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Updated: June 8, 2025


They hooted and chattered, screamed and sang. Orange and green and red, the cockatoos flashed through the air, or perched upon great boughs beside parasitic blooms as gaudy as themselves. Giant palms rustled; monkeys slid down the swinging lianas, to climb again with haste, chattering wildly at human intrusion; butterflies fluttered aside; the spotted snake glided to its deeper haunts.

There was here a very broad beach of untrodden white sand, which extended quite into the forest, where it formed rounded hills and hollows like sand dunes, covered with a peculiar vegetation: harsh, reedy grasses, and low trees matted together with lianas, and varied with dwarf spiny palms of the genus Bactris.

To east and south and west he had explored, ever seeking to enlarge the knowledge and strengthen the security of his tribe. But to northward of the pointed hills lay league on league of profound jungle grotesque and enormous growths knitted together impenetrably by a tangle of gigantic, flame-flowered lianas.

On either hand rise high mountains, whose blue tops at times almost frowned over our heads, and the luxuriant tropical vegetation, with creeping lianas, threatened to bar our progress. Huge alligators sunned themselves on the banks, and birds of brilliant plumage flew from branch to branch.

Our fires lighted up, to the height of fifty or sixty feet, the palm-trees, the lianas loaded with flowers, and the columns of white smoke, which ascended in a straight line toward the sky. The whole exhibited a magnificent spectacle; but to have enjoyed it fully, we should have breathed an air clear of insects.

Plantain leaves hit them insolently in the face, lianas hung across their path like green ropes placed to bar them out, weeds tangled the foot. Berselius, like an animal that finds itself trapped, plunged madly forward. Adams following closely behind heard him catching back his breath with a sob. They plunged on for a few yards, and then Berselius stood still.

But a word breaks the spell, intelligence gleams in his face, and what, so far, has seemed a strange being, belonging rather to the lower animals than to human-kind, shows himself a man, and becomes equal to ourselves. Thus the endless, inhospitable jungle, without open spaces or streets, without prairies and sun, that dense tangle of lianas and tree-trunks, shelters men like ourselves.

It rained violently, but the pothoses, arums, and lianas, furnished so thick a natural trellis, that we were sheltered as under a vault of foliage. The Indians whose hammocks were placed on the edge of the river, interwove the heliconias and other musaceae, so as to form a kind of roof over them.

Around and across all this wind the parasites, lianas, rotang, some stretched like ropes from one trunk to another, some rising in elegant curves from the ground, some attached to other trunks and sucking out their life with a thousand roots, others interlaced in the air in distorted curves.

You went to ask pardon for her of her wicked master, and we, in return for this, will carry you home upon our shoulders. He then made a sign, and four of the strongest negroes immediately formed a sort of litter with the branches of trees and lianas, in which, having seated Paul and Virginia, they placed it upon their shoulders.

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