oat. It
was like the "good-bye" of civilization.

The road they were pursuing through the forest was just a dim track beaten
down by the feet of the copal and cassava gatherers bearing their loads to
Yandjali. Here and there the forest thinned out and a riot of umbrella
thorns, vicious, sword-like grass and tall, dull purple flowers, like
hollyhocks made a scrub that choked the way and tangled the foot; then the
trees would thicken up, and with the green gloom of a mighty wave the
forest would fall upon the travellers and swallow them up.

Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to analyze the
extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him.

The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had
died to all the things he had ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself
in a foreign country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; a mile
deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage as it was, seemed part of
the civilization and the life he had left behind him.

The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees are familiar.
One may lose one's direction, but one can never lose _oneself_ amidst the
friendly pines, the beeches, the oaks, whose forms have been known to us
from childhood.

But here, where the beard-moss hangs from unknown trees, as we tramp
through the sweltering sap-scented gloom, we feel ourselves not in a
forest but under a cover.

There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing of the breeze in the
branches, nothing of the beauty of the forest twilight here. We are in a
great green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with
leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a
curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one's brow, with the
languor of one's body, and the remembrance of one's past, for the sight of
an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird
whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust.

A great green room, where echo sounds of things unknown.

You can see nothing but the foliage, and the tree boles just around, yet
the place is full of life and war and danger.

That crash followed by the shrieking of birds--you cannot tell whether it
is half a mile away or quite close, or to the right, or to the left, or
whether it is caused by a branch torn from a tree by some huge hand, or a
tree a hundred years old felled at last by Time.

Time is the woodman of the