Read Ebook: The North-West Amazons: Notes of some months spent among cannibal tribes by Whiffen Thomas

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For days they followed the course of the Kahuinari, hugging its right bank, and in this way happened across a Colombian half-breed, from whom they sought assistance. The Colombian took them to his house near the Avio Parana but would not grant them even food until they paid for it with the rifles they carried. The idea of succouring Robuchon was far removed from his philosophy. The boys, then, having surrendered their rifles in return for the stores they so much needed, made the narrow crossing from the Avio Parana to the Papunya River, and followed that stream without deviation to its junction with the river Issa. Turning backward up the left bank of the Issa, they reached the military station at the mouth of the Igara Parana and there told their tale.

When at last a Relief Expedition was made up, it consisted of three negroes--John Brown and his comrades--and seventeen half-breeds. The party left on its search for Robuchon thirty-seven days after he had been abandoned at the mouth of the Kahuinari. It took ten days to reach the junction of the Avio Parana and the Kahuinari, and twenty-one days more to arrive at the camp on the Japura. It had taken ten weeks to bring help. The relief party found some tools, some clothes, a few tins of coffee, a little salt, and a camera. There was no trace of Robuchon, of the Indian woman, or of the dog. On a tree was nailed a paper, but the written message had been washed by the rain and bleached by the sun till it was illegible. Robuchon's last message can never be known.

The relief party divided into two companies for the journey back--one section of twelve, the other of eight men. The larger party arrived in the rubber district six weeks later. The smaller party, with the three blacks, was lost in the bush. Five months and a half afterwards five survivors attained safety. The story of their misery is a chapter in the history of Amazonian travel that may never be written.

Two and a half years afterwards I was returning from a disappointing trip to the Karahone country. There were persistent rumours that Robuchon was held a prisoner by the Indians north of the Japura. I determined to see if any evidence could be found to settle his fate. I had in my party one of the negroes who had accompanied the French explorer. We journeyed overland southward through the Muenane-Resigero country till we reached the Kahuinari, thence by canoe to the Japura River. The Japura at this point is about a rifle-shot in width--2500 to 3000 yards across. Some three miles below this point on the right bank, a little way back from the river, was a small clearing. In it were three poles marking the site of a deserted shelter. John Brown, my servant and formerly Robuchon's, said it was the last camp of Eugene Robuchon.

We made camp in the clearing. A little way inland I found an abandoned Indian house, but all indications pointed to its having been deserted many years before. Half buried in the clearing I discovered eight broken photograph plates in a packet, and the eye-piece of a sextant. Other evidence of civilised occupation there was none. At some little distance my Indians detected traces of a path, and though to me it seemed only an old animal track, they maintained it was a man-made road. Cutting along the line of this path, at the end of a hard day's work we emerged upon a second clearing and the ruins of a shelter. After careful searching we unearthed a rusty and much-hacked machete or trade knife. There our discoveries ended. The path went no farther.

We encountered no Indians in our search. On further investigation it appeared that there are none in the vicinity, and the nearest to the deserted camp on the south of the river are the Boro living on the Pama River, forty or fifty miles away.

Believing that the most probable route of escape was down the Japura, I journeyed slowly eastward almost to the mouth of the Apaporis. We then turned and came back, searching the right bank. Throughout this time we found no Indians and no signs of Indians. On the bank, about a mile and a half below Robuchon's last camp, we found the remains of a broken and battered raft. It had evidently been carried down in full river, and left stranded on the fall of the waters. Brown recognised the wreck as that of the raft which the Frenchman's party had built after the loss of the canoe. But it afforded no clue.

Much as I should have liked at this time to pursue my investigations among the Indians of the left, or north, bank of the river, I had perforce to give up further progress for the time being on account of the mutinous hostility of my boys. Nothing would persuade them that they would not be eaten up if they crossed the great river at this point.

