrous material admirably suited for cordage, being singularly elastic and resistant.

From the curious candella-tree,--called by the Spaniards _arbol de la manteca_, by the Indians _cuajo_,--he obtains tallow for candles and excellent oil for lamps, and a beverage which is made from its fruit.

The cow-tree supplies a milk in appearance like that of the animal from which it takes its name, but thicker. On analysing this product, it is found to consist of water, animal milk, and wax as pure as that obtained from bees. By dipping cotton in the liquid, too, candles can be made.

In the hotter regions grows the bajuco d'agua, which supplies the place of wells and fountains,--each yard of it affording a pint of water. High up on the mountainside, in the regions of icy wastes, called the paramos, grows the frailejou, which yields a pure turpentine, and assists to warm the human body. Of the palms, a few only can be described. There is the cocoa-nut palm, with its swollen bulb-like stem when young, its tall straight trunk when full-grown, its cluster of heavy fruit, its long plume-like drooping flower; the coccoeiro, with its slighter trunk and pendent branches of small berry-like fruit; the palmetto, with its tender succulent bud on the summit of the stem, used as a vegetable, and proving an excellent substitute for cabbage; the thorny icari, or cari--a variety of fan-palm. Its spiny stems and leaves, which cut like razors, make it difficult to approach. Its bunches of bright chestnut-brown fruit hang from between the leaves which form its crown, each bunch about a foot in length, massive and compact, like a large cluster of black Hamburg grapes.

The syagrus palm has a greenish fruit, not unlike the olive in appearance, which hangs in large pendent bunches just below the leaves. The fruit resembles somewhat that of the bread-tree, but is more slender and cylindrical in form.

The leaves of different kinds of palms are used for thatching the Indian huts, the curua palm among others. When young, they grow closely round the mid-rib attached to the axis by a few fibres only, so that when the mid-rib is held up they hang from it like so many straw-coloured ribbons. With these leaves both the walls and roofs are covered. The mid-rib, which is strong, and sometimes four or five yards long, is set across to serve as a support, and bind down the pendent leaves. Such a thatch will last for years, and is an excellent protection from rain as well as sun.

The Indian furnishes himself with cups and vessels of all sorts from the cuieira-tree (Crescentia cajeput). It is of immense size, the fruit being like a gourd. It is spherical, of a light green shining surface, and grows from the size of an apple to that of the largest melon. It is filled with a soft white pulp, easily removed when the fruit is cut in halves. The rind is then allowed to dry. Cups and basins of various sizes are made from it, which the Indians adorn with a variety of brilliant colours.

One of the staple productions of the Upper Amazon is the guarana. It is a trailing plant, a sort of vine; when full-grown, about eight feet high, and bearing a bean the size of a coffee-bean, two being enclosed in each envelope. This bean, after being roasted, is pounded in a small quantity of water till it becomes compact, and, when dry, is about the colour of chocolate. It is then grated with the rough tongue of the piraracu, and when mixed with sugar and water makes a refreshing beverage. It is said to have an excellent effect when administered in cases of diarrhoea.

 

ASPECTS OF THE FOREST.

Although at some times of the year the forests present only varied tints of green and brown, unrelieved by brighter colours; at others, when, after the rains, nature has revived, the banks of the streams are gay and beautiful in the extreme. Thousands of brilliant blossoms of varied colours rise amid the trunks of the trees, or hang in rich festoons from the branches, while the air is laden with the almost overpowering perfume of numberless flowers.

"Wild flowers," says Mrs Agassiz, "are abundant; not delicate small plants growing low among the moss and grass, but large blossoms covering tall trees, and resembling exotics at home by their rich colour and powerful odour--indeed, the flowers of the Amazonian forests reminded me of hot-house plants--and there often comes a warm breath from the depth of the woods laden with perfume, like the air from the open door of a conservatory."

