Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/124

 indurated clay, in some places very hard, in others soft and friable: they were clothed with wood to their summits, and had a very picturesque appearance.

The village of Montealegre is situated on a hill about a quarter of a mile from the water's edge. The ascent to it is up a shallow ravine, and the path is entirely covered with deep, loose sand, which makes the walk a very laborious one. On each side are numbers of large cactus-plants, of the branched candelabrum form, and twenty to thirty feet high: they grow in immense masses, having great woody stems as thick as a man's body, and were quite a novel feature in the landscape. The village itself forms a spacious square, in which the most conspicuous object is the skeleton of a large and handsome church of dark sandstone, which was commenced about twenty years ago, when the place was more populous and thriving, and before the revolutions which did so much injury to the province; but there is little prospect of its ever being finished. 'The present church is a low, thatched, barn-like edifice, and most of the houses are equally poor in their appearance. 'There are no neat enclosures or gardens,—nothing but weeds and rubbish on every side, with sometimes. a few rotten palings round a corral for cattle.

The trade of this place is in cacao, fish, calabashes, and cattle. 'The cacao is grown on the low lands along the banks of the rivers. It is here planted on cleared ground fully exposed to the sun, and does not seem to thrive so well as when in the shade of the partially cleared forest, which is the plan we had seen adopted in the Tocantins. When an Indian can get a few thousand cacao-trees planted, he passes an idle, quiet, contented life: all he has to do is to weed under the trees two or three times in the year, and to gather and dry the seeds. The fruit of the cacao-tree is of an oblong shape, about five inches long, and with faint longitudinal ribs. It is of a green colour, but turns yellow as it ripens, and it grows on the stem and larger branches by a short strong stalk, never on the smaller twigs; it grows so firmly, that it will never fall off, but, if left, will entirely rot away on the tree. The outer covering is hard and rather woody. Within is a mass of seeds, which are the cacao-nuts, covered with a pure white pulp, which has a pleasant sub-acid taste, and when rubbed off in water and sweetened, forms an agreeable and favourite drink. In pre-