Brazil on the Move by John Dos Passos

Author:John Dos Passos [Passos, John Dos]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Latin America, South America, Travel, Brazil
ISBN: 9781569249581
Google: nPH22VcjAJ8C
Amazon: B0060AY8SO
Barnesnoble: B0060AY8SO
Goodreads: 13536158
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1963-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

A Rainforest Economy

The only practical way of reaching Iquitos is by air. The head of ocean navigation of the Amazon is still an island inaccessible by road. After flitting between the jagged snowteeth of the highest Andes the plane starts to toboggan downward through the massed cumulus clouds that steam up incessantly from the rainy eastern slopes.

After rumbling for a long time amid a churn of mist we begin to see trees through rents in the clouds. The wooded slopes below us heave in ridges cut by swift straight streams occasionally barred by the white spume of rapids. As the hills subside the rivers seem for a while to strangle in the rainforest.

Now we are flying low over what seems a mossy plain, only the tendrils of the moss are gigantic trees. The rivers have broken through below us, muddy and turgid now, and flow in restless curves from oxbow to oxbow. As far as you can see in every direction the forest is cut by the meanderings and the arabesques of rampaging rivers.

We are looking down on an unending struggle between the weight of the hurrying water and the fibrous density of the treepacked land. This titanic wrestling match has left the jungle scarred by the scratches of old riverbeds as if by the claws of some vast jaguar. The rivers slither like great snakes between the tottering trees, leaving their castoff courses to one side or the other in lagoons and sickleshaped backwaters. In some places the subsiding waters have left reedy ponds or palegreen savannas. Every shape you see results from the war between land and water. There’s still not a sign of human occupation. Not a canoe, not a hut, not a smoke.

We are headed east flying low above the olivegreen coils of the Rio Marañon when, along the broadly curving silty beaches, a different green appears which could be rice that human hands have sown. A log half pulled up on a beach might be a dugout. A pile of dry palm leaves might be a thatched hut. There is smoke from brush fires.

Now there is an unmistakable canoe, the flash of the paddle of a man paddling in the bow. A long thatched object moving upstream must be a motorboat. There’s a road below with toy trucks, tin roofs, tiled roofs under palms, a beach hatched with rows of dugouts, a wide stretch of river full of canoes and launches; and the plane is spiraling down into the airfield.

Iquitos turns out to be two towns. There’s the outpost Peruvian city: a gridiron of streets of stone and rubble houses, stores, banks, a motion picture theater, markets, a hotel on a bluff overlooking the river run by the Peruvian Government to encourage tourists; and then there’s the Amazonian river town. This they call the port of Belén.

In the port everything is afloat. Houses, built of poles and thatch tied together with jungle vines, are set on rafts made of great logs of various light woods similar to balsawood.

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