Foiled, therefore, in my attempts to learn anything on the scene of Robuchon's disappearance, I determined to prosecute inquiries among the Boro scattered about the peninsula bounded by the Pama, the Kahuinari, and the Japura. But here also no amount of examination could elicit any information as to the explorer, the woman, or the dog. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the existence of the Great Dane--an object of awe to the Indians--had left no legend among the natives. Robuchon himself wrote of his hound: "My dog, as always, entered the house first. The great size of Othello, his flashing teeth, and close inspection of strangers, his blood-shot eyes and bristling hair invariably inspired fear and respect among the Indians." Had such an animal fallen into the hands of the Boro, I feel certain its fame would have outlived that of any chance European who might have become their prisoner, however much they desired to conceal their participation in his murder. My own Boro boys could find no record among their compatriots of the presence of Othello or his master.

After this we proceeded in a northerly direction, and, crossing the Japura, visited the Boro tribe located on the north bank of the river, between the Wama and the Ira tributaries. The chief of this tribe had married a Menimehe woman who, curiously enough, remained on terms of friendship with her parent tribe. The chief informed me that in the Long, Long Before--from reference to the size of his son at the time, I calculated about three years previously--the Menimehe had captured a white man with face hairy as a monkey's. As Robuchon was wearing a beard at the time of his disappearance this seemed to present a clue, but as the Menimehe refused to confirm the statement, and there was no mention of the woman or of the dog, it added but little to the evidence of his fate.

The testimony was further weakened by the knowledge that about that time either the Menimehe or the Yahuna destroyed a Colombian settlement near the mouth of the Apaporis River, and made prisoners of white men. Whatever the truth of the bearded white man, there was certainly no memory remaining of the Indian woman nor of Othello, the Great Dane.

On my return to the Rubber Belt I learned that Robuchon had been lost on a previous expedition for a considerable period, and had lived during that time with Indians. Although this had occurred in the regions south of the Amazon on the Peru-Brazil-Bolivian frontier, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Acre River, the general haziness of natives with respect to place and time may have accounted for the rumours of captivity among the semi-civilised Indians of the Rubber Belt, which set me on a fruitless search among the Indians of the Kahuinari-Japura.

To sum up the evidence with respect to the fate of Robuchon, it seems to me that he did not die of starvation at the mouth of the Kahuinari, because a certain amount of food-stuff was found by the first Relief Expedition at the site of the camp, but no signs of human remains. The illegible message nailed to the tree suggests that he vacated the spot and endeavoured to leave information as to his route for those who might come to his relief.

Robuchon had five courses open to him once he decided on abandoning the camp:

I presume he was located by a band of visiting Indians, captured, and either murdered or carried away in captivity to their haunts on the north bank of the Japura. I suggest the probability of the Indians coming from the north bank up the Japura, because, so far as I could learn, it was not the custom of the Pama Boro to journey to the mouth of the Kahuinari, since they could obtain all they needed from the river at points more easily and more speedily accessible to them. There were no Indians resident in the vicinity, but Indians from across the Japura made excursions at low river in search of game or of turtles and their eggs.

It is upon one of those chance bands that reluctantly I am forced to lay the responsibility for the death of Eugene Robuchon in March or April 1906.

This was little enough to add to the ascertained fact of Robuchon's end, but such as it was it brushed aside some of the mystery, and proved of interest to the members of the French Geographical Society and to the relatives of the lost explorer.

After concluding my investigations among the Boro in the vicinity of the Pama River, I again crossed the Japura River near the Boro settlement on the north of that river, and proceeded eastward into the country of the Menimehe. This country appears more sparsely populated than the Kahuinari districts, and the manners and customs of these people vary considerably from the tribes inhabiting the country to the south.

From the most easterly point I decided to proceed in a north-westerly direction with a view to striking the upper waters of the Uaupes River eventually. It was in this neighbourhood that I developed beriberi; and, owing to the swelling of my legs, which were covered with wounds and sores, I was only able to walk with difficulty, although I had no pain. My brain was numbed as well as my legs. I slept at every opportunity, did not want to eat, and seemed to be under the effect of some delusive narcotic. Yet I never failed to take all necessary precautions--it was mechanical, a mere habit. Stores were running short, owing to their bad condition, and my boys and carriers were becoming mutinous. Game was scarce, and the few native houses we encountered were for the most part deserted; what Indians we came across were surly and sullen, and appeared latently hostile.

