双语+MP3|美国学生世界地理22 橡胶和咖啡之国

MOUNTAINS make rivers. If a continent were flat—absolutely flat and level like a table—there would be no rivers. Rain falling would run off the continent like water poured on a table. The water running off the Andes Mountains makes the greatest river in the World—not the longest, but the biggest. The name of this river also begins with an “A.” It is called the Amazon. On the map the Amazon looks like a vine with many branches. It gets so broad and wide as it goes on that you cannot see across it. The Amazon empties more water into the ocean than any other river i. t. w. W.

You may wonder why, with all the big rivers in the World pouring water into the ocean all the time, the ocean does not fill up and run over as a bathtub would fill up and run over if you left the water running into it all the time. It is because the water in the ocean is always turning into vapor, rising high into the air and making clouds. The clouds rise over the sea, then blow over the land, then turn to rain: the rain falls on the ground, a great part of it is taken up by trees and plants but the rest runs into the rivers, the rivers flow into the ocean and then the same thing goes on over and over again—rivers, ocean; ocean, clouds; clouds, land; land, rivers; rivers, ocean; ocean, clouds, and so on forever and ever. No water is ever lost in the World. It may be in a different place, but there is never any more nor any less water in the World than ever has or ever will be.

All the great rivers in South America flow into the Atlantic Ocean—none flows into the Pacific, because the Andes Mountains lie so close to the Pacific edge there is no room for great rivers on that side.

The Amazon runs through a country by the name of Brazil. Brazil is the biggest country in South America. It is bigger than the whole of our United States! People called the country Brazil after a tree growing there. The brazil-tree is used for making a colored dye. But it would have been more fitting if the country had been named “Rubber” or “Coffee,” for more rubber-trees and coffee-trees grow in Brazil than do brazil-trees.

The land around the Amazon River is called “Selvas”—which means “woods.” It is not only woods but jungles and swamps, and it is very wild, hot, damp, and unhealthful. It is so hot and damp that everything grows big and thick and fast—so big that water lilies grow leaves as big as the top of a dining-room table; so thick that man can hardly make his way through; and as fast as Jack the Giant Killer’s beanstalk.

There are many animals but few men in the Selvas, and the men are mostly Indians. There are many monkeys, the kind organ-grinders use. There are parrots, which sailors catch and teach to speak and bring back home. There are butterflies and moths of great size and beautiful colors that a boy would love to have for his collection. There are huge snakes called boa-constrictors, that look like heavy vines hanging from branches to fool other animals which they catch, coil around, and hug to death, then swallow whole and go to sleep for a week or month while the meal is being digested. There are animals that hang from trees by their toes like a boy on a trapeze, and even sleep upside down; lazy, sleepy animals that never seem to be awake, and move, when they do move, so slothfully they are called “sloths.” There are animals like dragons, called “iguanas.” There are huge bullfrogs whose croaking sounds like the roar of lions. And there are mosquitos, the country mosquitos that give you malaria. You may wonder why any one goes to the Selvas at all. They go a-hunting for animals for museums and zoos, but the chief thing they go hunting for is the juice or sap of a tree that grows wild in the Selvas.

White people found the Amazon Indians playing with balls that bounced and bounded. They had seen nothing of the sort before. These balls, they found out, were made of the sap of a tree. That gave the white man the idea that this sap might be used to make balls for white children and white men to play with—babies’ balls, tennis-balls, golf-balls. Then they found that lumps of it would rub out—so they called it rubber—and that they could make rubber erasers, automobile tires, rubber bands, and rubber boots of it. Soft rubber and hard rubber and pully rubber and springy rubber are all made from the sap of the rubber-tree by treating it in different ways as a cook makes taffy and gum-drops and caramels by cooking sugar in different ways.

Men go through the Selvas and wherever they find a rubber-tree they cut notches in the tree trunk and fasten a cup underneath to catch the tree’s sap, which flows out from the notches like blood out of a cut finger. Then they go round again and empty the cups of rubber sap into a bucket and carry it to their camp. When they have collected enough sap they take a stick, pour some of the sap on it, and dry it over a fire. They do the same thing again and again until there is a big lump of rubber on the stick. These lumps of rubber they pile into canoes and carry down the Amazon River to larger boats that carry the rubber to the United States and to other countries.

But there is something that grows in Brazil that begins with a “C”—that almost every family in the United States has at breakfast each morning. Can you guess what it is? It’s coffee. Coffee doesn’t grow in Brazil wild as the rubber-tree does. In fact, coffee didn’t grow in Brazil at all until some men brought coffee bushes from across the ocean and planted them in Brazil. They planted them on high ground near the shore, not in the Selvas. They found that the high ground and the weather were just exactly right for growing coffee, and now much more coffee grows in Brazil than in the place where coffee came from first, and indeed more than in any other place i. t. w. W.

Coffee grows on a small tree, and the coffee berries look something like cherries. Inside of each cherry-like berry are two seeds. These seeds are coffee, but before coffee can be made into a drink the coffee seeds must be toasted brown and then ground to powder.

One New Year’s Day a long time ago a man was sailing along the coast of Brazil when he came to what seemed to be the mouth of a river. As it was the first day of January he named the place River of January, which in his language was Rio de Janeiro. It turned out to be no river; but the city that grew up at that place is still called Rio de Janeiro, and it is the capital of Brazil. In the harbor of Rio, as it is called for short, there is a huge rock which is called “The Loaf of Sugar,” and as you see Rio from a ship the mountains back of the city look like a “Sleeping Giant,” and that is what they are called.

More coffee is shipped from Rio than from any other place i. t. w. W. , except another place on the coast of Brazil just south of Rio. This other place is called Santos. The cup of coffee your father drinks in the morning probably comes from either Rio or Santos. If coffee and cocoa could talk, and tin cans and asphalt streets and rubber tires, as such things do in fairy-tales, what tales they could tell of their homes and travels!