The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness
Peter Matthiessen
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0099449927
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Peter Mattiessen has long been known for his travels to some of the remotest lands on earth, most notably recorded in The Snow Leopard. The Cloud Forest brings to vivid life a South American journey that took him from the Sargasso Sea to the jungles of Amazonia, from the Inca city of Machu Picchu high in the Andes to the bleak rocks of Tierra del Fuego and the winds and vast skies of Patagonia. The result is an incisive and marvellously well-observed journal by a born writer and naturalist, a voyage of exploration among the people, places and fading wildlife of this most exotic and mysterious of continents.
and one man has the traditional floppy peasant sombrero made of sisal. His companion, however, is rigged out for the tropics in a pair of skier’s goggles, worn jauntily on a checked logger’s cap, complete with ear flaps. A Norwegian freighter, the Margaret Onstad, comes up on our starboard quarter and crosses close across our bows—outward bound, to judge from her present course, from Jacksonville or Fernandina to South Africa. We are presently several hundred miles due east of northern Florida.
small owls looking like quail, which I startled from a bush by the runway, and the take-off procedure of the pilot, a gay, abandoned sort of fellow, who kept the clumsy two-engined plane less than fifty feet from the ground, buzzing and swerving, for several miles across the roughest kind of upland country. Terror was general among the passengers, but as I speak no Portuguese and the rest were country people, already bewildered by their trip, no one dared say a thing. We are now well into Mato
dangerous rocks are covered over. I hope he is right, but I would have more faith in what he says if he were going to accompany us. Whatever the truth of the matter, we are casting off at midday. I’m not at all sure we know all we should, and would feel much happier with a life-preserver. I asked Epifanio if he thought we would make it to the mission at Timpia before nightfall. He and Ardiles grinned at each other in a way I disliked very much, and Pereira said, “Maybe, if you go directly.” This
few minutes approached the lower portals of the Pongo. These are less imposing than the entrance, but they are mighty all the same and contribute immensely to the drama of the place. The rocks toward this end are rectangular in shape, as if cut by some mighty hand, and the moss on them, the ferns, and the lavender-red flowers of a vine falling down the face of the portal to the left give the whole place the air of an ancient landscape in the romantic concept. I turned and looked backward, up the
but it is still deep enough at this season to permit good progress, and we arrived toward dark at the lumber camp of Victor Macedo, one of whose peons is the discoverer of the fossil. On the Mapuya, in late afternoon, we had seen a lovely pair of swallow-tailed kites, that most graceful of the hawks, swooping in gentle arcs over the shadowy slow stream; a few of these birds still survive in the wilderness swamps of the southern United States. April 26. Quebrada Grasa. Until the very last minute