onging to half a dozen different sorts of young trees, and
intertwined with as many different species of slender creepers. You
thought at your first glance among the tree-stems that you were
looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a
labyrinth of wire-rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left
at every five steps. You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like
Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you if
they are only three, and not six feet high. In the midst of them
you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth,
green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to
it either way, but gradually discover that it is the leaf-stalk of a
young Cocorite palm. {129b} The leaf is five-and-twenty feet long,
and springs from a huge ostrich plume, which is sprawling out of the
ground and up above your head a few yards off. You cut the leaf-
stalk through right and left, and walk on, to be stopped suddenly
(for you get so confused by the multitude of objects that you never
see anything till you run against it) by a gray lichen-covered bar,
as thick as your ankle. You follow it up with your eye, and find it
entwine itself with three or four other bars, and roll over with
them in great knots and festoons and loops twenty feet high, and
then go up with them into the green cloud over your head, and
vanish, as if a giant had thrown a ship's cables into the tree-tops.
One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the Negro and the
Indian, is a Liantasse. {129c} You see that at once by the form of
its cable--six or eight inches across in one direction, and three or
four in another, furbelowed all down the middle into regular knots,
and looking like a chain cable between two flexible iron bars. At
another of the loops, about as thick as your arm, your companion, if
you have a forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few
blows of his cutlass he will sever it as high up as he can reach,
and again below, some three feet down, and, while you are wondering
at this seemingly wanton destruction, he lifts the bar on high,
throws his head back, and pours down his thirsty throat a pint or
more of pure cold water. This hidden treasure is, strange as it may
seem, the ascending sap, or rather the ascending pure rain-water
which has been taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft, to be
elaborated into sap, and le