“Well, both of you are absurd, if that will amuse you,” returned Minha. “Let us follow the liana!”
“You are not afraid?” said Manoel.
“Still objections!” shouted Benito.
“Ah, Manoel! you would not speak like that if you were already on your way and Minha was waiting for you at the end.”
“I am silent,” replied Manoel; “I have no more to say. I obey. Let us follow the liana!”
And off they went as happy as children home for their holidays.
This vegetable might take them far if they determined to follow it to its extremity, like the thread of Ariadne, as far almost as that which the heiress of Minos used to lead her from the labyrinth, and perhaps entangle them more deeply.
It was in fact a creeper of the salses family, one of the cipos known under the name of the red “japicanga,” whose length sometimes measures several miles. But, after all, they could leave it when they liked.
The cipo passed from one tree to another without breaking its continuity, sometimes twisting round the trunks, sometimes garlanding the branches, here jumping form a dragon-tree to a rosewood, then from a gigantic chestnut, the “Bertholletia excelsa,” to some of the wine palms, “baccabas,” whose branches have been appropriately compared by Agassiz to long sticks of coral flecked with green. Here round “tucumas,” or ficuses, capriciously twisted like centenarian olive-trees, and of which Brazil had fifty-four varieties; here round the kinds of euphorbias, which produce caoutchouc, “gualtes,” noble palm-trees, with slender, 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.