er, graceful, and glossy stems; and cacao-trees,
which shoot up of their own accord on the banks of the Amazon and its
tributaries, having different melastomas, some with red flowers and
others ornamented with panicles of whitish berries.

But the halts! the shouts of cheating! when the happy company thought
they had lost their guiding thread! For it was necessary to go back and
disentangle it from the knot of parasitic plants.

"There it is!" said Lina, "I see it!"

"You are wrong," replied Minha; "that is not it, that is a liana of
another kind."

"No, Lina is right!" said Benito.

"No, Lina is wrong!" Manoel would naturally return.

Hence highly serious, long-continued discussions, in which no one would
give in.

Then the black on one side and Benito on the other would rush at the
trees and clamber up to the branches encircled by the cipo so as to
arrive at the true direction.

Now nothing was assuredly less easy in that jumble of knots, among which
twisted the liana in the middle of bromelias, _"karatas,"_ armed with
their sharp prickles, orchids with rosy flowers and violet lips the size
of gloves, and oncidiums more tangled than a skein of worsted between a
kitten's paws.

And then when the liana ran down again to the ground the difficulty
of picking it out under the mass of lycopods, large-leaved heliconias,
rosy-tasseled calliandras, rhipsalas encircling it like the thread on
an electric reel, between the knots of the large white ipomas, under
the fleshy stems of the vanilla, and in the midst of the shoots and
branchlets of the grenadilla and the vine.

And when the cipo was found again what shouts of joy, and how they
resumed the walk for an instant interrupted!

For an hour the young people had already been advancing, and nothing had
happened to warn them that they were approaching the end.

They shook the liana with vigor, but it would not give, and the birds
flew away in hundreds, and the monkeys fled from tree to tree, so as to
point out the way.

If a thicket barred the road the felling-sword cut a deep gap, and the
group passed in. If it was a high rock, carpeted with verdure, over
which the liana twisted like a serpent, they climbed it and passed on.

A large break now appeared. There, in the more open air, which is as
necessary to it as the light of the sun, the tree of the tropics, _par
excellence,_ which, according to Humboldt, "accompanies man in the
infancy of his civilization," th