“Beautiful!
How beautiful is all this beautiful world!
How glorious in its action and itself!”
I have called the part of the llanos we were then entering a prairie, but it was far more beautiful than any of our plains known by that name. It was more like the palm-besprent delta of the Nile than the tame and almost treeless reaches of land which characterize so much of our western prairies. Here and there were coppices of graceful shrubs made melodious by feathered songsters whose notes were new to us, but everywhere, at no greater distance from one another, were our old friends that had accompanied us all the way from the mouth of the Orinoco—the ever-attractive moriche palms.
We saw also several other species of palm that excited our interest, but none more so than the strange corneto palm. Like various species of the Oenocarpus and Iriartea, it is remarkable for its adventitious or secondary roots, which, springing from the trunk in large numbers, lift it above the ground, and give it the appearance of a large column supported on a cone of smaller columns inclined to it obliquely. These roots vary from a fraction of an inch to several inches in diameter. They have at times a length of from six to ten feet and embrace a space of ground from five to eight feet in diameter. They are frequently covered by vines and parasites so as to form a natural bower which is used as a retreat by wild animals. Even the Indians have recourse to these fantastic arbors as a place of refuge during rain storms.
Here, as in the land of the Aruacs, the moriche palm is not only a thing of beauty, but, for the Indians, a source of comfort and joy. This and other palms, notably a kind of date palm, and the Cumana, which bears a fruit similar to the wild olive, supply the Indians, during certain months of the year, with all the food they consume. Speaking of the palm, Padre Rivero declares it to be “the earthly paradise of the Guahibos and Chiricoas. It is their delight, their general larder, their all. It is the subject matter of their thoughts and conversations. About it they dream, and without it life would possess no joy for them.”[1]
Like the cocoa palm, “By the Indian Sea, on the isles of balm,” of which Whittier so sweetly sings, the palm on the Meta and its affluents, as well as on the lower Orinoco, is for the child of the forest
“A gift divine,
Wherein all uses of man combine,—