Employing our privilege of narrator, we will precede the Indian chief, and sketch the character of the country he had to pass through before reaching the city which was his destination. We will at the same time give a description which will enable the reader to form an idea of the manners and customs of the inhabitants, while Tcharanguii is hurrying to arrive, and displaying a certain respect to his prisoners, and lavishing on them attentions which might seem surprising on the part of a man like the formidable chief of the Jaos. What were the reasons that induced Tcharanguii to act in this way?--we may probably know hereafter.
The Cordillera of the Andes, that immense backbone of the American continent, which it traverses through its whole length from north to south, has several peaks forming immense llanos on which tribes reside at an elevation where in Europe all vegetation ceases.
After passing through the Parumo of San Juan Bautista and entering the templada region, which extends for about sixty leagues, the traveller finds himself in face of a virgin forest which is no less than eighty leagues in depth, and some twenty odd in width.
The most practised pen is powerless to describe the unnumbered marvels to be found in that inextricable vegetation called a virgin forest, which is at once strange and fascinating, majestic, and imposing. The most fanciful imagination recoils before this prodigious fecundity of an elementary nature, which is necessarily born again from its own destruction with every new strength and vigour.
Lianas running from tree to tree and from branch to branch, plunge here and there into the soil to rise again further on skywards, and form by crossing and interlacing an almost impassable barrier, as if jealous Nature wished to conceal from profane eyes the secret mysteries of these forests, in whose shadows the footsteps of men have only echoed at rare intervals and never with impunity. Trees of all ages and species grow without order or symmetry, as if they had been sown haphazard like grains of wheat in a furrow. Some, slight and tall, count but a few years, and the ends of their branches are covered by the wide and grand foliage of others whose haughty crowns have seen centuries pass.