[29] Unter den Tropen, Erster Band, p. 521, Jena, 1871. [↑]
[30] El Delta del Orinoco tomado de la esploracion al alto bajo Orinoco y central en 1850, por Andres E. Level, Vol. III, de la Memoria de la Dirección General de Estradistica al Presidente de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela, en 1873. [↑]
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT RIVER
“What a wide river!” was the exclamation of a fellow-passenger as our steamer passed out of the Macareo and turned the apex of the delta. It was, indeed, very wide, and the bank of the Orinoco on our port-quarter was almost invisible. Here, even during the dry season, this mighty water course is no less than four leagues in width. We now, for the first time, fully realized that we were sailing on the broad waters of one of the world’s master rivers. After the Parana and the Amazon, it is the largest waterway in South America, and, for the volume of water it carries into the ocean, it ranks with the Mississippi, the Congo, Yang-tse-Kiang, and the Brahmaputra. Well have the natives of the lands through which it flows named it the Great River—for it is great in every way—great in the immense basin it drains; great in the tribute it carries to the ocean, and great in the number and magnitude of the rivers it counts among its affluents from the distant Cordilleras.
As along the Macareo, so here along the Orinoco, one never tires of gazing at the magnificent forest trees and the dense shrubbery with which the banks are fringed. At one time it is the wide-branched ceiba, covered with bright-blooming epiphytes; at another a clump of graceful moriche palms, whose tremulous plumes are given an added beauty by the presence of a bevy of multicolored parrots and macaws. The foliage of tree and shrub is here ever fresh and luxuriant and retains always that delicate hue so characteristic of the leafage of our northern woodlands in the early days of spring.
Most of the trees, large and small, are literally weighed down with parasites and epiphytes. Among the latter growths are orchids of countless variety and rarest beauty, such as are seldom seen in our northern floral conservatories. And the way in which the trees are held together by those strange forms of vegetable life—so abundant in the tropics—the bejucos or bush ropes! Sometimes they are as thick as a man’s arm, sometimes they are like a ship’s cable, sometimes they may be mistaken for telegraph wires—so long and fine are they. They extend from the ground to the tops of the highest trees, or drop from the summits of the loftiest monarchs of the forest to the earth beneath, sometimes singly, sometimes by scores. Then again they cross one another from tree to tree and form a trelliswork that at times is next to impassable. And these bejucos, or lianas, as they are also called, are, like the trees, burdened with air-plants of various species, at one time large masses of leaves, at another long spikes of the richest blossoms.
At almost every turn the vision is delighted by lovely arboreal groups and charming natural bowers, all graced with the most gorgeous combinations of emerald foliage and ruby bloom—interspersed with delicate tufts of lilac, pink and canary—and illumined by gleams of flitting sunshine which bring out a glorious play of color effects with which the eye is never tired. “A dryad’s home,” we heard an enthusiastic señorita exclaim, as we passed one of these flower-decked bowers, on which glittered the checkered sunlight. And so well it might be, it was so rare a gem of sylvan loveliness.
While passing up this majestic river and admiring the ever-varying panorama of rarest floral beauty, we recalled a couple of paragraphs in Darwin’s Journal of Researches, in which he refers to the futility of attempting to describe, for one who has never visited the tropics, the wonders of the scenery there and above all the marvels of the vegetable world. He expresses himself as follows: