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#6 An ancient forest
on Serra dos Orgaos,
in the province of Sebastianopolis, Rio
de Janeiro
Latin translation
by Ben Hennelly
The first European who directed his attention to the beauty and great  richness of Brazilian plant life was George von Langsdorff. When at
the start of my adolescence I read his outstanding descriptions of the
plant life of the island of Santa
Catarina, which he had come to know in the company of that
most distinguished man, Krusenstern, as he was circumnavigating our
world, I was seized with wonder at the description of the beautiful
variety and plenty of that plant life which the great serenity of the
sky and the almost unbroken harmony of elements make to rise up.
My heart was powerfully
shaken by the magnificence and beauty of that Brazilian vegetation,
and I certainly did not foresee then that ten years later, I would myself
travel through those fruitful regions and peer into the superior nature
of that land with the very same man as my guide. And yet fortune so
favored me that I stayed the greater part of July and August 1817 with
that kind man, and from his estate, Mandiocca,
which is
situated up under the Monte dos Orgaos and offers rest to travelers in the area called Serra
d'Estrella who pass on the way between the land of Minas and the Sebastianopolitan province, I was able to wander through
the forests of that wonderful region. Langsdorff was himself witness
to the amazement with which the foreign travelers --- Spix, Mikan and
Thomas Ender, the illustrator, in addition to myself --- were overcome
as they looked upon the proud magnificence of that nature, as he writes
in a letter which Cl. de Eschwege, a man very close to me, published
at the time (1). Although I saw many different ancient forests in Brazil,
I nonetheless cannot deny that in no other place did they appear more
beautiful and pleasing to me than around the city of Rio
de Janeiro and in the sloping places of the mountains that
run with the name Serra
do Mar throughout a large part of the Sebastianopolitan province. These pleased me more than the others did and left an undying
memory in my mind, not only because they were the first offered to my
amazed eyes, but because they truly stand out for their beauty and pleasantness.
For it can justly be said that the land's immense power of procreation
is here subject to the dictates of beauty, and that everything is filled
with the sweet breath of harmony, and the vegetation is not only constructed
with plenty and majesty, but is also pleasingly arranged and ordered.
Serra dos Orgaos, province of Rio de Janeiro
From this it happens that the appearance of the ancient forest in the
windings of the mountains generally called Serra
dos Orgaos, on account of the veins of spotted-red granite that shoot up steeply, discrete from one another in the manner of a
pipe organ, does not display a rough and disorderly abundance, or the
fertility of a land that does not cease from producing life, as Pliny
says, where each and every plant flourishes and bears fruit as if born
out of some storm and struggle, so that soon it is overpowered by another
plant that is stronger; -- rather, here we cannot fail to perceive that
the manner of the life and death of individual beings is organized according
to a certain law which in some beneficial way affects, soothes and uplifts
the spirit of the viewer. Life seems so wisely governed, as if by the
gentle hand of its author, in order to conceal death. This disposition
of nature cannot fail to resonate with human sentiment, which is so
constructed as to be filled with joy at the sight of life spread out
everywhere and to rejoice with strong emotion in the majesty of the
universe, while it is affected with sorrow and great sadness at the
demise of the universe's individual parts.
 
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