Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy

by Frank R. Stockton

Here, now, is a very different place. This is a forest in the tropics. You will not be likely to meet with bandits here. In fact, it is very improbable indeed that you will meet with any one. There are vast portions of these woods which have never been trodden by the foot of man, and which you can never see unless you cut your way, hatchet in hand, among the thick undergrowth and the interlacing vines.

Here are ferns as large as trees—great masses of flowers that seem as if a whole garden had been emptied down before us—vast wildernesses of green, which we know extend for miles and miles, and which, although apparently so thick and impenetrable, are full of all kinds of life, vegetable and animal. The trees are enormous, but many of them are so covered with vines and creepers that we can scarcely distinguish the massive trunks and luxuriant foliage. Every color is here, rich green, royal purple, red, yellow, lilac, brown, and gray. The vines, which overrun everything, are filled with gorgeous flowers, and hang from the branches in the most graceful forms. Monkeys chatter among the trees, beautiful parrots fly from limb to limb, butterflies of the most gorgeous hues flutter about the grass-tops and the leaves near the ground, and on every log and trunk are myriads of insects, lizards and little living things of endless varieties, all strange and wonderful to us.

In some parts of this interminable forest, where the light breaks through the foliage, we see suspended from the trees the wonderful air-plants or orchids. They seem like hanging-baskets of flowers, and are far more beautiful and luxuriant than anything of the kind that we have in our hothouses at home.

But we shall not find it easy to walk through all these beauties. As I said before, we shall often be obliged to cut a path with our hatchets, and even then we may be unable to penetrate very far into this jungle of beauties. The natives of these countries, when they are compelled to pass through these dense forests, often take to the small streams and wade along in the water, which is sometimes up to their shoulders, occasionally finding shallower places, or a little space on the banks where they can pick their way along for a few hundred yards before they are obliged to take to the stream again.

Everything is lovely and luxuriant here, but it will not do to stay too long. There are fevers and snakes.

Let us now go to the greatest woods in the whole world. I do not mean the most extensive forest, but that one where the trees are the grandest. This is the region where the giant trees of California grow.

Nowhere on the face of the earth are there such trees as these. Some of them stand over four hundred feet high, and are thirty feet in diameter!

Their age is believed to be about eighteen hundred years. Think of it! They have been growing there during the whole of the Christian era!