Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v1.djvu/367

He had passed us by night below Serpa, on his way to Barra, and so had arrived about three weeks before me. Besides ourselves, there were half-a-dozen other foreigners here congregated,—Englishmen, Germans, and Americans; one of them a Natural History collector, the rest traders on the rivers. In the pleasant society of these, and of the family of Senhor Henriques, we passed a delightful time; the miseries of our long river voyages were soon forgotten, and in two or three weeks we began to talk of further explorations. Meantime we had almost daily rambles in the neighbouring forest. The country around Barra is undulating and furrowed by ravines, through which flow rivulets of clear cold water, along whose banks many picturesque nooks occur. The whole surface of the land down to the water's edge is covered by the uniform dark-green rolling forest, the caá-apoam (convex woods) of the Indians, characteristic of the Rio Negro. This clothes also the extensive areas of low land, which are flooded by the river in the rainy season. The olive-brown tinge of the water seems to be derived from the saturation in it of the dark green foliage during these annual inundations. The great contrast in form and colour between the forests of the Rio Negro and those of the Amazons arises from the predominance in each of different families of plants. On the main river, palms of twenty or thirty different species form a great proportion of the mass of trees; whilst on the Rio Negro they play a very subordinate part. The characteristic kind in the latter region is the Jará (Leopoldinia pulchra), a species not found on the margins of the Amazons, which has a scanty