FRANZ KELLER.
[The author of the following selection, with his father, was sent in 1867, by the Minister of Public Works at Rio Janeiro, to explore the Madeira, and to project a railroad along its banks where the rapids rendered navigation impossible. His observations during this journey are given in “The Amazon and Madeira Rivers,” from which we extract his remarks concerning the Brazilian forests.]
Everywhere the decomposing organisms serve as bases for new formations. No particle, however small, is ever lost in the great household of Nature; but nowhere is her restless activity so conspicuous as in the tropics, where the succession of vegetable decay and life is so much more rapid than it is in colder climes; and which will strike the reflecting student more especially in the wide, forest-clad valleys of tropical America, and on the Amazon and its affluents.
On the heights of the Cordillera the process is already at work. The waste of the mountain-slopes, broken off by rills and torrents, and carried by them into the main river, slowly drifts down-stream in the form of gravel-banks, until, scattered and rent asunder in a thousand ways, it finally takes permanent form as light-green islands, which are soon covered and protected with a dense coat of vegetation.
As every zone of geologic formation in the extensive valley adds its tribute, these banks are a kind of mineralogical collection, which shows samples of all the rocks on the river-banks, with the exception, perhaps, of light pumice-stone, the produce of the volcanoes of the Andes, which drifts down-stream in large pieces, and is highly prized by the Tapuia population (on the lower course) for sharpening and cleaning their weapons and tools. Even when not picked up by hunter or fisher, it is not lost. It will be arrested by some snag or projection of the shore, it will so get embedded in the newly-forming sediment, and thousands of years hence its silicic acid will afford the necessary material for the hard glassy bark of a bambusacea, or the sharp edge of a reed. When the currents are not strong enough to move the larger banks, they at least carry sand and earth with them, and deposit them as shoals or new alluvion at less exposed spots....
The undermined concave shores are sometimes a serious danger to the passing barque, as even the slight ripple of a canoe is sufficient to bring down the loosely overhanging earth, often covered with gigantic trunks. These concave sides, with their fallen trees and their clusters of sinking javary-palms, supported sometimes by only a tangled net-work of tough lianas, give to the scenery that peculiar character of primeval wildness which is so charming to foreigners.
When one has climbed up the steep shore, often forming huge terrace-like elevations, and has safely passed through a labyrinth of interwoven roots and creepers into the interior of the forest, which is getting freer from underwood at some distance from the river, he is oppressed with the sensation of awe and wonder felt by man on entering one of the venerable edifices of antiquity.
A mysterious twilight encompasses us, which serves to intensify the radiance of the occasional sunbeam as it falls on a glossy palm-leaf, or on a large bunch of purple orchid-flowers. Splendid trunks, some of them from twenty to thirty feet in diameter, rise like so many pillars supporting the dense green vault of foliage; and every variety of tall, graceful palms, spare and bushy, and bearing heavy berries of bright yellow or red, struggle to catch a glimpse of the light, from which they are shut out by the neighboring giants, of which the figueira (or wild fig-tree) is one of the most striking, in the dimensions of its crown and stem, and in the strange shape of its roots, which project like huge outworks. These seem to grow in all directions, forming props, stays, and cross-bars wherever they are wanted, just as if the whole were a soft plastic mass, the sole purpose of which was to supply, with a minimum of material, as much stability as possible to the trunk, whose wood is of extreme softness and whose roots are not deep. The pachiuba-palm (Iriartea exorhiza) and some species of Cecropiæ exhibit other extravagances in their roots. They appear as if standing on stilts, the real trunks only beginning at eight or ten feet above ground.