Frank and Fred wished to make some purchases, and sallied out for that purpose. They returned with the declaration that Manaos was like home in one respect, according to the old song, as it was "The dearest spot on earth." Hardly anything they saw was the product of the country; everything was imported, and the importers held their goods at high prices. An American whom they met said there was little agriculture in the surrounding region; beef came up the Madeira; sheep, and other meat-supplying animals were imported, and so were hams and all other preserved edibles; while manufactured articles were from New York, Liverpool, or other Atlantic ports.
GIANT FIG-TREE.
Fred asked what were the industries of Manaos, and was told there were none at all.
"Brazilians and Indians will not work," said his informant. "The immigrants from Europe live by trading. Since their emancipation, the negroes prefer fishing to any other mode of existence, and the Americans that came here as colonists have mostly gone back disappointed. There is really no laboring class here, and until there is we can have no agriculture. The land would produce abundantly, but there is nobody to cultivate it. I doubt if there are five hundred acres of tilled land on the Amazon, between this point and the foot of the Andes."
The exports of Manaos are rubber, coffee, sarsaparilla, Brazil nuts, pissaba, chinchona, fish, and turtles. The imports are cotton cloth, beads, and other "Indian goods" for the natives, and various articles of necessity or luxury for the European inhabitants. The surrounding country is diversified with valleys, hills, and ravines, and not far from the place is a pretty cascade ten feet high and fifty feet wide, falling over a precipice of red sandstone. The sheet of water resembles Minnehaha in its general outline, but its peculiarity is in its deep orange color, obtained from the soil through which the streams flows.
The youths wished to ascend the Rio Negro, but circumstances did not permit the excursion. The Negro rises in Colombia, and is twelve hundred miles in length; at one place it is ten or twelve miles in width, and at Manaos not less than two miles. During the flood of the Amazon the dark waters of the Negro are dammed and held back, for hundreds of miles, by the rise of the giant stream. The natural canal, the Cassiquari, which connects the Negro with the Orinoco, is half a mile wide, and drains off the superfluous waters which go to swell the lower part of the last-named river.
