Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/340

 

CHAPTER XV.

no country in the world contains such an amount of vegetable matter on its surface as the valley of the Amazon. Its entire extent, with the exception of some very small portions, is covered with one dense and lofty primeval forest, the most extensive and unbroken which exists upon the earth. It is the great feature of the country,— that which at once stamps it as a unique and peculiar region. It is not here as on the coasts of southern Brazil, or on the shores of the Pacific, where a few days’ journey suffices to carry us beyond the forest district, and into the parched plains and rocky serras of the interior. Here we may travel for weeks and months inland, in any direction, and find scarcely an acre of ground unoccupied by trees. It is far up in the interior, where the great mass of this mighty forest is found ; not on the lower part of the river, near the coast, as is generally supposed.

A line from the mouth of the river Parnaíba, in long. 41° 30’ W., drawn due west towards Guayaquil, will cut the boundary of the great forest in long. 78° 30’, and, for the whole distance of about 2,600 miles, will have passed through the centre of it, dividing it into two nearly equal portions.

For the first thousand miles, or as far as long. 56° W., the width of the forest from north to south is about four hundred miles ; it then stretches out both to the north and south, so that in long. 67° W. it extends from 7° N., on the banks of the Orinoko, to 18° S., on the northern slope of the Andes of Bolivia, a distance of more than seventeen hundred miles. From a point about sixty miles south-east of Tabatinga, a circle may be drawn of 1,100 miles in diameter, the whole area of which will be virgin forest.