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Its summit is bare and stony, but, wherever its less steep declivities are covered with mould vast forests appear suspended on its flanks. At the foot of Duida is the mission of Esmeralda, a little hamlet with eighty inhabitants, surrounded by a lovely plain, intersected by rills of black but limpid water. This plain is adorned with clumps of the mauritia palm, the sago-tree of America.
Between these two tributary streams of the Orinoco, amid the morichales, or clumps of mauritia palm-trees, which surround Esmeralda, the Rio Sodomoni flows, celebrated for the excellence of the pine-apples that grow upon its banks.
Our road was persistently upwards, and as we ascended the woods became thinner and lost their tropical luxuriance. The huge trees of the alluvial Amazonian plain gave place to the Phoenix and coco palms, growing in scattered clumps, with thick brushwood between. In the damper hollows the Mauritia palms threw out their graceful drooping fronds.
Now appears the miriti, or mauritia one of the most beautiful of its tribe, with pendent clusters of glossy fruit, and enormous spreading fan-like leaves cut into ribbons; the jupati, with plume-like leaves forty feet and upwards in length, graceful in the extreme, starting almost from the ground.
Though scattered throughout the country, the proper territory of their nation is on the low swampy country which borders the banks of the Orinoco; but their lands being completely inundated by the overflowing of the rivers for some months in each year, they construct their dwellings above the water, among the mauritia palms, whose crowns of fan-like leaves wave above their heads and shield them from the rays of the burning sun.
There are little pools round the farm, which the animals find, guided by their instinct, by the view of some scattered tufts of mauritia, and by the sensation of humid coolness, caused by little currents of air amid an atmosphere which to us appears calm and tranquil.
In an excellent soil, around clumps of mauritia, there is every year from fifty feet square a produce of thirteen or fourteen tortas. A torta weighs three quarters of a pound, and three tortas cost generally in the province of Caracas one silver rial, or one-eighth of a piastre.
These majestic trees were eight or ten years old, and had not yet borne flowers. Raleigh, who knew none of the productions of the Upper Orinoco, does not speak of the juvia; but it appears that he first brought to Europe the fruit of the mauritia palm, of which we have so often spoken.
These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings saved on the summit of a mountain, and casting behind them the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief, are well worthy of attention.
Then their canoes, or woibakas, as they are called, enable them to procure food from the water, and give them the means of moving from place to place. No tree is more useful to the natives than the mauritia. Before unfolding its leaves its blossoms contain a sago-like meal, which is dried in thin, bread-like slices. The sap is converted into palm-wine.
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