"Beautiful as are the endless forests, however," she remarks in another place, "we could not but long, when skirting them day after day, without seeing a house or meeting a canoe, for the sight of tilled soil, for pasture lands, for open ground, for wheat-fields and hay-stacks; for any sign, in short, of the presence of man. As we sat at night in the stern of the vessel, looking up the vast river stretching many hundred leagues, with its shores of impenetrable forests, it was difficult to resist an oppressive sense of loneliness. Though here and there an Indian settlement or a Brazilian village appears, yet the population is a mere handful in such a territory."

Wonderful is the change in the appearance of the tropical representatives of well-known families in the Old World.

The india-rubber tree belongs to the milk-weed family. The euphorbiaceae assume the form of colossal trees, constituting a considerable part of its strange and luxuriant forest growth. The giant of the Amazonian woods, whose majestic flat crown towers over all other trees, while its white trunk stands out in striking relief through the surrounding mass of green--the sumaumera--is allied to the mallows of the North. Some of the most characteristic trees of the river-shore belong to these two families.

 

BUTTRESS TREES.

One of the most striking characteristics of the forest vegetation is the way in which many of the trunks of the trees are supported by buttresses. The huge sumaumera is especially remarkable; but this disposition to throw out supports is not confined to one tree. It occurs in many families. These buttresses start at a distance of about ten feet from the ground, separating greatly towards the base, where they are often ten to twelve feet in depth. The lower part of the trunk is thus divided into several open compartments, so large that, if roofed over, they would form a hut with sufficient space for two people to stand up or lie down in. Others, however, rise to the height of twenty or thirty feet, and run up in the form of ribs to forty or fifty feet. Other trees appear as if they were composed of a number of slender stalks bound together, and are ribbed to their entire height. In some places the furrows reach completely through them, and appear like the narrow windows of a tower. The stems of others again rise on the summit of numerous roots, like the bulging-stemmed palm, apparently standing on a number of legs at the height of a dozen feet or more from the ground. Often the roots thus form archways sufficiently large for a person to walk beneath.

 

SIPOS OR WILD VINES.

Circling round the stems of trees in innumerable coils, and grasping them with a deadly embrace, grow in rich luxuriance countless wild vines, well meriting the name of murdering sipos. They hang in festoons from their boughs, and form an intricate tracery of network from tree to tree,--often of sufficient strength to support the falling monarchs of the forest when time has wrought decay among their roots.

Here are seen tillandsias and bromeliaceae, like the crowns of huge pineapples; large climbing arums, with their dark green and arrow-head shaped leaves, forming fantastic and graceful ornaments swinging in mid-air; while huge-leaved ferns and other parasites cling to the stems up to the very highest branches. These are again covered by other creeping plants; and thus we see parasites on parasites, and on these parasites again. As we gaze upwards, we see against the clear blue sky the finely divided foliage, many of the largest of the forest-trees having leaves as delicate as those of the trembling mimosa: among them appear the huge palmate leaves of the cecropias, and the oval glossy ones of the clusias, countless others of intermediate forms adding to the variety of its scenery,--the bright sunshine playing on the upper portion of the foliage, while a solemn gloom reigns among the dark columns which support this wondrous roof of verdure.

In truth, in these woods a thousand objects attract the eye, each a world of varied vegetation in itself; while the ear listens to the quick rustling breeze moving the palm-leaves fifty feet or more above the head,--not like the slow gathering, rushing wind among the pine-trees in northern climes, but like rapidly running water. Now an immense butterfly of the most vivid blue comes sailing by to alight on a neighbouring shrub, when, suddenly folding his azure wings out of sight, it looks merely like some brown moth spotted with white.

As evening comes on, in some districts a strange confusion of sounds is heard, as from a crowd of men shouting loudly at a distance. Now it seems like the barking of dogs, then like that of many voices calling in different keys, but all loud, varied, excited, full of emphasis; and yet, after all, the rioters are but the frogs and toads uttering their usual notes.

