Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/26

4 nected and definite impression on the mind. Thus it is that travellers who crowd into one description all the wonders and novelties which it took them weeks and months to observe, must produce an erroneous impression on the reader, and cause him, when he visits the spot, to experience much disappointment. As one instance of what is meant, it may be mentioned that during the first week of our residence in Pará, though constantly in the forest in the neighbourhood of the city, I did not see a single humming-bird, parrot, or monkey. And yet, as I afterwards found, humming-birds, parrots, and monkeys are plentiful enough in the neighbourhood of Pará; but they require looking for, and a certain amount of acquaintance with them is necessary in order to discover their haunts, and some practice is required to see them in the thick forest, even when you hear them close by you.

But still Pará has quite enough to redeem it from the imputations we may be supposed to have cast upon it. Every day showed us something fresh to admire, some new wonder we had been taught to expect as the invariable accompaniment of a luxuriant country within a degree of the equator. Even now, while writing by the last glimmer of twilight, the vampire bat is fluttering about the room, hovering among the timbers* of the roof (for there are no ceilings), and now and then whizzing past my ears with a most spectral noise."

The city has been laid out on a most extensive plan; many of the churches and public buildings are very handsome, but decay and incongruous repairs have injured some of them, and bits of gardens and waste ground intervening between the houses, fenced in with rotten palings, and filled with rank weeds and a few banana-plants, look strange and unsightly to a European eye. The squares and public places are picturesque, either from the churches and pretty houses which surround them, or from the elegant palms of various species, which with the plantain and banana everywhere occur; but they bear more resemblance to village-greens than to parts of a great city. A few paths lead across them in different directions through a tangled vegetation of weedy cassias, shrubby convolvuli, and the pretty orange-flowered Asclepias curassavica,—plants which here take the place of the rushes, docks, and nettles of England. The principal street, the "Rua dos Mercadores" (Street of Merchants), contains almost