THE AMAZON.

North Otago Times, 3 December 1910, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE AMAZON.

>; ITS .RUBBER FORESTS,

Wbllo the -' Amazon is the world's greatest' river,; if .not : in length, at least in tho volume of water which flows through' it, it is; the worldV strangest river as well. The few travellers and explorers have journeyed" up this watercourse to its many, sources in the glaciers of the South American mountains tell stories which are almost incredible about the literal maze of .streams which unite to form it, each stream having Ub birth,in one!of the great ice-masses. Yet a few hundred miles below, where they merge and create the river the temperature is such that it works'its waj through a perfect , labyrinth of tropical vegetation. Only the mariner can tell the place where the" Amazon really ■ has its. mouth, because the opening it has made on the eastern coast of South America is so wide that it extends over one hundred miles. A long distance before one comes to the mouth of the river, however, one is really sailing on the waters of the Amazon, because they force their way so far out into the ocean. They say that three hundred miles out at sea, of! the mouth of the Amazon,, you can hoist a bucketful of fresh water out of the ocean from the deck of a ship, such is the quantity of its water that flows from that gigantic basin. Long after you have entered .the actual river, and have its banks to north and south of you, if you are in midstream you will still be out of sight of land, •such is the breadth of the vast channel, The river stretches far into the ocean and far up the country. Take a map of South America, and look at a place called Iquitos. It lies fourfifths of the way across the, continent ftorn['east to west. Yet from Iquitos there is a- fortnightly service of ocean-going steamers to Europe, which descend some three thousand miles of the river before they .reach the sea. It is not only one branch of the Amazon, but many, that arethuß to be regarded as the same as ocean highways. The southern branches of the Amazon are broken by rapids along a line where a low continental shelf exists.""Above these rapids, however, there is again deep water. Thug • beyond the falls of the Madeira there are over ten thousand, miles of navigable water on that riye'r and its branches, and these only await the making of a short railway, less than two hundred miles long, to be brought Into connection with the other highways of the world.

Most of what we know about the •ipwr region of the great river is due to an article of which we use so much in daily life—rubber—in footwear, "oats, and other garments to protect us from the rain and snow ; fashioned into handles for knives, forks, and turned into hundreds of' necessary Wngs. The world has been searched for rubber-tree, but it grows, in so few forests that most of the crude rubber comes from the gum which is drawn from the woodlands of the.Upner Amazon. • In these, forests grow the trees which yield tbc finest quality of rubber-glim, To obtain the rubber little bands of white men have spent jcars of exploring these almost unknown forests often cutting their way mile after mile through tangles of' vines which so interlace the trees that every ray of the sun is shut out and it is almost as dark as night, Sometimes they cannot go on foot, but must work their way along in frail canoes, as the rubber tree is often found in whit might be called woodland lakes, rising directly from the water, Most-of the. stcamshios which sail far into the heart of South America carry rubber as the most valuable part of their return cargoes, bringing it not only, to Great Britain, but to France, Belgium, and Germany, where the huge, dingy brown ' balls intoi which the gum is pressed are made into articles to supply many human needs. So much •of the rubber is taken from the forests of the Amazon that explorers. are continually going farther and farther into them in search of more of the rubber-bearing trees, and it is owing to their explorations that much of the mvstery of this great region has been reveal-' ed,—"Chamber's Journal."