I decided to return, overcome by the argument of Brown that if I did not do so the boys would go, so we turned back to the east and south of the original line, and proceeded overland by way of the Kuhuinari River to the Igara Parana, and thence to the Kara Parana by river. Arriving at the latter river at the end of February, and finding that the steamer for Iquitos would not start for some time, I made a short trip among the tribes of this river.

The difficulties in the way of obtaining information are such that it is only those who sink for the nonce all inherited and acquired ideas of superiority, manners, and customs who can be successful. As a consequence, the stranger will have to journey with savages, eat with savages, sleep with savages, from the moment he seeks to penetrate their land. Watchfulness night and day must be the price of any desire to understand the native in his home. The field-worker must subordinate every previous and personal conception. Native justice must be his justice. Almost necessarily native ethics must be his ethics. He is no missionary seeking to convert those he meets to ideas of his own; rather is he a learner, an inquirer, eager to understand the thoughts that inspire them, to analyse the beliefs they themselves have gathered. Then there is no common medium of language. Sometimes a native speaking a tongue with which the traveller has a passing acquaintance can make himself understood in another tribal language whereof the white man is blankly ignorant, and then some approximation of the truth sought to be conveyed is arrived at tortuously. For example, I had a Witoto Indian who understood a little Andoke, and by way of Brown the Barbadian carried to me much information of these little-known Indians. John Brown was here invaluable as he knew Witoto well and Boro to some purpose. But much of the appended vocabularies had to be gathered by the crude method of pointing to an object. Having noted the word phonetically, one had to get it confirmed by trial.

Travelling in the bush is a dreary monotony of discomfort and ever-present danger. There are weary stretches of inundated country, sweating swamp. You pass with an unexpected plunge from ankle-deep mire to unbottomed main stream. The eternal sludge, sludge of travel without a stone or honest yard of solid ground makes one long for the lesser strain of more definite dangers or of more obtrusive horrors. The horror of Amazonian travel is the horror of the unseen. It is not the presence of unfriendly natives that wears one down, it is the absence of all sign of human life. One happens upon an Indian house or settlement, but it is deserted, empty, in ruins. The natives have vanished, and it is only the silent message of a poisoned arrow or a leaf-roofed pitfall that tells of their existence somewhere in the tangled undergrowth of the neighbourhood.

On the trail one speedily learns the significance of the phrase "Indian file." Here are none of the advance guards, flank guards, and rear guards that are needed to penetrate unfriendly country in other lands. The first man hacks a way for those who follow, and the bush is left as a wall on either side that is as inscrutable to the possible enemy on the flank as to the advancing party. On account of such conditions I should say, from my experience of bush travel in these regions, that the whole party should rarely if ever exceed twenty-five in number. On this principle it will be seen that the smaller the quantity of baggage carried the greater will be the number of rifles available for the security of the expedition.

The difficulty of an efficient food supply is very great. Game is always hard to shoot on account of the density of the bush, and in many parts appears to be non-existent. Preserved goods in sealed cases, of convenient size for porterage, should be taken from Europe. My failure to carry out my original intentions was due more than anything else to the fact that my supplies were purchased in the country, and 50 per cent proved unfit for consumption. The country where supplies must be husbanded has little enough of food that is appetising to offer. Fish, if plentiful, are hard to catch for the uninitiated. One hungers for the occasional tapir or peccary, the joys of monkey-meat, and an incautious, though unpalatable, parrot, and in the days of real distress may be glad to fall back on frogs, snakes, and palm-heart. The real fear of starvation, after perhaps the ghastly dread of being lost, is the great cause of anxiety to the traveller in the Amazons.

As for shelter,--a tent is an encumbrance,--an open screen of rough palm thatch can be erected in a very short time, and is all that is necessary, although not all that is to be desired. The shelter is a poor one that does not prevent the dews and the inevitable rain from chilling one to the bone.

