ound them, sometimes stretching obliquely
from their summits, like the stays of a ship's mast. Others wound round
their trunks, like huge serpents ready to spring on their prey. Others,
again twisted spirally round each other, forming vast cables of living
wood, holding fast those mighty monarchs of the forest. Some of the
trees were so covered with smaller creepers and parasitic plants that
the parent stem was entirely concealed. The most curious trees were
those having buttresses projecting from their bases. The lower part of
some of them extended ten feet or more from the base of the tree,
reaching only five or six feet up the trunk. Others again extended to
the height of fully thirty feet, and could be seen running up like ribs
to a still greater height. Some of these ribs were like wooden walls,
several inches in thickness, extended from the stem, so as to allow room
for a good-sized hut to be formed between them by merely roofing over
the top. Again, I remarked other trees ribbed and furrowed for their
whole height. Occasionally these furrows pierced completely through the
trunks, like the narrow windows of an ancient tower. There were many
whose roots were like those of the bulging palm, but rising much higher
above the surface of the ground. The trees appeared to be standing on
many-legged pedestals, frequently so far apart from each other that we
could without difficulty walk beneath them. A multitude of pendants
hung from many of the trees, some like large wild pine-apples, swinging
in the air. There were climbing arums, with dark-green arrow-head
shaped leaves; huge ferns shot out here and there up the stems to the
topmost branches. Many of the trees had leaves as delicately cut as
those of the graceful mimosa, while others had large palmate leaves, and
others, again, oval glossy ones.

Now and then, as I looked upwards, I was struck with the finely-divided
foliage strongly defined against the blue sky, here and there lighted up
by the bright sunshine; while, in the region below through which we
moved, a deep gloom prevailed, adding grandeur and solemnity to the
scene. There were, however, but few flowers; while the ground on which
we walked was covered with dead leaves and rotten wood, the herbage
consisting chiefly of ferns and a few grasses and low creeping plants.

We stopped at last to lunch, and while John and I were seated on the
branch of a fallen tree, our friend disappeared. He retur