he eye cannot focus itself rapidly
enough in this confusion of distances,--which have to be cut through ere
you can pass. Some of them are rooted in the ground, straight and tense;
some of them dangle and wave in the wind at every height. What are they?
Air-roots of wild pines, or of Matapalos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or
of some other parasite? Probably; but you cannot see. All you can see
is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look
up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on
end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud arms as big as
English forest-trees branch off, and that out of their forks a whole
green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and
half climbed up again.

You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has
sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is smooth and free from
climbers, and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very
cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty
yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle a dozen yards on, which has
climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller
still, till it has climbed out of sight, and possibly into the lower
branches of the big tree. And what are their species? What are their
families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist
can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The
leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the
tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree, when cut,
refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees
around. Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may
be one of three or even four different plants....

And where are the famous Orchids? They perch on every bough and stem;
but they are not, with three or four exceptions, in flower in the
winter; and if they were, I know nothing about them; at least I know
enough to know how little I know. Whosoever has read Darwin's
"Fertilization of Orchids," and finds in his own reason that the book is
true, had best say nothing about the beautiful monsters till he has seen
with his own eyes more than his master.

And yet even the three or four that are in flower are worth going many a
mile to see. In the hot-house they seem almost artificial from their
strangeness; but to see them "natural," on natural boughs, gives a sense
of th