Clothes for the Amazons are not designed with a view to fashion or appearance. In the past, continental explorers have introduced some interesting fashions in ducks and khaki, but travelling through a country where one's life is passed in a bath of perspiration, their distinction of appearance yields to the simple comfort of the native's nudity. In search of a compromise, I have found that a thin flannel suit of pyjamas with the trouser-legs tucked into the socks, and a pair of carpet slippers laced over the instep, best meet the requirements of the region. Ordinary boots are a positive danger on account of the narrow and sometimes slippery tree-trunks over which one clambers uneasily. A small towel round the neck to wipe away the perspiration is a great comfort. For head-gear a cloth cap or "smasher" hat suffices.

A long knife or cutlass must be carried, and, personally, I invariably carried a revolver, while the gun-bearer should always be at hand with a rifle or scatter-gun. A blanket, sleeping-bag, and waterproof sheet of course must be taken, with the other comforts, medical and hygienic, common to all expeditions.

The drawings that appear in this volume are either taken from photographs or from actual trophies and articles in my possession. The photographs are a record of industry and patience. Films I found useless in this climate, and plates alone materialised. It must be remembered, also, that every time plates have to be changed it is necessary to build a small house, and double thatch and treble thatch to prevent the entrance of any light. Even then the experienced do their work at night.

The difficulty of posing and overcoming the objection of the native subject will be at once realised. Too many groups have been draped by explorers in the unaccustomed decencies of camp equipment, though it has become an essential of the country--climatic and psychological--that the women walk abroad naked and the men unembarrassed by more than a loin-cloth.

The maps cannot pretend to be more than the roughest approximate sketch-maps. When absence of a horizon and the density of the bush are realised, it will be obvious that they can be nothing more. It is hoped that they will suffice to give some idea of the general trend of the country and the location of the various language-groups.

Topography--Rivers--Floods and rainfall--Climate--Soil--Animal and vegetable life--Birds--Flowers--Forest scenery--Tracks--Bridges--Insect pests--Reptiles--Silence in the forest--Travelling in the bush--Depressing effects of the forest--Lost in the forest--Starvation.

Although the Amazons have been known to Europe for fully four hundred years, exploration has been confined almost entirely to the main river and its great tributaries. Little addition has been made to the information possessed by Sir Walter Raleigh in the three hundred years that have elapsed since his death. The rivers certainly are known and charted, yet the land beyond their banks is almost as much a land of mystery in the twentieth century as it was in the days of Queen Elizabeth. It is possible to spend a lifetime in navigating the Amazon, and to know nothing more of its 2,722,000 square miles of basin than can be peered at through the curtain of vegetation which drapes the main streams. Behind that veil lies the fascination of Amazonian travel.

We are not here concerned with the scanty records history offers of these vast regions, nor, for our immediate purposes, is it needful to inquire into the conditions and features of the Amazon watershed as a whole, except in so far as they differ from or resemble those of my field of exploration, the tracts between the middle Issa and Japura Rivers, and in their vicinity. Roughly speaking, this lies in that debatable land where the frontiers of Brazil meet those of Peru, Colombia, and--perhaps--Ecuador, a country claimed in part by the three latter, but administered by none. Here the dead level of the lower Amazonian plains imperceptibly acquires a more decided tilt, the trend of the land from the great Andean water-parting on the west and north-west being south-east to the mighty river on the south, consequently these north-western affluents of the Amazon flow in more or less parallel lines from the north-west to the south-east. It is the rivers that dominate this country, the mountains, those primal determinants, are only distant influences, snow-topped mysteries but dimly imagined on the far horizon from some upstanding outcrop, a savannah where momentarily a perspective may be gained over and beyond the illimitable forest.

On the south of the tracks here dealt with the Amazon slowly sweeps its muddy yellow waters, 500,000 cubic feet per second, towards the ocean. On the north the Uaupes River flows to join the Rio Negro. Between the Uaupes and the Amazon the Rio Caqueta, or Japura River, runs south-east, due east, and south to the main stream, and almost parallel with it the Putumayo, or Issa, gathers the waters of the Kara Parana and the Igara Parana, both on its northern, that is to say its left bank, and joins the Amazon where the main river turns sharply south 471 miles below Iquitos. West again, the Napo drains down to join the great water-way 2300 miles from the sea. Of the Napo much has been written since Orellano sailed down it from Peru, homeward bound to Spain in 1521, and it may be left outside the bounds of our inquiry. With the Issa and Japura we must deal in some detail, but of the Uaupes and Rio Negro a few words will suffice.

