Wanderings in South America

by Charles Waterton

He who wishes to reach the Macoushi country had better send his canoe over- land from Sinkerman's to the Essequibo.

There is a pretty good path, and meeting a creek about three-quarters of the way, it eases the labour, and twelve Indians will arrive with it in the Essequibo in four days.

The traveller need not attend his canoe; there is a shorter and a better way. Half an hour below Sinkerman's he finds a little creek on the western bank of the Demerara. After proceeding about a couple of hundred yards up it, he leaves it, and pursues a west-north-west direction by land for the Essequibo. The path is good, though somewhat rugged with the roots of trees, and here and there obstructed by fallen ones; it extends more over level ground than otherwise. There are a few steep ascents and descents in it, with a little brook running at the bottom of them, but they are easily passed over, and the fallen trees serve for a bridge.

You may reach the Essequibo with ease in a day and a half; and so matted and interwoven are the tops of the trees above you that the sun is not felt once all the way, saving where the space which a newly-fallen tree occupied lets in his rays upon you. The forest contains an abundance of wild hogs, lobbas, acouries, powisses, maams, maroudis and waracabas for your nourishment, and there are plenty of leaves to cover a shed whenever you are inclined to sleep.

The soil has three-fourths of sand in it till you come within half an hour's walk of the Essequibo, where you find a red gravel and rocks. In this retired and solitary tract Nature's garb, to all appearance, has not been injured by fire nor her productions broken in upon by the exterminating hand of man.

Here the finest green-heart grows, and wallaba, purple-heart, siloabali, sawari, buletre, tauronira and mora are met with in vast abundance, far and near, towering up in majestic grandeur, straight as pillars, sixty or seventy feet high, without a knot or branch.

Traveller, forget for a little while the idea thou hast of wandering farther on, and stop and look at this grand picture of vegetable nature: it is a reflection of the crowd thou hast lately been in, and though a silent monitor, it is not a less eloquent one on that account. See that noble purple-heart before thee! Nature has been kind to it. Not a hole, not the least oozing from its trunk, to show that its best days are past. Vigorous in youthful blooming beauty, it stands the ornament of these sequestered wilds and tacitly rebukes those base ones of thine own species who have been hardy enough to deny the existence of Him who ordered it to flourish here.

Behold that one next to it! Hark how the hammerings of the red-headed woodpecker resound through its distempered boughs! See what a quantity of holes he has made in it, and how its bark is stained with the drops which trickle down from them. The lightning, too, has blasted one side of it. Nature looks pale and wan in its leaves, and her resources are nearly dried up in its extremities: its sap is tainted; a mortal sickness, slow as a consumption and as sure in its consequences, has long since entered its frame, vitiating and destroying the wholesome juices there.

Step a few paces aside and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora behind it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now lie on the ground in sad confusion, one upon the other, all shattered and fungus-grown and a prey to millions of insects which are busily employed in destroying them. One branch of it still looks healthy! Will it recover? No, it cannot; Nature has already run her course, and that healthy-looking branch is only as a fallacious good symptom in him who is just about to die of a mortification when he feels no more pain, and fancies his distemper has left him; it is as the momentary gleam of a wintry sun's ray close to the western horizon. See! while we are speaking a gust of wind has brought the tree to the ground and made room for its successor.

Come farther on and examine that apparently luxuriant tauronira on thy right hand. It boasts a verdure not its own; they are false ornaments it wears. The bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the root to its topmost branch. The succession of fruit which it hath borne, like good cheer in the houses of the great, has invited the birds to resort to it, and they have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants on its branches which, like the distempers vice brings into the human frame, rob it of all its health and vigour. They have shortened its days, and probably in another year they will finally kill it, long before Nature intended that it should die.