o me. I might have spent weeks in
botanizing merely at them; but all I could remark, or cared to remark,
there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo towards
growing enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the
only question for one who for forty years had been longing for one peep
at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a
deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden
bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet
season, and on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left
of the trace. I hurried down it like any school-boy, dashing through mud
and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of
help from good-natured negroes, who expected the respectable elderly
"buccra" to come to grief, struggled perspiring up the other side of
the gully, and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short,
breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.

In the primeval forest, looking upon that upon which my teachers and
masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace,
Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine,
comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare
in ignorance. There was actually, then, such a sight to be seen on
earth, and it was not less, but far more, wonderful than they had said.

My first feeling on entering the high woods was helplessness, confusion,
awe, all but terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards.
Without a compass, or the landmark of some opening to or from which he
can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness
is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it
impossible to give any general sketch of the forest. Once inside "you
cannot see the wood for the trees." You can only wander on as far as you
dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and
carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines
all straining upward, in fierce competition, towards the light-food far
above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round
your head, and rises thickening to an unknown height. The upward lines
are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what
leaves they bear, being for most part on the tips of the twigs, give a
scattered, mist-like appearance to the u