FERNS, TREES, AND CREEPERS.
"The flowers are on the top. On many of the trees not a single blossom is to be found at a height less than one hundred feet. The glory of the forest can be seen only by sailing in a balloon over the undulating flowery surface above. There, too, in that green cloud, are the insects and birds and monkeys. You are in 'the empty nave of the cathedral, and the service is being celebrated aloft in the blazing roof.' In place of mosses and lichens, the trunks and boughs are bearded with orchids, ferns, tillandsias, and cactuses, frequently forming hanging gardens of great beauty. The branches are so thoroughly interwoven, and so densely veiled with twiners and epiphytes, that one sees little more than a green wall. He might roam a hundred years in the Amazon thicket, and at the end find it impossible to classify the myriad crowded, competing shapes of vegetation. The exuberance of nature, displayed in these million square miles of tangled, impenetrable forest, offers a bar to civilization nearly as great as its sterility in the African deserts."
[CHAPTER XIX.]
FROM THE MADEIRA TO THE RIO NEGRO.—OTHER TRIBUTARIES OF THE AMAZON.—NOTES ON THE GREAT RIVER.—MANAOS.—DOWN THE AMAZON TO PARA.
Entering the Amazon from the Madeira, the steamer turned her prow to the westward and ascended the great river for sixty miles, to the mouth of the Rio Negro. The yellow waters of the Amazon and Madeira had reminded Frank and Fred of the Mississippi; there was some dispute between them as to which of the two streams was dirtier in color, but they finally agreed that the Madeira was the worse of the two.
"We will compare the Madeira to the Missouri," said Fred, "and the united stream to the Mississippi as we see it below the mouth of the Ohio." Frank agreed to this distinction, and there the discussion ended.
The Amazon brings down a vast amount of alluvial matter which it receives from its tributaries, in addition to what it breaks away from the banks on its own account below the mouth of the Madeira. The sediment is carried far into the sea, and there is no proper delta at its mouth, as with the other great rivers of the world.
Frank made some notes concerning the great river, which we will now introduce.
"The Amazon," said he, "is undoubtedly the largest river on the globe, but it is not the longest. Lieutenant Herndon estimates its length, considering the Huallaga as the head-stream, at three thousand nine hundred and forty-four miles; another authority makes it three thousand miles; another two thousand seven hundred and fifty, and other travellers give various figures up to three thousand six hundred miles. The differences arise from disputes as to which of the tributaries should be called the head-stream.