Download or read book The Lower Amazon written by Algot Lange and published by General Books. This book was released on 2012-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Collecting and SmoKing Rubber ASSING up some river or creek one never fails to see certain light-coloured trees standing close to the water-front or at some seasons even in the water. These trees immediately arrest attention because of their peculiarities. Their lower trunks are thick, dark, and warty and their crowns are light, with trisected, medium-sized leaves of a beautiful light-green colour. They are the seringucira branca or white rubber-trees from which comes the finest rubber in the world or fine Para. The trunk to a height of ten or twelve feet from the ground is often very much thickened, caused by mistreatment by the rubber- worker, how, we shall understand by visiting a typical rubber-worker's hut and asking leave to follow this solitary forester on his day's journey. We pass along the water-front to reach the hut which stands back a little in the forest with a space cleared around it, and we notice several young rubber-trees of no more than eighteen months' growth rising not far from the mother- trees whence the seeds have fallen and taken root. Now I stand in front of the seringueiro's (rubber- worker's) primitive hut and examine this most rudimentary forest dwelling which hardly can offer sufficient shelter for a human being during the heavy rains. I am surprised to see such a crude piece of construction, even where no nail, nor board, nor bit of metal has been employed. The hut in question is not more than fifteen by thirty feet and about twenty feet in height. Its floor is raised about four and a half feet from the surface. Poles made of young trees that have been cut and placed in holes in the ground are the main support of the hut. Other saplings are tied horizontally to carry the flooring made of split pieces of palm trunks. At the po...