It was in this jangada, safer than any other vessel of the country, larger than a hundred egariteas, or vigilingas, coupled together, that Joam Garral proposed to embark with his family, his servants, and his merchandise.
“Excellent idea!” had cried Minha, clapping her hands, when she learned her father’s scheme.
“Yes,” said Yaquita, “and in that way we shall reach Belem without danger or fatigue.”
“And during the stoppages we can have some hunting in the forests which line the banks,” added Benito.
“Won’t it take rather long?” observed Manoel; “could we not hit upon some quicker way of descending the Amazon?”
It would take some time, obviously, but the interested observation of the young doctor received no attention from anyone.
Joam Garral then called in an Indian who was the principal manager of the fazenda.
“In a month,” he said to him, “the jangada must be built and ready to launch.”
“We’ll set to work this very day, sir.”
It was a heavy task. There were about a hundred Indians and blacks, and during the first fortnight in May they did wonders. Some people unaccustomed to these great tree massacres would perhaps have groaned to see giants many hundred years old fall in a few hours beneath the axes of the woodmen; but there was such a quantity on the banks of the river, up stream and down stream, even to the most distant points of the horizon, that the felling of this half-mile of forest would scarcely leave an appreciable void.
The superintendent of the men, after receiving the instructions of Joam Garral, had first cleared the ground of the creepers, brushwood, weeds, and arborescent plants which obstructed it. Before taking to the saw and the ax they had armed themselves with a felling-sword, that indispensable tool of everyone who desires to penetrate the Amazonian forests, a large blade slightly curved, wide and flat, and two or three feet long, and strongly handled, which the natives wield with consummate address. In a few hours, with the help of the felling-sword, they had cleared the ground, cut down the underwood, and opened large gaps into the densest portions of the wood.
In this way the work progressed. The ground was cleared in front of the woodmen. The old trunks were divested of their clothing of creepers, cacti, ferns, mosses, and bromelias. They were stripped naked to the bark, until such time as the bark itself was stripped from off them.
Then the whole of the workers, before whom fled an innumerable crowd of monkeys who were hardly their superiors in agility, slung themselves into the upper branches, sawing off the heavier boughs and cutting down the topmost limbs, which had to be cleared away on the spot. Very soon there remained only a doomed forest, with long bare stems, bereft of their crowns, through which the sun luxuriantly rayed on to the humid soil which perhaps its shots had never before caressed.
There was not a single tree which could not be used for some work of skill, either in carpentry or cabinetwork. There, shooting up like columns of ivory ringed with brown, were wax-palms one hundred and twenty feet high, and four feet thick at their base; white chestnuts, which yield the three-cornered nuts; murichis, unexcelled for building purposes; barrigudos, measuring a couple of yards at the swelling, which is found at a few feet above the earth, trees with shining russet bark dotted with gray tubercles, each pointed stem of which supports a horizontal parasol; and bombax of superb stature, with its straight and smooth white stem. Among these magnificent specimens of the Amazonian flora there fell many quatibos whose rosy canopies towered above the neighboring trees, whose fruits are like little cups with rows of chestnuts ranged within, and whose wood of clear violet is specially in demand for shipbuilding. And besides there was the ironwood; and more particularly the ibiriratea, nearly black in its skin, and so close grained that of it the Indians make their battle-axes; jacarandas, more precious than mahogany; cæsalpinas, only now found in the depths of the old forests which have escaped the woodman’s ax; sapucaias, one hundred and fifty feet high, buttressed by natural arches, which, starting from three yards from their base, rejoin the tree some thirty feet up the stem, twining themselves round the trunk like the filatures of a twisted column, whose head expands in a bouquet of vegetable fireworks made up of the yellow, purple, and snowy white of the parasitic plants.
Three weeks after the work was begun not one was standing of all the trees which had covered the angle of the Amazon and the Nanay. The clearance was complete. Joam Garral had not even had to bestir himself in the demolition of a forest which it would take twenty or thirty years to replace. Not a stick of young or old wood was left to mark the boundary of a future clearing, not even an angle to mark the limit of the denudation. It was indeed a clean sweep; the trees were cut to the level of the earth, to wait the day when their roots would be got out, over which the coming spring would still spread its verdant cloak.
This square space, washed on its sides by the waters of the river and its tributary, was destined to be cleared, plowed, planted, and sown, and the following year fields of manioc, coffee-shrubs, sugar-canes, arrowroot, maize, and peanuts would occupy the ground so recently covered by the trees.
The last week of the month had not arrived when the trunks, classified according to their varieties and
