It is the ceaseless activity of all vegetable life that renders these regions fit for human habitation at all. There is no period, as with us, of bare branches overhead and decaying matter below. Decomposition is there, but for every dead leaf a virent successor is ready to absorb the gases engendered by decay. The soil may be water-logged, but evaporation, combined with the constant rain, the frequent inundations, and the endless operations of an immeasurable insect world, militate against stagnation. Dank it may be, but there is no iridescent scum upon the water, no fœtid smells to warn of lurking poisons. These natural danger-signals are unneeded, for the poisons are self-destructive. Processes of corruption are coexistent with those of purification. So extraordinary is this that I never hesitated to drink any water, nor is any evil resultant from water-drinking within my knowledge.
In this struggle it is the weak who go under, the feeble who support the strong. This holds good for vegetable and animal kingdom alike, and even with man there is no place for the helpless. Those who fail by the way, who cannot fulfil their functions in the toiling world, and have ceased to be of practical utility, must make way for the more capable. Altruism is not bred of the forest, it is a virtue born in cities. Here it would be suicide. The growing leaf must push off the fading leaf, or the latter will stunt and imperil its growth. In fact it does so, and growth is thus continual. There are no seasons to correspond with our spring nor with our fall of the leaf. From the lower Amazon’s maze of water-ways up to the foothills of the western mountains reigns perpetual summer; the same leafy veil hides the mysteries of the great expanse, eternally dying, eternally renewed.
As one passes onwards, however, nearer where the great cloud-banks gather over the mountain giants of the west, a perceptible change is to be noted, the scenery of the upper Amazon differs in certain essential particulars. It is not only that the great river thoroughfare, first spread on either side beyond the farthest horizon,[14] becomes a thin black line that grows nearer and deeper. Other features besides the river-surface contract. The majestic forest trees give way to timber not so towering. Plant life is not less prolific, but it is on a smaller scale. The bush has the air of being younger. It suggests that it has been dwarfed by perpetual inundations. Nor is the stunted growth limited to the vegetable world; the animals themselves, as if Nature insisted that all be in keeping, are on a lesser scale than their congeners of the eastern plains. No alligators of immense size lurk in the upper waters, even the fish and the turtles are smaller, as though their inches were limited in proportion to the streams.
It is not easy to convey any true notion of the scenery of the Montaña, the vast forest regions spreading eastwards, down from the lower Andean slopes. Here and there the dense forest gives place to an open savannah, an outcrop of rock with but a shallow stratum of soil. These have none of the deep vegetable mould of the lower-lying forests, and the poorer and thinner soil harbours flora of many totally distinct varieties. Often the great fan leaves of the Aeta are matted into a dense roof over the black swamp of the valleys. Sometimes these water-loving palms are seen by the river-side, interlopers in the fringe of fern and thickets of feathery bamboo; or, again, they will grow in a regular belt with little or no other vegetation.
Life is more evident on the rivers than in the forest. Fish are there in plenty—eighteen hundred species are known in the Amazonian waters. Birds, often conspicuous by their apparent absence in the bush, flock on the sand-banks and marshes of the bank. Herons and ducks abound. Egrets haunt the sandy spits that rise from the water, and in the marshy swamps numbers of these beautiful creatures may commonly be seen hunting for the tiny fish, animals, and insects on which they feed. Another enemy of the small denizens of the stream and marsh is the kingfisher. More than one variety abound on all the Amazon water-ways, but none of them can compare with the English bird in brilliancy of colour. Probably this is an instance of protective colouring, one of Nature’s methods of defence, for on these dark waters the gorgeous blue of our Alcedo ispida would be even more conspicuous than it is on our clearer streams.
One pictures this tropical garden, this paradise of the naturalist, as a blaze of gorgeous colour, a profusion of exquisite forms. But, in proportion to one’s imaginative anticipation, I have never seen such a monotonous, flowerless wilderness as this bush appears. Still there are flowers, and flowers of showy colouring, the pinks and yellows of the bignonias, the white and crimson of the chocolate-tree, the crimson of the hibiscus, the scarlet blaze of the passion-flower, the snowy beauty of the inga; all these and a thousand more are there, with the rarest blue and all the myriad shades of mauve and orange, yellow, pink, brown, violet of uncounted orchids. But orchids, though common, grow at the very top of the trees, and unless they are searched for they are not seen, except such varieties as are found on the savannahs.
The whole is on a scale so gigantic, the immense forest, the great rivers, that details are lost in the vast expanse, and the total effect is one of absolute sameness. Yet the individual variety is enormous. Though uniform in the mass, twenty-two thousand species of plants have been differentiated; thousands more remain undescribed. Only a botanist could attempt to deal with these even superficially. The uninitiated, like myself, can but look and wonder.
Many of the units of this mighty aggregate are of a surpassing loveliness; flowers unequalled for beauty, birds and insects that are living jewels, outrivalling inanimate gems. Such palms and ferns as would be rare treasures in a Kew Gardens hothouse riot unheeded in tangled profusion above the dark marshy soil, over a screen of parasites and epiphytes. Forest giants, those immense monarchs of the woods Californian advertisements depict for the edification of the populace, are not there; certainly they are never to be found in the Montaña. Nor, perhaps, in consequence of the lower growth, is there that intense gloom mentioned by writers on more easterly districts. The idea that you look up but can never see the sky is fiction to me. The foliage is certainly too dense for the sunlight to penetrate down to the damp soil and matted underbush, but patches of the sky are always more or less visible through the interlocked branches overhead. Light and air are to be had freely only on the tree-tops, and it is there that birds, insects, and flowers mass their glories out of human ken. Even the animals are climbers, and most of them spend more than half of their existence on the trees.
There are no long dark avenues beneath this leafy canopy that hides all the life and colour of the forest world from the traveller, painfully cutting his path through the intricate confusion of roots and creepers below. These parasitic creepers are of many kinds, rooting down to the dark soil, intertwining with themselves, pushing boldly to the tree-tops, strong as withes, in wild festoons, knotted, tangled, of every thickness from a giant cable to a narrow thread. I have seen parasite on parasite. They loop from tree to tree, bind the underwood into impenetrable thickets, and trail over the track-way, ready to strangle or trip the heedless passer-by. But track-way is a misnomer. The only thoroughfares, where water is as abundant as dry land, are the water-ways. The bed of a stream is the only track. No other line of communication is intelligible to the Indian. Even in the vicinity of civilised centres, hundreds of miles away from these wild fastnesses of Nature, the exuberant vegetation rapidly encroaches upon a roadway. Paths in the forest there are none. A forest track consists in following the line of least resistance. If this should be stopped by any obstacle, a fallen tree, a sudden inundation, it would never be removed or surmounted. There is no choice but to climb over or go round. The ordinary Indian wayfarer would go round; and so the road deviates increasingly; it becomes inconceivably twisted, until the actual ground covered is enormous compared with the distance from point to point.