Rapids and cataracts bar the navigation of the Uaupes, the chief tributary if not, as some would have it, the main stream of the Negro, until it is, according to Wallace, "perhaps unsurpassed for the difficulties and dangers of its navigation."

Wallace estimated the country to be not more than 1000 feet above sea-level. I should judge it to be considerably less, by the trend of the country to the south of it. But even here I may be mistaken, as my aneroid was useless, for undiscovered reasons, and my opinion is based simply on the force of the currents of the rivers, the number and depth of the rapids, and the distances to the main river and thence to the sea. The height above sea-level cannot be great, for the tides are felt at Obydos, more than half-way from the ocean to the mouth of the Rio Negro, and there is no abrupt rise from the Obydos levels; indeed the slope of the land is so slight that in the middle reaches of the main river during wet seasons the floods spread for twenty miles, and there is no visible current.

The Uaupes, though lighter than the majority of southern tributaries of the Negro, is what is known as a black water river, while most of the rivers flowing in on the northern bank are white water rivers. This peculiarity, which may be as marked as the difference between ink and milk, is due apparently to the variety of soil in the country drained by the rivers. The chief tributaries of the Uaupes, the Itiya and the Uniya, are both white water streams. Spruce notes that fish are scarcer in black than in white water streams, and attributes it to the absence of vegetation. This may be true in part of the Negro, but it is not true, I think, of other rivers. Certainly these have some sort of fish, for I have seen them rise. One species is known to feed on a variety of laurel berry very plentiful on some of the river-banks.

The Rio Negro itself, the waters of which are dead black, is navigable for more than a third of its course to vessels of a 4 feet draught even in the dry season, and communication is possible from its upper waters with the great northern artery of the Orinoco, through the Casiquiari, the most important of the natural canals that abound throughout the Amazon regions.

The Igara Parana runs into the Issa where that river makes a horse-shoe bend, the junction being on the inner side of the horse-shoe. The breadth of the stream at its mouth is 161 metres. The water is clearer than that of the Issa, and the current slower, never more than 3 miles an hour. Some 220 miles upstream there is an important waterfall, known as La Chorrera, or the Big Falls. The Igara Parana becomes vary narrow and most tortuous as it nears them, and is only 30 metres wide at its exit from Big Falls Bay. This is a huge pool almost as wide as it is long, with a narrow exit at one end, and a succession of cascades at the other. These falls are impassable in boats, and traffic with the upper river can only be carried on by land portage. Much debris of rocks and river-borne tree-trunks obstructs the narrow passage above the falls, which are given by Robuchon as having a total length of 120 metres and a width of 18 metres. The waters descend over a series of wide rocky steps, worn flat and smooth by the ceaseless friction. Masses of stone line the right bank, and rise perpendicularly from the water. This is the only part of the country where I have seen rocks and stones in any quantity.

The upper reaches of the river are distinctly more picturesque than its lower waters. The almost level banks, with their monotonous succession of forest trees, grow gradually steeper, till the sandstone cliffs rise like a fortification above the fringe of vegetation that encroaches on the high-water mark. Presently the river winds in and out between shelving hills, tree-clad to the very margin of the water. Between the Igara Parana and the Kara Parana the country is a perfect switchback of hills and ridges, with a stream in every gully. The steepness of these valleys, with a pitch perhaps of 25? or 30?, does not permit the surface water to lodge and form swamp or morass, in contrast to the waterlogged plains of the lower rivers. Immediately on the left bank of the Igara Parana, and in the vicinity of the Big Falls, the country continues to be hilly, but to the north-east it is more open, and the bush is less obstructive, though its density varies immensely. Similar diversified scenery is to be found on the upper waters of the Japura.

