The soil in which they grow here is half pitch pavement, half loose brown earth, and over both, shallow pools of water, which will become much deeper in the wet season; and all about float or lie their pretty fruit, the size of an apple, and scaled like a fir-cone.

They are last year's, empty and decayed.

The ripe fruit contains first a rich pulpy nut, and at last a hard cone, something like that of the vegetable ivory palm, {159} which grows in the mainland, but not here.

Delicious they are, and precious, to monkeys and parrots, as well as to the Orinoco Indians, among whom the Tamanacs, according to Humboldt, say, that when a man and woman survived that great deluge, which the Mexicans call the age of water, they cast behind them, over their heads, the fruits of the Moriche palm, as Deucalion and Pyrrha cast stones, and saw the seeds in them produce men and women, who repeopled the earth.

No wonder, indeed, that certain tribes look on this tree as sacred, or that the missionaries should have named it the tree of life.
'In the season of inundations these clumps of Mauritia, with their leaves in the form of a fan, have the appearance of a forest rising from the bosom of the waters.