Wanderings in South America | Page 9

by the
exterminating hand of man.
Here the finest green-heart grows, and wallaba, purple-heart, siloabali,
sawari, buletre, tauronira and mora are met with in vast abundance, far
and near, towering up in majestic grandeur, straight as pillars, sixty or
seventy feet high, without a knot or branch.
Traveller, forget for a little while the idea thou hast of wandering
farther on, and stop and look at this grand picture of vegetable nature: it
is a reflection of the crowd thou hast lately been in, and though a silent
monitor, it is not a less eloquent one on that account. See that noble
purple-heart before thee! Nature has been kind to it. Not a hole, not the
least oozing from its trunk, to show that its best days are past. Vigorous
in youthful blooming beauty, it stands the ornament of these
sequestered wilds and tacitly rebukes those base ones of thine own
species who have been hardy enough to deny the existence of Him who
ordered it to flourish here.
Behold that one next to it! Hark how the hammerings of the red-headed
woodpecker resound through its distempered boughs! See what a
quantity of holes he has made in it, and how its bark is stained with the
drops which trickle down from them. The lightning, too, has blasted
one side of it. Nature looks pale and wan in its leaves, and her
resources are nearly dried up in its extremities: its sap is tainted; a
mortal sickness, slow as a consumption and as sure in its consequences,
has long since entered its frame, vitiating and destroying the
wholesome juices there.
Step a few paces aside and cast thine eye on that remnant of a mora

behind it. Best part of its branches, once so high and ornamental, now
lie on the ground in sad confusion, one upon the other, all shattered and
fungus-grown and a prey to millions of insects which are busily
employed in destroying them. One branch of it still looks healthy! Will
it recover? No, it cannot; Nature has already run her course, and that
healthy-looking branch is only as a fallacious good symptom in him
who is just about to die of a mortification when he feels no more pain,
and fancies his distemper has left him; it is as the momentary gleam of
a wintry sun's ray close to the western horizon. See! while we are
speaking a gust of wind has brought the tree to the ground and made
room for its successor.
Come farther on and examine that apparently luxuriant tauronira on thy
right hand. It boasts a verdure not its own; they are false ornaments it
wears. The bush-rope and bird-vines have clothed it from the root to its
topmost branch. The succession of fruit which it hath borne, like good
cheer in the houses of the great, has invited the birds to resort to it, and
they have disseminated beautiful, though destructive, plants on its
branches which, like the distempers vice brings into the human frame,
rob it of all its health and vigour. They have shortened its days, and
probably in another year they will finally kill it, long before Nature
intended that it should die.
Ere thou leavest this interesting scene, look on the ground around thee,
and see what everything here below must come to.
Behold that newly-fallen wallaba! The whirlwind has uprooted it in its
prime, and it has brought down to the ground a dozen small ones in its
fall. Its bark has already begun to drop off! And that heart of mora
close by it is fast yielding, in spite of its firm, tough texture.
The tree which thou passedst but a little ago, and which perhaps has
laid over yonder brook for years, can now hardly support itself, and in a
few months more it will have fallen into the water.
Put thy foot on that large trunk thou seest to the left. It seems entire
amid the surrounding fragments. Mere outward appearance, delusive
phantom of what it once was! Tread on it and, like the fuss-ball, it will

break into dust.
Sad and silent mementos to the giddy traveller as he wanders on!
Prostrate remnants of vegetable nature, how incontestably ye prove
what we must all at last come to, and how plain your mouldering ruins
show that the firmest texture avails us naught when Heaven wills that
we should cease to be!
The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the
great globe itself, Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve, And, like the
baseless fabric of a vision, Leave not a wreck behind.
Cast thine eye around thee and see the thousands of Nature's
productions. Take a view of them from the opening seed on the surface
sending a downward shoot, to