Lippincotts Magazine, February 1873 | Page 2

promises. Where the height and thickness of the foliage prevented them from seeing the sky, or even the shade of the surrounding green, they walked bent toward the ground, stirring up the rubbish, and choosing among the dead foliage certain leaves, of which they carefully examined the two sides and the stem. When by accident they found themselves near enough to speak to each other--a rare chance, for each peon undertook a separate line of search--they asked their friends, showing the leaves they had found, whether their discoveries appertained to the neighboring trees or whether the wind had brought the pieces from a distance. This kind of investigation, pursued by men who had prowled through forests all their lives, might seem slightly puerile if the reader does not understand that it is often difficult, or even impossible, to recognize the growing tree by its bark, covered as it is from base to branches with parasitic vegetation of every sort. In those forests whatever has a stout stem is used without scruple by the bignonias and air-plants, which race over the trunk, plant their root-claws in the cracks, leap over the whole tree at a single jet, or strangle it with multiplied knots, all the while adorning it with a superb mantle of leaves and blossoms. This is a difficulty which the most experienced cascarilleros are not able to overcome. As an instance, the history is cited of a practico or speculator who led an exploration for these trees in the valley of Apolobamba. After having caused to be felled, barked, measured, dried and trimmed all the cinchonas of one of those natural thickets called _manchas_--an operation which had occupied four months--he was about to abandon the spot and pursue the exploration elsewhere, when accident led him to discover, in the enormous trunk buried in creepers against which he had built his cabin, a _Cinchona nitida_, the forefather of all the trees he had stripped.
In this kind of search the caravan pursued the borders of the river, sometimes on this side and sometimes on that, now passing the two-headed mountain Camanti, now sighting the tufted peak of Basiri, now crossing the torrent called the Garote. In the latter, where the dam and hydraulic works of an old Spanish gold-hunter were still visible in a state of ruin, the sacred golden thirst of Colonel Perez once more attacked him. Two or three pins' heads of the insane metal were actually unearthed by the colonel and displayed in a pie-dish; but the business of the party was one which made even the finding of gold insignificant, and they pursued their way.
The flanks of these mountains, however, were really of importance to the botanical motive of the expedition. Along the side of the Camanti, where the yellow Garote leaked downward in a rocky ravine, the Bolivians were again successful. They brought to Marcoy specimens of half a dozen cinchonas, for him to sketch, analyze and decorate with Latin names. The colors of two or three of these barks promised well, but the pearl of the collection was a specimen of the genuine _Calisaya_, with its silver-gray envelope and leaf ribbed with carmine. This proud discovery was a boon for science and for commerce. It threw a new light upon the geographical locality of the most precious species of cinchona. It was incontestably the plant, and the Bolivians appeared amazed rather than pleased to have discovered outside of their own country a kind of bark proper only to Bolivia, and hardly known to overpass the northern extremity of the valley of Apolobamba. This discovery would rehabilitate, in the European market, the quinine-plants of Lower Peru, heretofore considered as inferior to those of Upper Peru and Bolivia. The latter country has for some time secured the most favorable reputation for its barks--a reputation ably sustained by the efforts of the company De la Paz, to whom the government has long granted a monopoly. This reputation is based on the abundance in that country of two species, the Cinchona calisaya and _Boliviana,_ the best known and most valued in the market. But for two valuable cinchonas possessed by Bolivia, Peru can show twenty, many of them excellent in quality, and awaiting only the enterprise of the government and the natural exhaustion of the forests to the south.
This magnificent bit of luck, the finding of the calisaya, awakened in the susceptible bosom of Mr. Marcoy an ardent desire to explore for himself the site of its discovery. But Eusebio, the chief of the cascarilleros, assuming a mysterious and warning expression, informed the traveler that the place was quite inaccessible for a white man, and that he had risked his own neck a score of times in descending the ravine which separated the route from the hillside where the