 

The Seringa or India-Rubber Tree.

Along the whole extent of the submerged region on the banks of the Amazon, beginning at a distance of about fifty miles from Para, as well as on the shores of many of its tributaries, grows a tree with bark and foliage not unlike that of the European ash. The trunk, however, shoots up to an immense height before throwing off branches. It is the valuable seringa-tree (Siphonia elastica), belonging to the family Euphorbia, which produces india-rubber. As soon as the waters after the rainy season have subsided, the natives go forth in parties to procure the sap with large bowls, clay moulds, pans in which to collect it, and axes for cutting the wood for their fires. They build their huts in the neighbourhood of the trees.

The first business is to make gashes in the bark, keeping them open by pegs, under which they place little clay cups, or shells. Each person has a certain number of trees under his charge. Every morning he goes round, and pours what has collected in the cups into a large bowl. The sap is at first of the consistency of cream, but it soon thickens. The moulds, which are generally in the form of bottles, are then dipped into the liquid. As soon as the coating is dried, the mould is again dipped in, and the same process is gone through for several days. The substance is at this time hard and white. Meantime fires are made with the nuts of several species of palms--the inaja and others. These produce a thick black smoke. The india-rubber is then passed several times through it. By this means a dark colour and the proper consistency are obtained. The moulds being broken, the clay is poured out, and the material is ready for the market.

Sometimes it is formed in large flat pieces; and of late years it has been preserved in a liquid state in hermetically closed vessels.

The seringa-tree differs greatly from the group of plants which furnish the caoutchouc of Africa and the West Indies; the latter being the product of certain species of ficus of a climbing character, and inferior to the india-rubber of South America.

 

THE COW-TREE.

Among the noblest of the forest monarchs appears a tree with deeply-scored reddish and ragged bark. Who would have supposed that from that vast trunk would issue a milky liquid scarcely distinguishable at first from that of the cow? Yet such is the sap coming from the opening made by the axe from the massaranduba or cow-tree. When fresh it serves every purpose of real milk when mixed with coffee; but drunk pure has a somewhat coarse taste--and it is considered dangerous to drink much of it, however refreshing a small quantity may be. It soon thickens, and forms a tenacious glue, which can be usefully employed in cementing crockery. A decoction of the bark is employed as a red dye for cloth. The fruit, also, is largely consumed; while the wood is excessively durable in water.

 

MONKEYS' DRINKING-CUPS--BRAZIL-NUT TREE.

Two lofty trees, closely allied to each other--the Lecythis ollaria and the Bertholletia excelsa--produce enormous capsules full of nuts. The first, called the sapucaya, yields these curious capsules known as _cuyas de maccao_, or monkeys' drinking-cups. At the top is a circular hole, to which a natural lid fits exactly. On the nuts becoming ripe the lid is loosened, and the heavy cup falling to the ground, the nuts are scattered far and wide, when they are eaten by numerous animals on the watch for them. The collectors, therefore, have difficulty in obtaining them. The other tree, known as the Brazil-nut tree, produces similar wooden vessels; but as they have no lid, they fall entire to the ground, and are thus preserved till human beings come to collect them, when they are shipped to England and other parts of the world.

 

THE VICTORIA REGIA.

On the surface of the tranquil pools, amid the recesses of the forest, float the wide-spreading circular leaves of the magnificent Victoria regia, like vast dishes--their edges turned up all round--with beautiful flowers rising amid them. The colour varies from the velvety white outer petals through every shade of rose to the deepest crimson, and fading again to a creamy yellowish tint in the heart of the flower. The natives call it the _forno do piosoca_, or oven of the jacana--the leaves being like that of the baking-pans, or ovens, on which the mandioca meal is roasted. The leaf rises from the root at the bottom of the pool, on a stock armed with sharp spines.

