Remember the Rainforest 1

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From the tower of the church there is a vast panorama of the surrounding territory. The Tapajos runs through a region, whose flatness can be evaluated by the colossal trees that predominate here and compete with the virgin forests. Inland, it rises to the south and to the southeast to a mountain range of low hills, covered with thick bush. The banks of the Tapajos begin to rise at the side of the village, always becoming more and more elevated and abrupt. In general, formed of red clay, they are so cleft and washed away by the floods, that they seem like natural peaks or inverted cones. The geologic formation is also here, as in Gurupa and Belem, a more or less gypsum-colored stoneware, which appears here and there with a breach of lioz stone.

The idea that a few days' journey upstream will find them gold predominates among the inhabitants of Santarem.

Pyrite

They also showed us a heavy pyrite, found beneath the falls, in a place that the Indians call Taguba-Coara, and we believe it contains silver. La Condamine observes that it is easy to obtain the green stones here, called Amazonas or pierres divines. In this hope, we visited most of the farms of the Indians that form a group farther from the river than the houses of the whites; but our research was unsuccessful.

The vegetation here, as well as the Xingu, does not offer a typical idea of the flora of the Amazon, but it contains many of the most characteristic forms of the southernmost regions. In the neighborhood of the village, there are low, leafy trees, and a meadow of hard grasses with long rough hairs, like those of Piaui.

Piaui

Further inland the high virgen forest covers everything. The general condition with which the vegetation around Santarem differs from that of the Amazon, is precisely the compendium of all the qualities we have observed before in the flora of the central plateau of central Brazil: lower groves, with stronger branches; smaller, harder, often hairy leaves; more abundant and, in general, more aromatic flowers; finally, predominance of grasses, herbs and low vines. The flora gives a surprising impression of the whole, surprising even to the Sertanista himself. One of them, with whom we talked about the journey through the Tapajos to Cuiaba, to better describe the species of vegetation along this river, described it as follows: "Along the banks are the trees and fields, ". Under the name of Minas they comprise, above all, throughout the Amazon, the high regions of the south, whose exaggerated fame of gold wealth is far spread in these southern areas.

It is not uncommon to see Brazil's largest bird of prey, the royal gaviao (Aquila destructor, Daud), one of those eagles brought alive from the basin of the upper Tapajos by a traveler.

Aquila

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