Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/41

1848.] perfectly straight; the huge creepers, which climb about them, sometimes stretching obliquely from their summits like the stays of a mast, sometimes winding around their trunks like immense serpents waiting for their prey. Here, two or three together, twisting spirally round each other, form a complete living cable, as if to bind securely these monarchs of the forest; there, they form tangled festoons, and, covered themselves with smaller creepers and parasitic plants, hide the parent stem from sight.

Among the trees the various kinds that have buttresses projecting around their base are the most striking and peculiar. Some of these buttresses are much longer than they are high, springing from a distance of eight or ten feet from the base, and reaching only four or five feet high on the trunk, while others rise to the height of twenty or thirty feet, and can even be distinguished as ribs on the stem to forty or fifty. They are complete wooden walls, from six inches to a foot thick, sometimes branching into two or three, and extending straight out to such a distance as to afford room for a comfortable hut in the angle between them. Large square pieces are often cut out of them to make paddles, and for other uses, the wood being generally very light and soft.

Other trees, again, appear as if they were formed by a number of slender stems growing together. They are deeply furrowed and ribbed for their whole height, and in places these furrows reach quite through them, like windows in a narrow tower, yet they run up as high as the loftiest trees of the forest, with a straight stem of uniform diameter. Another most curious form is presented by those which have many of their roots high above the surface of the ground, appearing to stand on many legs, and often forming archways large enough for a man to walk beneath.

The stems of all these trees, and the climbers that wind or wave around them, support a multitude of dependants. Tillandsias and other Bromeliaceæ, resembling wild pineapples, large climbing Arums, with their dark green arrowhead-shaped leaves, peppers in great variety, and large-leaved ferns, shoot out at intervals all up the stem, to the very topmost branches. Between these, creeping ferns and delicate little species like our Hymenophyllum abound, and in moist dark places the leaves of these are again covered with minute creeping mosses