recollection of the wild scenes I had beheld! But such regrets were vain
... and I tried to occupy myself with the state of things which actually
existed."[7]

On reaching London, Wallace took a house in Upper Albany Street, where
his mother and his married sister (Mrs. Sims), with her husband, a
photographer, came to live with him. The next eighteen months were fully
occupied with sorting and arranging such collections as had previously
reached England; writing his book of travels up the Amazon and Rio Negro
(published in the autumn of 1853), and a little book on the palm trees
based on a number of fine pencil sketches he had preserved in a tin box,
the only thing saved from the wreck.

In summing up the most vivid impressions left on his mind, apart from
purely scientific results, after his four years in South America, he
wrote that the feature which he could never think of without delight was
"the wonderful variety and exquisite beauty of the butterflies and birds
... ever new and beautiful, strange and even mysterious," so that he
could "hardly recall them without a thrill of admiration and wonder."
But "the most unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first
meeting and living with man in a state of nature--with absolute
uncontaminated savages!... and the surprise of it was that I did not
expect to be at all so surprised.... These true wild Indians of the
Uaupés ... had nothing that we call clothes; they had peculiar
ornaments, tribal marks, etc.; they all carried tools or weapons of
their own manufacture.... But more than all, their whole aspect and
manner was different--they were all going about their own work or
pleasure, which had nothing to do with white men or their ways; they
walked with the free step of the independent forest-dweller, and, except
the few that were known to my companion, paid no attention whatever to