Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

We regretted that time did not permit us to examine the length of their line of march, from their marvelous dwellings to the trees they were stripping for roofing material. They have been known to go a mile or more for material suited to their purpose and to deprive scores of trees of all their leaves in a single day.

To one unfamiliar with the tropics, the depredations committed by these destructive insects appear incredible. Of an unknown number of species, they are among the greatest enemies of man in the equatorial regions. They spare nothing. Gardens and orchards, coffee and sugar, cassava and banana plantations disappear as quickly before them as before blight or frost.

In the early part of the sixteenth century, according to Herrera,[5] their numbers in Española and Puerto Rico were so great and their devastations so extensive and irresistible, that they threatened to depopulate the islands. Various parts of South America have also at different times suffered from the same plague—rivaling the seven plagues of Egypt in the distress and destruction which marked their path. Had we not had here, and elsewhere in the tropics, ocular evidence of their prodigious numbers, and been witnesses of the magnitude of the works due to their united efforts, we should have classed the accounts left us by the early chroniclers of the extent of the ravages of the ant plague among works of fiction rather than records of authentic history.[6]

The scenery along the mountain ascent was an ever-changing panorama of rarest beauty and sublimity, such as no pen could describe or brush portray. It exhibited all the tropical luxuriance of the llanos together with the wild picturesqueness characteristic of Alpine heights.

At times we wended our way along the banks of a noiseless river, which, in solitary grandeur, was sweeping through verdant meads and beneath arcades of sylvan green, carrying its vivifying waves to the broad, expectant plains below. The placid scene, dotted with human habitations, and variegated by bright pastures, the home of contented flocks and herds, offered to the enchanted gaze, in a single picture, all the fabled beauties of the glens of Tempe and the dales of Arcady.

As we mounted higher up on our way, our route was along the verge of deep, headlong torrents mantled in the shade of overhanging bamboos, or obscured by the jutting crags and huge beetling rocks of the earthquake rift mountain. Ever and anon, our ears caught the muffled but incessant roar of thunderous waterfalls, which plunged from dizzy precipices high above our heads, both to the right and to the left of our upward path.

Scarcely had the deafening notes of these tumultuous floods, which awakened a thousand echoes in the sombre caves and yawning gulfs of the countless windings and abrupt breaks of the mountain ravines, died away, before we found ourselves in presence of some murmuring cascade that might well have adorned the grove around the grotto of Calypso. In the gleaming crystal basin at its foot, embowered in vernal bloom and eternal verdure, which diffused an aromatic breath over the passer-by, was tremulously reflected the plumed crown of the palm tree under which the weary traveler sought a moment’s rest for his weary frame. At every turn in our steep and devious path, our eyes were delighted by some wild, struggling brook, that fretted its way through a labyrinthine gorge, pranked with verdurous gloom, or charmed by some wanton rivulet leaping over rocks or forming limpid pools, canopied with foliage and flowers of rarest fragrance and brightest hue, that

“Forever gaze on their own drooping eyes,

Reflected in the crystal calm.”

It is not an exaggeration to say, that in our journey from the foot to the summit of the Andes, we passed in rapid review some of earth’s grandest and most entrancing prospects. Sometimes I was reminded of the mountains and valleys of the Alps, at others of the peaks and cañones of the Rocky Mountains. Some cataracts recalled the waterfalls seen leaping from the lofty precipices of Alaska; others, those that add such a charm to the manifold wonders of the Yosemite and the Yellowstone.