More curious is the raphia, with plume-like leaves, sometimes from forty to fifty feet in length, starting also from a short stem--almost from the ground. Its vase-like form is peculiarly graceful and symmetrical. Among the most curious is the pashiuba barrigudo, or bulging-stemmed palm (Iriartea ventricosa); which, rising on a pyramid of roots for several feet, runs up in a single column for some distance, and then swells in a curious spindle-form, again to assume the same proportions as below, till its head spreads out in several fan-like branches with web-shaped leaflets. The tree looks as if supported on stilts, and a person can stand upright among the roots of old trees with the perpendicular stem above his head. These roots have the form of straight rods, and are studded with stout thorns, whilst the trunk is quite smooth. The purpose of this curious arrangement is probably to recompense the tree by root-growth above the soil for its inability, in consequence of the competition of neighbouring roots, to extend itself underground. Here, too, grows the slender and graceful assai-palm, with its perfectly smooth trunk,--the fruit appearing in a heavy cluster of berries just below the cluster of leaves on its summit. The stem is hard and tough as horn, and is much made use of, when split into narrow planks, for the construction of walls and flooring of houses. The fruit is about the size of a cranberry, and of a dark brown colour. When boiled and crushed it yields a quantity of juice of about the consistency of chocolate, somewhat of the colour of blackberry juice, when it has a sweetish taste--and is eaten, made into cakes with the flour of the mandioca root. From it also is formed the favourite beverage of the people. To obtain the fruit, the native fastens a strip of palm-leaves round his instep, thus binding his feet together, to enable him to climb the slippery trunk, which he does with wonderful rapidity, to obtain the fruit at its summit.