The Indians load their boat and paddle away up the Amazon. The first night out they camp on the bank. The next morning they turn into a small river, a branch of the Amazon. This stream is so narrow that the branches of the trees sometimes meet overhead, and the Indians have trouble getting their boat through the tops of trees that have fallen into the stream. One day the rubber seekers shoot a wild pig that is busy rooting on the bank; and once they see a jaguar, a large cat-like animal, lying on a limb of a tree waiting to spring on some passing animal. One night they will have to sleep in the boat, because the shore is so muddy that there is no place on it for the tent. The men need to wrap up in mosquito netting if they are to get 'any sleep, for the whole Amazon buzzes night and day with mosquitoes and other biting insects.
After five days' paddling up this branch stream, the Indians come to their own village of leaf houses. The village is on a high point of the bank, thirty feet higher than the river, where it cannot be flooded when the river overflows in the rainy season.
271. Gathering rubber.— Six Indians from the village take the new machetes and start into the forest, hunting the rubber trees. These trees are twenty to fifty yards apart. To get from one tree to the next, a path has to be cut with the machete through the tangled vines and bushes. In two days each man has found his string of rubber trees and has cut the path from tree to tree. The next day he taps the trees by cutting big gashes in the bark and fasten ing up tin cups to catch the sap that flows out. The following morning he goes around with buckets and collects the sap, which is white like milk.
This sap is made into rubber by dipping a wooden paddle into the sticky sap and then drying the sap in the smoke of burning palm nuts. After much dipping and dry ing, there is on the paddle a big, black ball of crude rubber, a ball as big as your head, such as we saw in the warehouses at Para, or in the automobile tire factories of the United States. (Fig. 282.) The smoke that dries the rubber is so strong that sometimes it makes the men blind.
In a few days the rubber gatherers must chop out the paths again, for in that hot, wet country the vines and bushes grow so fast that it is almost impossible to keep the ground clear.
After a few weeks, the rubber trees have been bled to death, and our Indians chop out new paths to fresh trees. At the end of three months, the rain begins to fall every day, the river rises, and water stands in the forest. This ends the rubber gather ing season. The canoes are now loaded with the precious balls of rubber, each of which is worth several dollars, and the Indians paddle down to Iquitos. The Portuguese merchant is there to take the rubber, which pays for the things that the Indians got from the merchant when our ship came there. There is enough more rubber to pay for another boatload of supplies. These will have to last the people in the village until the merchant comes again next year.
272. Flat plain with few are few and far between in the Amazon Valley, but altogether there are thousands of Indians on the many little rivers of that vast forest. Each year they are chopping their way through the jungle, fighting mosquitoes and snakes, and smok ing the rubber that we use the next year for rubber shoes, bicycle and automobile tires, garden hose, rubber toys for the baby, pencil erasers, and for many other useful things.
This Amazon Valley is a part of one of the flattest plains in the world. In the season of daily rain the rivers overflow for miles and miles on each side. In one place you can actually get into your canoe and paddle from the Amazon Valley into the valley of the Orinoco, which is north of the Amazon. The place where you might do this is in a big swamp where a little river called the Cassiquiare flows at one end into the Rio Negro, a branch of the Amazon, and at the other end flows into a branch of the Orinoco, the great river of Venezuela. (See Fig. 284.) At the southern edge of the Amazon Valley, there are large swamps that flood in the rainy season, so that a canoe can go from the branches of the Madeira River into the headwaters of the Paraguay River. If we should make this journey from the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Paraguay, we would begin to think the world had almost no people in it at all, so many, many days would we be paddling through the forest seeing only birds, mos quitoes, snakes, monkeys, and a few other wild animals. Occasionally we would pass a small village of Indians, some of whom had never before seen a white person.
Near the southern end of the we would get out of the hot country, out of the forest, and into the land of farms and ranches. Steamboats would be on the river, even great ocean steamers, bound for London, Antwerp, and New York. What capital cities would we find on this river? 273. Rubber in other great Amazon Valley does not grow all the rub ber in the world. There is land enough and to spare; but there are not workers enough because the place is so unhealthful.
tations, went to the islands of Ceylon and to Singapore, in southern Asia. (Fig. 444.) The island of Ceylon, about the size of the state of Maine, has more people than are to be found in all the Amazon Valley; and near Singapore there are Malays and hundreds of thousands of Chinese who come down from Canton and Shanghai to get jobs on the rubber plantations.
The plantation rubber trees live on from year to year as apple trees do, for the European overseers do not let the men bleed the trees to death by tapping them too much. The finest rubber in the world now comes to New York in the steamers that call at Singapore and Ceylon, on their way back from China.
Several kinds of trees will produce rub ber, and some of them grow wild in the forests of nearly all hot countries. Some rubber comes from the lowland forests of Mexico, of Central America, and of some of the West Indian Islands. The black men of the African forests hunt out and kill their rubber trees just as the Indians do in South America. There is the rubber port of Boma, on a great African river near the equator (Fig. 404), just as there is the South American port of Para on the oppo site side of the Atlantic.
274. Rubber plantations. — Since the automobile has made us need so much rubber, we have learned how to plant rubber trees in orchards, just as we plant apple, peach, or orange trees. If you were going to set out a rubber plantation, you would want to go to a place where you could hire people to work on it. To find places where there were plenty of helpers, the Englishmen, who started rubber plan