So vast is the Amazon that, like the Andes which form a barrier to separate two worlds, different species of animals inhabit its opposite banks. It swarms with fish that will fight for a right to live, and some of them, the paichi, for instance, reach the length of ten feet and must be caught by harpooning. The water is full of swimming animals. There are river-cows like sea-lions, and oceanic fauna such as frigate birds and flying-fish. In the mud along the banks are tracks of crocodiles and tortoises.
The Amazon has gained mastery over the land and has turned it into a sposhy ocean, interspersed with flats of jungle flowers. A watery labyrinth, “an aquatic not a terrestrial basin,” it is the Mediterranean of South America. The greatest river in the world twists and turns about, makes short cuts across its own bends and leaves behind a delicious lagoon here, or a little, land-locked inlet there. The Victoria Regia spreads its great, leathery leaves, and scarlet ibises tilt about upon them.
This land beyond the Andes is known as the “rain-shadow.” The already overflowing rivers are constantly swelling, since it rains so violently that a stream of the Amazon valley can rise fifteen feet in a single night. A passing and re-passing is continually going on, for, as the water flows back toward the ocean, the winds above it are returning from the Atlantic, bringing rain to moisten the jungle and to be stopped only by the wall of the Andes.
Rain discloses the resources of the jungle. Plants push, burst upward in astonishing growth. Flowers paint themselves with ineffable new colors distilled from the rain, and those whose day has come and gone lie in heaps of yellow, pink, and white petals on the ground, fallen from beyond the tree-tops.
A single, heavy tapir, anta, the somber-colored wood-cow, roused by the rain and encouraged by the added gloom, wanders forth to tear off new sprouts within its reach. Peccaries rustle by in little droves—wild pigs which, it is said, will bite around a tree if their object of attack has climbed beyond reach. The minute, silky marmoset, filled with perennial terror and shivering at the rain, has crept into shelter, and just daring to show its wrinkled little face, howls dismally.
It is after a rain, too, when the wondrous notes of the organista, the sweet flute-bird, drip through the trees, mellow, melancholy, yet with a musical accuracy of pitch as clear-cut as the circle of a drop of water fallen on a slab of alabaster. These notes share the mystery of the vast silence itself. Even savages rest on their paddles to listen. Would you capture the magician and carry the jungle-silence home? You can take the little gray bird—but it always dies in captivity.
CHAPTER III
JUNGLE GLOOM AND JUNGLE SHEEN
I
Since the earth was first moistened by rain, and plants first grew, no limit has been set to the rights of vegetation in the jungle. Its sway is uncontested. It has known no master. Its insatiable desire to reach up and out and down has been uncurbed and undirected. And heaven seems to wish it well. Intensest heat, light, and moisture are showered upon it. Under such conditions, life would spring spontaneously into being, were there not myriads of progenitors to be responsible for whatever form it chose to take.
All the creative force of nature is behind the infinitely varying forms, and the frightful luxuriance of reproduction. Vegetation has the extravagance of first geologic ages, bursting with life, rejoicing in weird, vegetable arabesques and green out-thrusts of leaves.