e
forest in its cruel embrace (thus depriving it of its strength) and then
falls in rich festoons from its boughs, swaying and rustling with every
breath of air.

By making a cut at the extremity of one of the sprays that hang down
towards the ground, a fresh, drinkable water flows out.

It is superfluous, perhaps, to add that this grand necessity for the
traveller on foot may be obtained from other sources: the streams that
are to be found trickling along here and there, and the huge leaves that
upon drying up secrete a certain quantity of rain water within them.

So the jungle gives to eat and to drink, with wonderful abundance and
variety, but woe to him who does not know her well, for she also
proffers Death in a thousand unsuspected and seductive forms!

* * * * *

How many times in the solemn, languid hour of noontide, when bird and
beast were drowsing from the heat, I have stood in the shade and
interrogated the forest upon its first violators and their descendants!
But my demands remained unanswered; in its superb grandeur it does not
interest itself in the tragic vicissitudes of animal or vegetable lives,
it makes no records, on the contrary, it quickly cancels all traces of
past events.

I have vainly asked: from whence came those who have found shelter and
solitude in the obscure depths of its wooded hills? How many centuries
have they dwelt in those lone, wild parts? I have asked if that shy and
dispersed tribe was not the remains of a once great and strong people
eclipsed by a younger, stronger, and more savage race? Sometimes
watching, with admiring eyes, the strange architectural forms taken by
the massive trunks and graceful vines, fantastic but always majestic, I
have asked the forest if it had not arisen upon the ruins of some long
ago and lost civilization and if those same forms were not an
inexplicable evocation of the gigantic creations of vanished genii of
which I seemed in imagination to catch faint glimpses?

But the forest remained mute and kept its impenetrable secret.

Only here and there, groups of trees, lower than the surrounding ones,
and between them spaces of ground, which had evidently once been
clearings and were not yet totally re-covered by jungle growth, gave
proof of Sakai nomadism even in other ages. No other sign of the past,
and my query, perhaps absurd, repeats itself. Am I before the savage
infancy of a people, or the spent senility of