Here the leaves of the trees are always green, and flowers appear in constant succession; but the surface of the ground is without herbage, for the darkness of the wood is fatal to all humble vegetation.  The small plants are mostly parasites, thousands inserting their roots into the bark of trees and garlanding them with beauty.  Those that take root in the ground show but few leaves or flowers, until they have clambered upwards, through the underwood, into the light of heaven.  Almost the only relief afforded the sight, in this vast solitude, comes from the rivers and other collections of water, over whose expanse the eye revels with the delight we feel on emerging from the gloom of a cavern.  Every object seems to be struggling to get outside of this chaotic growth, where it can obtain the genial influence of the sun:  for near the surface of the ground are perpetual shade and hideous entanglement.

In this primeval forest we must not expect to realize any of our poetical ideas of the primitive residence of the first human family.  Here are no Arcadian scenes of peace and rural felicity.  On all sides we behold an undying competition for light and life, among both plants and animals.  We are reminded here of life in a crowded city, where the excessive abundance of supplies for human wants imported from the surrounding country causes a still greater superfluity of population, and produces a struggle for a livelihood more severe than in a rural district of gravel and boulders.  The oases of this great wilderness are those places in which there is an absence of the general fertility:  barrenness in such circumstances is a relief,—­because it allows both freedom and repose.

This wood is the nursery of all descriptions of monsters, living chiefly in trees.  On their branches and in their tangled recesses, adorned with all sorts of foliage and flowers, creatures the most terrible and the most loathsome are seen crowding and crouching in close proximity to the most beautiful forms of living things.  They fill the air with their discordant utterances, and allow no permanent silence or tranquillity.  Hours of periodical stillness and repose, occurring mostly at noonday, and affecting one with a sensation of awful grandeur, by contrast with the preceding disturbances, are followed, especially in the night, by a tumultuous roar from the legions of contending animals.

  “A universal hubbub wild
  Of stunning sounds and voices all confused,
  Borne through the hollow dark, assaults the ear
  With loudest vehemence.”

Even the notes of insects are a deafening crash, like the rattling of machinery in a cotton-mill.  Except in the hush of noonday, the notes of singing-birds are drowned amidst the howling of monkeys, the whining of sapajous, the roar of the jaguar, and the dismal hooting of thousands of wild animals that riot in these awful solitudes.  The sight of the fairest flowers and the most beautiful insects and birds only renders one more keenly sensitive to the frightful discords that startle and the perils that surround him.