Minha made Manoel admire the natural wonders which could not be found
in their simplicity in the more civilized provinces of the east. He
listened to her more with his eyes than his ears, for the cries and
the songs of these thousands of birds were every now and then so
penetrating that he was not able to hear what she said. The noisy
laughter of Lina was alone sufficiently shrill to ring out with its
joyous note above every kind of clucking, chirping, hooting,
whistling, and cooing.
At the end of an hour they had scarcely gone a mile. As they left the
river the trees assumed another aspect, and the animal life was no
longer met with near the ground, but at from sixty to eighty feet
above, where troops of monkeys chased each other along the higher
branches. Here and there a few cones of the solar rays shot down into
the underwood. In fact, in these tropical forests light does not seem
to be necessary for their existence. The air is enough for the
vegetable growth, whether it be large or small, tree or plant, and
all the heat required for the development of their sap is derived not
from the surrounding atmosphere, but from the bosom of the soil
itself, where it is stored up as in an enormous stove.
And on the bromelias, grass plantains, orchids, cacti, and in short
all the parasites which formed a little forest beneath the large one,
many marvelous insects were they tempted to pluck as though they had
been genuine blossoms–nestors with blue wings like shimmering
watered silk, leilu butterflies reflexed with gold and striped with
fringes of green, agrippina moths, ten inches long, with leaves for
wings, maribunda bees, like living emeralds set in sockets of gold,
and legions of lampyrons or pyrophorus coleopters, valagumas with
breastplates of bronze, and green elytræ, with yellow light pouring
from their eyes, who, when the night comes, illuminate the forest
with their many-colored scintillations.
“What wonders!” repeated the enthusiastic girl.
“You are at home, Minha, or at least you say so,” said Benito, “and
that is the way you talk of your riches!”
“Sneer away, little brother!” replied Minha; “such beautiful things
are only lent to us; is it not so, Manoel? They come from the hand of
the Almighty and belong to the world!”
“Let Benito laugh on, Minha,” said Manoel. “He hides it very well,
but he is a poet himself when his time comes, and he admires as much
as we do all these beauties of nature. Only when his gun is on his
arm, good-by to poetry!”
“Then be a poet now,” replied the girl.
“I am a poet,” said Benito. “O! Nature-enchanting, etc.”
We may confess, however, that in forbidding him to use his gun Minha
had imposed on him a genuine privation. There was no lack of game in
the woods, and several magnificent opportunities he had declined with
regret.
In some of the less wooded parts, in places where the breaks were
tolerably spacious, they saw several pairs of ostriches, of the
species known as _”naudus,”_ from for to five feet high, accompanied
by their inseparable _”seriemas,”_ a sort of turkey, infinitely
better from an edible point of view than the huge birds they escort.
“See what that wretched promise costs me,” sighed Benito, as, at a
gesture from his sister, he replaced under his arm the gun which had
instinctively gone up to his shoulder.
“We ought to respect the seriemas,” said Manoel, “for they are great
destroyers of the snakes.”
“Just as we ought to respect the snakes,” replied Benito, “because
they eat the noxious insects, and just as we ought the insects
because they live on smaller insects more offensive still. At that
rate we ought to respect everything.”
But the instinct of the young sportsman was about to be put to a
still more rigorous trial. The woods became of a sudden full of game.
Swift stags and graceful roebucks scampered off beneath the bushes,
and a well-aimed bullet would assuredly have stopped them. Here and
there turkeys showed themselves with their milk and coffee-colored
plumage; and peccaries, a sort of wild pig highly appreciated by