The Kahuanari, a considerable tributary on the south bank of the Japura, drains the divide that intervenes between that river and the Igara Parana. It is subject to sudden floods, which wash down large quantities of forest debris. I have seen it rise twenty feet in a day, and afterwards subside as quickly.

The floods are not to be wondered at when the tremendous rainfall of these regions is considered. The question is never if it will rain, but when and for how long it will be fine. Rain is certain in a land which has but a few days clear of it in every twelve months. Five days, a fortnight, that, all told, is the extent of dry weather to be looked for in this country. The dry season is but a name. It is dry only in comparison with the wetter months from March to August. The upper valley of the Amazon has a three-day winter at our midsummer--June 24, 25, 26--so it is said, and certainly I noted a very decided drop in the temperature of these days in 1908. Snow is unknown, and hail not common. Despite the daily rain the turquoise blue of the sky is seldom long hidden, though from March to June leaden skies portend rain, and seldom fail to make good their portent. During the dry season the rain if it be frequent is never continuous. Almost every day, between three and four in the afternoon and two and five in the morning, heavy clouds will roll up, a preliminary breeze rustle through the leaves, shake the trees, and increase till suddenly there comes a deluge of big drops. Such storms last but half an hour, yet the rain will soak through everything, and the wet bushes drench the passer-by for hours afterwards. Nothing is ever really dry, things are in a constant state of saturation, and it is possible at all times to wring moisture out of any of one's belongings. So great and incessant is the evaporation that at night the dew is as heavy as rain, while the marshy low-lying lands and the rivers are shrouded by mist both morning and evening. With such humid air lichens and Hepaticae flourish on all the tree-trunks, though I have never seen them, as described by Spruce, covering the very leaves of the trees.

Electric disturbances are numerous, and a sharp and sudden thunder-shower often occurs about three in the afternoon, or in the night, though rain at night without thunder is common. These storms come up in the dry season especially, and the worst storms may be expected in February, at the breaking of the dry weather. Sometimes the electric storm will consist of an uninterrupted display of lightning with little or no thunder, and the sizzle of light makes the landscape appear as in a cinematograph picture. This continued on one occasion all through the night, and from the amount of interest the Indians evinced I judged it to be an unusual occurrence.

It is always possible to tell when rain will come because of the preliminary breeze, hardly felt below the tree-tops, followed by a dead calm that precedes the downpour. The prevailing wind for nine months of the year will be from the east or south-east, from June to August it will be north and north-west. In January the prevailing wind is from the Atlantic, north-east, veering to south-west; in July from the Pacific, south-west, round to north-east. Fitful and uncertain local whirlwinds will, without warning, swoop down on the clearings round the houses, play havoc in forest and plantation, uproot trees, and destroy habitations.

In spite of the continual rain, of the universal humidity; the climate is not unhealthy. The heat, though a damp heat, is never excessive, the enormously great evaporation brings in a succession of fresh breezes to moderate the temperature; and so, despite apparently trying conditions, the climate is not injurious. The low watersheds between the large rivers appear to be quite healthy, and if there be fever its prevalence varies locally to an extraordinary degree. It has been observed that where the soil is first turned up fever not infrequently follows, a fact noted in other parts of the world, and by no means a condition peculiar to the Amazons.

The soil of the vast Amazonian basin is mainly the alluvial deposit of decomposed vegetable life for centuries past. This sea of Pampean mud stretches from the ocean marshes up to the very heels of the mountains that stand outpost to hold the southern continent from the Pacific. Black and rich it lies in layer after layer twenty, thirty, forty feet beneath the great pall of vegetation that flourishes above during its little day, to die and drop for successive generations of arboreal life to thrive upon in their turn. And in all this vastness is never a stone. Vegetable mould and water-borne mud, but stone does not exist for thousands upon thousands of miles. Only in the upper waters of the Amazonian system are rock formations reached; in the particular district under consideration nothing is to be found harder than a soft, friable sandstone. On parts of the Issa, as on the Napo, the deep banks show strata of shingle, with perhaps red or white clay, that alternate with the dark humus and decaying wood.

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 foetid 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, 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 Monta?a, 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.

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.

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