‘It is only the more advanced tribes,’ says Mr. Bates, ’who have kept up the cultivation. . . .  Bunches of sterile or seedless fruits’—­a mark of very long cultivation, as in the case of the Plantain—­’occur. . . .  It is one of the principal articles of food at Ega when in season, and is boiled and eaten with treacle or salt.  A dozen of the seedless fruits make a good nourishing meal for a full-grown person.  It is the general belief that there is more nutriment in Pupunha than in fish, or Vacca Marina (Manati).’

My friend Mr. Bates will, I am sure, excuse my borrowing so much from him about a tree which must be as significant in his eyes as it is in mine.

So passed many hours, till I began to be tired of—­I may almost say, pained by—­the appalling silence and loneliness; and I was glad to get back to a point where I could hear the click of the axes in the clearing.  I welcomed it just as, after a long night on a calm sea, when one nears the harbour again, one welcomes the sound of the children’s voices and the stir of life about the quay, as a relief from the utter blank, and feels oneself no longer a bubble afloat on an infinity which knows one not, and cares nothing for one’s existence.  For in the dead stillness of mid-day, when not only the deer, and the agoutis, and the armadillos, but the birds and insects likewise, are all asleep, the crack of a falling branch was all that struck my ear, as I tried in vain to verify the truth of that beautiful passage of Humboldt’s—­true, doubtless, in other forests, or for ears more acute than mine.  ‘In the mid-day,’ he says, {248a} ’the larger animals seek shelter in the recesses of the forest, and the birds hide themselves under the thick foliage of the trees, or in the clefts of the rocks:  but if, in this apparent entire stillness of nature, one listens for the faintest tones which an attentive ear can seize, there is perceived an all-pervading rustling sound, a humming and fluttering of insects close to the ground, and in the lower strata of the atmosphere.  Everything announces a world of organic activity and life.  In every bush, in the cracked bark of the trees, in the earth undermined by hymenopterous insects, life stirs audibly.  It is, as it were, one of the many voices of Nature, and can only be heard by the sensitive and reverent ear of her true votaries.’

Be not too severe, great master.  A man’s ear may be reverent enough:  but you must forgive its not being sensitive while it is recovering from that most deafening of plagues, a tropic cold in the head.