[CHAPTER VIII]
DIFFERENT KINDS OF WILD RUBBER—continued
Beyond the Amazon Valley, the chief wild-rubber producing countries in the New World are Central America and Mexico. Both are homelands of the Castilloa, and Mexico has large areas of a rubber-giving shrub called “Guayule.”
Now that you have seen how caucho is collected in South America, you will, I feel sure, be all the more interested to get a peep at some caucho-gatherers in Central America, who work in a different way. So let us go to Nicaragua.
Once more we are standing in the maze of a tropical forest. Just in front of us is a tree, which has big leaves hanging independently of each other from either side of the branches. By the shape and arrangement of its foliage we recognize it as a Castilloa. Under this tree stands a semi-clad, brown figure. What a dwarf he looks! No wonder; the tree with whose height you are unconsciously comparing his stature is a giant, whose top-to-root measure is well over 100 feet.
The native is going to collect caucho-milk. He does not cut down the tree, but taps it as it stands. With a big knife he makes V-shaped cuts in the trunk, operating on the lower part from the ground, and on the upper part from a hanging ladder. This rough-looking climbing apparatus he has made for himself out of bush-rope. You can see for yourself that it is easy enough for him to find bush-rope in this forest; from the branches of numbers of the trees around hang lengths of naturally-corded fibre, some of it stringlike, much of it thicker than any rope that is ever made in a factory.
The caucho-milk runs out from the cuts and trickles down the trunk into a calabash. When the collector has tapped several trees, he puts all the milk into an old pan, and adds to it some watery juice which he has obtained from a particular variety of creeper. He then stirs the mixture, and in a little time the rubber coagulates into lumps, which float on the surface. He takes these pieces of rubber out of the pan, and kneads them into flat, round “biscuits.”
Our next visit is to Mexico. Here we will not go into the forests, among the caucho-gatherers; for time is pressing, and rather than look at similar sights to those with which we are already acquainted, we choose to make for a part of this country where we can watch, amidst quite new surroundings, a novel process of obtaining rubber from a plant which is quite different from any we can see elsewhere.
We are on the stony soil of a Mexican plain, standing knee-deep in scrub. As far as the eye can reach in every direction the ground is covered with dwarfish vegetation, which consists of a shrub called “guayule.”
Guayule covers acres upon acres of the Mexican plains. It contains a large amount of rubber, which is secreted by all the plant-cells. Unlike most rubber-giving vegetation, this shrub does not yield its riches in the form of milk; the milk naturally coagulates within the cells and forms tiny particles of rubber. Presently you will see how these particles are routed out of their hiding-place.