Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

IN THE ECUADOREAN ANDES 177
Banos awaiting the fate of my goods. After so
long a voyage I was much fallen in flesh, and my
thin face nearly hidden by a beard of three months'
growth. The cold at Banos I found almost insufferable
- - thermometer sometimes as low as
48^ at daybreak, and at its maximum not passing
64"- -rains still continuing. I was attacked by
catarrh, with a cough so violent as often to bring
up blood from both nose and mouth. Perhaps I
should never see again my books, journals, instru-
ments, my Peruvian mosses, and other things
which no money could replace all perhaps rotting
on the shores of the Topo. There was not a book
in all Banos, save breviaries and "doctrinas."
The weather scarcely allowed me to get out, or
I might have put off sad thoughts by the sight of
new plants. I had no dry ing -paper, but I found
some coarse calico, and with this began to dry the
mosses and ferns I found on the dilapidated walls
of my garden. I had also to lay out the mosses
I had snatched up as we came along trom Canelos,
and which by chance had been brought along with
my bed, and this occupation diverted my thoughts
from my painful situation. The Cryptogamic vege-
tation of some parts of the Montana of Canelos is
wonderful. There is one mountain, called Abitagua,
which though not more perhaps than 5000 feet
high, is continually enveloped in mists and rains.
The trees on it, even to the topmost leaves, are
so thickly encased in mosses that a recognisable
specimen of them would be scarcely procurable, it
indeed they ever flower, which must be very
rarely. I gathered a tuft ol everything I saw in
fruit and stowed it in a pouch by my side. In the
VOL. II N