nder foliage.

For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an
English wood. But try to walk through it, and ten steps undeceive
you. Around your knees are probably Mamures, with creeping stems and
fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young cocoa-nut-palm. You
try to brush through them, and are caught up instantly by a string or
wire belonging to some other plant. You look up and round, and then you
find that the air is full of wires,--that you are hung up in a net-work
of fine branches belonging 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 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. 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 cable into the tree-tops.

One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the negro and the
Indian, is a Liantasse. 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 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