When young, the leaf may be seen in the form of a deep cup or vase surrounded with ribs, at that time comparatively small, the whole green expanse of the adult leaf covered in between them in regular rows of puffings. As the ribs grow their ramifications stretch out in every direction, the leaflets one by one unfolding to fill the ever-widening spaces; till at last, when it reaches the surface of the water, it rests horizontally above it without a wrinkle--the colossal leaf being thus supported by a heavy scaffold of ribs beneath it, sufficient not only to support the light-stepping jacana, but even a young child. Some of the leaves have a diameter of from four to five feet; some may grow even to a larger size.

"Here, seen in its own home, it has in addition to its own beauties the charm of harmony with all that surrounds it," observes Mrs Agassiz,--"with the dense mass of forest, with palm and parasite, with birds of glowing plumage, with insects of all bright and wonderful tints, and with fishes which, though hid in the water beneath it, are not less brilliant and varied than the world of life above."

 

PALMS.

Almost countless are the varieties of trees in the Amazonian forests, and wonderful the diversity in their combination. Rarely is the soil found occupied for any extent by the same kind of tree. A vast proportion are yet unknown to science. The palms surpass in number and variety all their sylvan brethren. They differ wonderfully in form and size: some, sturdy giants towering up towards the sky with wide-spreading branches; others, delicate little pigmies with slender stems and small broom-like crowns; while others assume the form of creepers, and wind in many folds round the supporting trunks of other trees.

"Among them are four essentially different forms:--the tall ones, with a slender and erect stem, terminating with a crown of long feathery leaves, or with broad fan-shaped leaves," remarks Professor Agassiz; "the bushy ones, the leaves of which rise, as it were, in tufts from the ground, the stem remaining hidden under the foliage; the brush-like ones, with a small stem, and a few rather large leaves; and the winding, creeping, slender species. Their flowers and fronds are as varied as their stalks. Some of these fruits may be compared to large woody nuts with a fleshy mass inside, others have a scaly covering, others resemble peaches or apricots, while others, still, are like plums or grapes. Most of them are eatable, and rather pleasant to the taste."

Among the most beautiful is the mauritia, or miriti, with pendent clusters of reddish fruit; its enormous, spreading, fan-like leaves cut into ribbons. Contrasted with it appears the manicaria, or the bussu, with stiff entire leaves, some thirty feet in length, almost upright, and very close in their mode of growth, and serrated all along their edges. The leaves all sprout from, a comparatively short stem.

More curious is the raphia, with plume-like leaves, sometimes from forty to fifty feet in length, starting also from a short stem--almost from the ground. Its vase-like form is peculiarly graceful and symmetrical.

Among the most curious is the pashiuba barrigudo, or bulging-stemmed palm (Iriartea ventricosa); which, rising on a pyramid of roots for several feet, runs up in a single column for some distance, and then swells in a curious spindle-form, again to assume the same proportions as below, till its head spreads out in several fan-like branches with web-shaped leaflets. The tree looks as if supported on stilts, and a person can stand upright among the roots of old trees with the perpendicular stem above his head. These roots have the form of straight rods, and are studded with stout thorns, whilst the trunk is quite smooth. The purpose of this curious arrangement is probably to recompense the tree by root-growth above the soil for its inability, in consequence of the competition of neighbouring roots, to extend itself underground.

Here, too, grows the slender and graceful assai-palm, with its perfectly smooth trunk,--the fruit appearing in a heavy cluster of berries just below the cluster of leaves on its summit. The stem is hard and tough as horn, and is much made use of, when split into narrow planks, for the construction of walls and flooring of houses.

The fruit is about the size of a cranberry, and of a dark brown colour. When boiled and crushed it yields a quantity of juice of about the consistency of chocolate, somewhat of the colour of blackberry juice, when it has a sweetish taste--and is eaten, made into cakes with the flour of the mandioca root. From it also is formed the favourite beverage of the people. To obtain the fruit, the native fastens a strip of palm-leaves round his instep, thus binding his feet together, to enable him to climb the slippery trunk, which he does with wonderful rapidity, to obtain the fruit at its summit.

