Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
places without number in our country. In this respect, all of Amazonia is not worth the coastline that
stretches from Cabo Frio to the Cape of Munduba.
It is a vast panorama, but one that has been beaten to horizontal contours on which the shoreline is
barely lifted. The appearance of the rest is that of an immense broken-down scarp modeled from the
arenite hills of Monte Alegre and the Granitic Guyana Shield. It is as though the place lacks vertical
lines. The excess of the landscape is such that in a few hours the observer gives in to the fatigue of
the unnatural monotony and feels that his gaze is inexplicably foreshortened in that world of endless
horizons, as empty and indefinite as those of oceans.
The overwhelming impression that I had, and perhaps this corresponds to a fundamental truth, is
this: man there is still an impertinent intruder. Neither awaited nor desired, man arrived when nature
was still arranging its most vast and lavish salon, encountering there an extravagant disorder. Even
the rivers have not yet formed their channels, they seem to be fumbling for some kind of equilibrium,
descending and diverging in unstable meanders, contorting in draws and oxbows where isthmuses
continually break apart and rebuild themselves in the futile formation of islands and lakes for a mere
six months. These rivers even create new topographic forms in which the defining aspects of land
and water are confounded. The waters extend themselves into lawless bayous, without one knowing
whether this is a river basin or a sea dissected with straits.
One flood can undo the efforts of a hydrographer.
The flora vaunts the same imperfect grandeur. At the silent middays (because the nights are fant-
astically noisy) those who advance into the forest find their vistas truncated by the green-black of the
foliage, and from one minute to the next. Faced with arborescent fronds that rival the height of the
palms, and trees with straight trunks and completely impoverished of flowers, they have the anxious
sensation of retreating back to time's remote epochs, as if one were adjourning to the dark recesses of
one of those carboniferous forests revealed in the retrospective optic of geologists.
Completingthispictureinthisancientregisteristheremarkableandmonstrousfaunaruledbycor-
pulent amphibians, which further enhance this Paleozoic impression. For those who follow the long
river courses, it is not rare to find imperfect forms of animals persisting like abstract types or simple
rungs on the evolutionary ladder. The
cigana
roosting on the flexible branches of the tropical
oirana
Face to face, nature here is prodigious but incomplete. It is a stupendous construction that lacks all
internal design.What isimportant tounderstand isthis: Amazonia isperhapstheyoungestlandinthe
world, an idea consonant with the well-known inductions of Wallace and Frederic Hartt. It was born
from the last tectonic convulsions that lifted the Andes and has hardly ended its evolutionary process
with its Quaternary
varzeas
, the floodplains that are constantly forming themselves and are the dom-
inant form of that unstable topography.
Amazonia has everything but lacks everything, because it wants that fettering of haphazard phe-
nomenatoarigorousframeworkfromwhichthetruthsofartandsciencecansovividlyemerge—and
which underlies the great unconscious logic of things.
And thus this irony: those outposts most observed by the savants are the least known. Reading
them, one verifies that not one left the principal channel of the great valley, and it was there that each
achieved, dazzlingly, his corner of specialty. From von Humboldt to Goeldi, from the dawn of the
last century to our days, all the elect anxiously and assiduously deliberated there. Wallace, Mawe,
Edwards, d'Orbigny, von Martius, Bates, Agassiz, to cite only those who come first to mind, soon
reduce themselves to mere writers of ingenious monographs. The very ample scientific literature on
Search WWH ::
Custom Search