THE RIUER SEN: Men and Medicine Move-ln on the Amazon

THE RIVER SEA

Mustering all their resources of will and strength, arming themselves with weapons of modern development from the bulldozer to the hypodermic needle, men are again battling to tame the wild basin of the Amazon. From the moldering towns that stand as monuments to earlier defeats, new roads are slashing into the jungle; virgin timber crashes down, letting in sunlight and packhorse aircraft. Raw new concrete emerges from forms to make the walls of factories, the piers of bridges, the foundations for machines. This time modern man, with all his new tools, may be able to do what his predecessors could not: build a permanent and growing economy out of a bewilderingly immense frontier.

The job will take generations. Brazilians call the Amazon O Rio Mar (The River Sea), and it plows into the Atlantic with such momentum that its silt-brown stain can be seen 100 miles from the coast. In one minute it empties 3 billion gallons of water, as much as 14 Mississippis. Oceangoing freighters can navigate its channel for a distance as great as from New York to Ireland—and still find water deep enough to cover a ten-story apartment building. Ten of its 1,100 tributaries are longer than the Rhine; so broad is its mouth that it holds an island (Marajó) larger than Switzerland. Melting Andean snows and glaciers, plus the 90 in. of tropical rain that falls each year, can make the river below Manaus rise 60 ft., flood an area the size of Poland. The Amazon's tangled trees make up 25% of the earth's forests; its basin covers an area nearly as great as the continental U.S.

It is as though Nature, in grim humor, rolled out an immense green piecrust, poured in a rich filling of almost every conceivable vegetable and mineral in the world, and then handed puny man a tiny fork.

Warrior Women. The first man to take on the challenge of the Amazon was the river's discoverer, Spanish Explorer Francisco de Orellana. Plunging over the Andes from the west coast in 1541, Orellana and his men sailed and fought their way downstream for eight months. According to the expedition's chronicler, they found a race of warrior women equal to the Amazons of Greek legend: "These women are very white and tall," he wrote. "They are very robust, and go about naked (but with their privy parts covered), carrying bows and arrows in their hands, each doing as much fighting as ten Indian men. They have a great wealth of gold and silver, and great cities of white stone glistening in the sun."

Thus the river got its name, though no one ever found the women again, or the great cities, or the gold. But the lands drained by the river do hold vast riches. Of the world's 22,767 known plant species, scientists have found 19,619 in the Amazon basin. The river and its tributaries churn with 1,800 species of fish (v. 150 in all Europe), including the voracious little piranha (which attacks in schools to reduce a horse or a man to a skeleton in minutes) and the manatee (the sea cow that gave rise to the mermaid legend among early mariners).