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The cinchonas under favorable circumstances become large trees: at present, however, in any of the explored and exploited regions of their growth, the shoots or suckers of the plants are all that remain. Wherever they abound they form the handsomest foliage of the forest.
It was followed by many others, until one of the cinchonas lay along the sward. Then Guapo attacked another, as near the root as was convenient for chopping. Don Pablo's part of the work now began. Armed with a sharp knife, he made circular incisions round the trunk, at the distance of several feet from each other, and a single longitudinal one intersecting all the others.
A veritable treasure which they had unearthed, worth all the others put together, was a line of those violet cinchonas which the native exporters call Cascarilla morada, and the botanists Cinchona Boliviana. The trees of this kind were grouped in threes and fours, and extended for half a mile.
After having caused to be felled, barked, measured, dried and trimmed all the cinchonas of one of those natural thickets called manchas an operation which had occupied four months he was about to abandon the spot and pursue the exploration elsewhere, when accident led him to discover, in the enormous trunk buried in creepers against which he had built his cabin, a Cinchona nitida, the forefather of all the trees he had stripped.
Of course it is still possible that quinine might be discovered in other conservatory-grown cinchonas, especially as the specimens operated upon were not fully developed.
Such was Guapo's account of these curious animals which are found only in the warmer regions of North and South America. Conversing in this way, the bark-hunters, at length, reached the cinchona-trees, and then all talk about armadillos was at an end. They went lustily to their work which was of more importance and, under Guapo's axe, several of the cinchonas soon "bit the dust."
Indeed, in that climate, the early morning hours are the pleasantest, and they had made it a rule to be always up by daybreak. They could thus afford to take a siesta in their hammocks during the hot noontide, a custom very common, and almost necessary, in tropical countries. Their road to the cinchonas led up the stream, on the same side with the house.
He also showed me how all the Indians most implicitly believe, if, by plants or seeds from the Yungas, the cinchonas are successfully propagated in other countries, all their own trees will perish. Such, I assure you, is their superstition.
Some of the palms, as the great morichi, form an exception to this rule. These are found in vast palmares, or palm-woods, extending over large tracts of country, and monopolising the soil to themselves. Don Pablo, having spent the whole of a day in examining the cinchonas, returned home quite satisfied with them, both as regarded their quantity and value.
The estimate made by Eusebio, however, of the trend or direction of the calisaya groves, induced him to forsake the bed of the Cconi, and strike south-eastwardly, so as to cross the Ollachea and the Ayapata. "But the mountains are disappearing," hazarded Mr. Marcoy. "Will not the cinchonas disappear with them?"
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