jangada must be built and ready to
launch."

"We'll set to work this very day, sir."

It was a heavy task. There were about a hundred Indians and blacks,
and during the first fortnight in May they did wonders. Some people
unaccustomed to these great tree massacres would perhaps have groaned to
see giants many hundred years old fall in a few hours beneath the axes
of the woodmen; but there was such a quantity on the 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, whic