Were it possible to soar on high and look down upon that wide verdant sea, its infinite gradations of green, enlivened here and there by the audacious brightness of a thousand wondrous flowers, we should have under our eyes the most complete, artistic and suggestive representation of life and its struggles.
The gigantic trees shoot up straight towards the sun, each one seeming to strive to outstrip the other; but a thick and even more ambitious undergrowth of plants twine round their trunks and enclose them in a tenacious embrace, then twisting, and creeping, amongst the spreading boughs, reach and cover the highest tops where they at last unfold their several leaves and flowers under the sun's most ardent gaze.
The tree, thus encircled and suffocated by the baneful hold of the climbers, lacks light and breath; the sap flows in scarce quantities throughout its organism and it languishes under the shade of the close tendrils; swarms of insects increase its agony by making their food and their nests of its bark; reptiles make love within the hollows of its trunk and at last the day comes when the lifeless giant falls with a frightful crash bearing with it the murderous parasite that is the victim of its own tenacity, which first raised it to bask in the sunshine and then caused it to be crushed under the rotten weight of its former supporter.
These are furious embraces of envy and jealousy; phrenzies of egotism in the vegetable kingdom: strange expressions of formidable hate and love, of oppression and vengeance.
All these myriads of plants are invaded by the irrepressible mania to ascend as high as possible and to receive the first, the most burning, perhaps the most pernicious, but the most liberal kiss of the sun. And they all hasten to arrive as though fearing to be superseded in the ascent as much by the colossal tree destined to brave centuries—if its massive roots are not ruined by its minute foes—as by those slender growths of a month or a day.
"Higher still! Always higher!" the green-leafed multitude seem to cry, "Excelsior!"
The sun never penetrates under this tangled mass of vegetation except where an opening has been made by the hands of the savages or by the work of lightning and hurricane.
In the dim light of its damp atmosphere the interminable rows of tall straight trunks, some stout and some slight, assume the oddest shapes which can appeal to the observer's phantasy. Now they are colonnades, adorned with pendant festoons stretching away into the distance; now they are mysterious aisles of monster temples; now they are the unfinished design of some giant architect whose undertaking was arrested by a sudden, mystic command. However fruitful may be the imagination of the artist he would here always find fresh and superb inspiration from the enthralling sight of Nature's virginal beauties.
The stagnant waters of the ponds, round which the frogs croak and the leeches crawl, are plentifully strewn with water-lilies, reeds and other aquatic plants.