The peculiar charms of a tropical primeval forest are enhanced by the mystery of its impenetrable thickets; for however grand its lofty vaults, or lovely its ever-changing forms of leaf or blossom, fancy paints scenes still more beautiful beyond, where the eye cannot penetrate, and where, as yet, no wanderer has ever strayed. But imagination also peoples the forest with peculiar terrors; for man feels himself here surrounded by an alien, or even hostile, nature: the solitude and silence of the woods weigh heavily on his mind; in every rustling of the falling leaves a venomous snake seems ready to dart forth; and who knows what ravenous animal may not be lurking in the dense underwood that skirts the tangled path?
In Europe there is no room for such feelings; for in our part of the world there are no woods that may not be visited, even in their deepest recesses: no thorny bush-ropes stretch their intricate cordage before the wanderer; no masses of matted shrubs block up his way. But it is very different in the boundless forests of tropical America. Here the jaguar sometimes loses himself in such impenetrable thickets that, unable to hunt upon the ground, he lives for a long time on the trees, a terror to the monkeys; here the padres of the mission-stations, which are not many miles apart in a direct line, often require more than a day’s navigation to visit each other, following the windings of small rivulets in their courses, as the forest renders communication by land impossible.
Even the more open parts of the forest are full of mysteries. In our woods the summits of the highest trees are accessible; there is no blossom that we are not able to pluck—no plant that we are not able to examine, from its root to its topmost branches; but in the Brazilian forest, where the matted bush-ropes wind round the trunks like immense serpents waiting for their prey or stretch like the rigging of a ship from one tree to another, and blossom at a giddy height, it is frequently as impossible to reach their flowers as it is to distinguish to which of the many interlacing stems they may belong.
If any one should be inclined to tax this description with exaggeration, let him try to pluck the flowers of the lianas, or to ascend by climbing their flexible cordage. The tiger-cat and the monkey, perhaps also the agile Indian, may be able to accomplish the feat; but it would be utterly hopeless for the European to undertake it. Nor is it possible to drag down these inaccessible creepers; for, owing to their strength and toughness, it would be easier to pull down the tree to which they attach themselves than to force them from their hold. Here two or three together twisting spirally round each other form a complete living cable as if to bind securely the monarchs of the forest; there they form tangled festoons, and covered themselves with smaller creepers and parasitic plants, hide the parent stem from sight.
No botanist ever entered a primitive forest without envying the bird to whom no blossom is inaccessible, who, high above the loftiest trees, looks down upon the sea of verdure, and enjoys prospects whose beauty can hardly be imagined by man.
A majestic uniformity is the character of our woods, which often consist but of one species of tree, while in the tropical forests an immense variety of families strive for existence, and even in a small space one neighbour scarcely ever resembles the other. Even at a distance this difference becomes apparent in the irregular outlines of the forest, as here a dome-shaped crown, there a pointed pyramid, rises above the broad flat masses of green, in ever-varying succession. On approaching, the differences of colour are added to the irregularities of form; for while our forests are deprived of the ornament of flowers, many tropical trees have large blossoms, mixing in thick bunches with the leaves, and often entirely overpowering the verdure of the foliage by their gaudy tints. Thus splendid white, yellow, or red-coloured crowns are mingled with those of darker or more humble hue. At length when, on entering the forest, the single leaves become distinguishable, even the last traces of harmony disappear. Here they are delicately feathered, there lobed—here narrow, there broad—here pointed, there obtuse—here lustrous and fleshy, as if in the full luxuriance of youth, there dark and arid, as if decayed with age. In many the inferior surface is covered with hair; and as the wind plays with the foliage, it appears now silvery, now dark green—now of a lively, now of a sombre hue. Thus the foliage exhibits an endless variety of form and colour; and where plants of the same species unite in a small group, they are mostly shoots from the roots of an old stem. This is chiefly the case with the palms; but the species of the larger trees are generally so isolated in the wood, that one rarely sees two alike on the same spot. Each is surrounded by strangers that begrudge it the necessary space and air; and where so many thousand forms of equal pretensions vie for the possession of the soil, none is able to expand its crown or extend its branches at full liberty. Hence there is a universal tendency upwards; for it is only by overtopping its neighbours that each tree can attain the region of freedom and of light; and hence also the crowns borne aloft on those high columnar trunks are comparatively small. Shooting up straight and tall in this general struggle, they present no fantastic branches, no projecting limbs, like the sturdy oaks of our forests, and each, supported by the surrounding crowd, loses depth and tenacity of root. They may partly be compared to a body of military: the storm may rage, the lightning blast, the earthquake shake, and though many fall, the body at large scarcely feels the loss. Separate them and they will be found far inferior in power to the wild warrior, who, accustomed to stand alone, trusts to his own strength and dexterity to bear him through the worst storms of fate.
Among the trees the various kinds that have buttresses projecting around their base are the most striking and peculiar. Some of these buttresses are much longer than they are high, springing from a distance of eight or ten feet from the base, and reaching only four or five feet high on the trunk; while others rise to the height of twenty or thirty feet, and can even be distinguished as ribs on the stem to forty or fifty. They are complete wooden walls from six inches to a foot thick, sometimes branching into two or three, and extending straight out to such a distance as to afford room for a comfortable hut in the angle between them. Other trees again appear as if they were formed by a number of slender stems growing together. They are deeply furrowed for their whole height, like the pillars in a cathedral, and in places these furrows reach quite through them, like windows in a narrow tower, yet they run up as high as their loftiest neighbours, with a straight stem of uniform diameter. Another most curious form is presented by those which have many of their roots high above the ground, appearing to stand on many legs, and often forming archways large enough for a man to walk beneath.
The stems of all these trees, and the climbers that wind or wave around them, support a multitude of dependants. Tillandsias and other Bromeliaceæ, resembling wild pine-apples, large climbing Arums, with their dark green, arrowhead-shaped leaves, peppers in great variety, and large-leaved ferns, shoot out at intervals all up the stem to the very topmost branches. Between these, creeping ferns and delicate little species like our Hymenophyllum abound, and in moist dark places the leaves of these are again covered with minute creeping mosses and Jungermannias, so that we have parasites on parasites, and on these parasites again. On looking upwards the infinite variety of foliage, strongly defined against the clear sky, is a striking characteristic of the tropical forest, and the bright sunshine lighting up all above, while a sombre gloom reigns below, adds to the grandeur and solemnity of the scene.
As these vast woods occupy sites of a very different character,—here extending along low river-banks, there climbing the slopes of gigantic mountains,—here under the equator, there on the verge of the tropics, where many of the trees, annually casting their foliage, remind one of the winter of the temperate zone—it is of course quite impossible to embrace all their varieties of form and aspect in one general description.
On descending from the heights of the Andes to the plains of the Marañon, the eye is attracted, in the more elevated forests (the region of the quinquina trees), by a variety of fantastically flowering orchids—and of arborescent ferns, with their lacelike giant leaves—by large dendritic urticeas—by wonderful bignonias, banisterias, passifloras, and many other inextricably tangled bush-ropes and creepers. Farther downwards, though the lianas still appear in large numbers, the eye delights in palms of every variety of form, in terebinthinaceas, in leguminosas, whose sap is rich with many a costly balsam; in laurels, bearing an abundance of aromatic fruit; or it admires the broad-leaved heliconias, the large blossoms of the solaneas, and thousands of other flowers, remarkable for the beauty of their colour, the strangeness of their form, or their exquisite aroma.