There are other large, fruit-eating birds; birds with curiously shaped tail feathers; birds with crests and ornamental plumage. As variegated as their forms are their curious cries. The black ox-bird bellows like a bull, the black and red tunqui grunts like a pig, and wood-pigeons cry like children. Occasionally “jets of brilliant melody” sparkle among the trees, but more often the notes have a mysterious, aerial quality “like the tinkling of a far-off bell suspended in the air.”
Here hangs the wonderful nest, four feet long, of the pouched starling, bound together with spiders’ webs as strong as silk. Such is jungle lavishness that plants and animals are given endowments useless to them in their struggle for existence. The bird which builds such a palatial nest has no advantage over any other. Its wondrous, unplantlike power gives to the sensitive plant no superiority. Struck with paralysis, it can recoil at a touch, but that forms no link with its fellow plants. Such a feat is not an attribute nor in any way a necessity of vegetable life. It can hardly compensate the sensitive plant for its lack of perfume and bright flower, the right of every growing thing.
Chatter of monkeys mingles with roar of falling water, hairy manikins, shrieking and gamboling, “very gentle and delightful apes,” Father Acosta called them. Tiny, blear-eyed monkeys scream in disapproval of all they can see, hear, or smell. Scarlet-faced monkeys, owl-faced monkeys, swing from branch to branch with crazy gestures, “taking one turn of the tail at least around anything in passing, just provisionally.”
Thick masses of quinar trees are draped in luxuriant parasites, and agave bushes are filled with red flowers. The wonderful maguey grows
IN THE VALLEY OF THE PERENÉ.
here, yielding water, oil, and vinegar, honey, thread, needles, and soap. Its juice boiled in rain-water takes away weariness.
Clear water drips over blocks of granite, covering the stone with moss in falling. The terrible jaguar lies curled up asleep in some far-off notch, gently purring. Ferns and palms, forerunners of the great empire of vegetation below, cluster along the brooks swelled with snow. “Tall and whispering crowds of tree ferns” droop their filmy fronds from lofty, slender stems. Ferns of every conceivable size and texture smother rocks and decaying trees. Some are as small as mosses, others appear monstrous, like those of a moonlight night. Humming-birds flit above the pomegranates or lose themselves in a banana blossom. “The rose-colored plumage of the silky cuckoo peeps out like a flower from the thick foliage.”
It is an earthly paradise, where bloodsucking bats emerge at night and lightning rages uncontrolled, destroying trees and cracking open precipices. Pumas live in these clefts hewn through the mountains, and they spring on to the shoulders of a victim, drawing back the head until the neck snaps. Pumayacu is the stream of the puma, with its tumultuous torrent whose very stones are treacherous.