Jules Verne by Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon Page B

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 every one 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 cabinet-work. 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 ship-building. 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