Wherever a native village exists, there are seen growing in clusters, beautiful ornaments beside the palm-thatched huts, the tall and elegant pupunha, or peach palm--Guilielma speciosa--to the height of sixty feet, and often perfectly straight. A single bunch of the fruit weighs as much as a man can carry, and on each tree several are borne. It takes its name from the colour of the fruit, not from its flavour or nature, for it is dry and mealy, and may be compared in taste to a mixture of chestnuts and cheese. It is eagerly devoured by vultures, who come in quarrelsome flocks to the trees when it is ripe. Dogs often feed on it. It is one of the few trees which the natives brought with them, it is said, from their original home, and have here cultivated from time immemorial. The fruit, when boiled, is nearly as mealy as a potato; and in perfection is the size of a large peach. It is generally supposed that there is more nutriment in the fruit than in fish,--about a dozen forming a meal for a grown-up person. The leaves of its crown are evenly arched over, forming a deep green vault--the more beautiful from the rich colour of the foliage. When the heavy cluster of ripe red fruit hangs under its dark vault, the tree is in its greatest beauty.

The palms are among the most characteristic features of tropical scenery. The variety of their forms, fruit, foliage, and flowers is perfectly bewildering, and yet as a group their character is unmistakable. On the whole, no family of trees is more similar; generically and specifically, none is more varied. Their leaves follow the simple arrangement of those of grasses, in which the leaves are placed alternately on opposite sides of the stem, thus dividing the space round it in halves. As the stem of the branches elongates, these pairs of leaves are found scattered along its length, and it is only in the ears, or spikes of some genera, that we find them growing so compactly on the axis as to form a close head.

Of this law of growth the palm known as the baccaba is an admirable illustration, its leaves being disposed in pairs one above another at the summit of the stem, but in such immediate contact as to form a thick crown. Its appearance is in consequence totally different from any other palm, except perhaps the jacitara, which has a slender, winding stem. Sometimes the crown is more open, as in the inaja--Maximiliana regia--in which the stem is not very high, and the leaves grow in cycles of five, separating slightly, so as to form an open vase rising from a slender stem.

Professor Agassiz remarks that the rest of this tropical forest is as interesting to the geologist as to the botanist, as it reveals to him its relation to the vegetable world of past ages, showing those laws of growth which unite the past and the present.

The tree-ferns--the chamaerops, the pandanus, the araucarias--are modern representatives of past types. The former is a palm belonging to the ancient vegetable world, but having its representative in our days. The modern chamaerops, with its fan-like leaves spreading on one level, stands, with respect to its structure, lower than the palms with pinnate leaves, which belong almost exclusively to our geological age, and have numerous leaflets ranging along either side of a central axis. The young palms, while their elders tower fifty feet above them, are often not more than two inches high; and to whatever genus they may belong, invariably resemble the chamaerops,--having their leaves extending fan-like on one plane, instead of being scattered along a central axis, as in the adult tree. The infant palm is, in fact, the mature chamaerops in miniature; showing that among plants, as among animals--at least in some instances--there is a correspondence between the youngest stages of growth in the higher species of a given type, and the earliest introduction of that type on earth.

More gregarious in their habits than most other palms are the urucuri palms--Attalea excelsa--groves of which beautify the higher lands, and grow in vast numbers under the crowns of the more lofty ordinary forest-trees; their smooth columnar stems being generally fifty feet in height, while their broad, finely pinnated leaves, interlocking above, form arches and woven canopies of elegant and diversified shapes. The fruit, in size and shape like the date, has a pleasant flavoured juicy pulp, and falls to the ground when ripe. _

Read next: Part 3: Chapter 17. The Wonders Of The Waters

Read previous: Part 3: Chapter 15. Wonders Of Insect Life

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