With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 2

by Unknown

You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you they are only three and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to it either way, but gradually discover that it is the leaf-stalk of a young Cocorite palm. The leaf is five-and-twenty feet long, and springs from a huge ostrich plume, which is sprawling out of the ground and up above your head a few yards off. You cut the leaf-stalk through right and left and walk on, to be stopped suddenly (for you get so confused by the multitude of objects that you never see anything till you run against it) by a gray lichen-covered bar as thick as your ankle. You follow it up with your eye, and find it entwine itself with three or four other bars, and roll over with them in great knots, and festoons, and loops twenty feet high, and then go up with them into the green cloud over your head, and vanish, as if a giant had thrown a ship’s cable into the tree-tops.

One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the negro and the Indian, is a Liantasse. You see that at once by the form of its cable,—six or eight inches across in one direction, and three or four in another, furbelowed all down the middle into regular knots, and looking like a chain cable between two flexible bars. At another of the loops, about as thick as your arm, your companion, if you have a forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few blows of his cutlass he will sever it as high up as he can reach, and again below, some three feet down; and, while you are wondering at this seemingly wanton destruction, he lifts the bar on high, throws his head back, and pours down his thirsty throat a pint or more of pure cold water. This hidden treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending sap, or rather the ascending pure rain-water which has been taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft, to be elaborated into sap, and leaf, and flower, and fruit, and fresh tissue for the very stem up which it originally climbed, and therefore it is that the woodman cuts the water-vine through first at the top of the piece which he wants, and not at the bottom; for so rapid is the ascent of the sap, that if he cut the stem below, the water would have all fled upward before he could cut it off above.

Meanwhile, the old story of Jack and the Bean-stalk comes into your mind. In such a forest was the old dame’s hut, and up such a bean-stalk Jack climbed, to fight a giant and a castle high above. Why not? What may not be up there? You look up into the green cloud, and long for a moment to be a monkey. There may be monkeys up there over your head,—burly red Howler, or tiny peevish Sapajou, peering down at you, but you cannot peer up at them. The monkeys, and the parrots, and the humming-birds, and the flowers, and all the beauty, are upstairs—up above the green cloud. You are in “the empty nave of the cathedral,” and the service is being celebrated aloft in the blazing roof.

We will hope that, as you look up, you have not been careless enough to walk on, for if you have you will be tripped up at once; nor to put your hand out incautiously to rest it against a tree, or what not, for fear of sharp thorns, ants, and wasp-nests. If you are all safe, your next steps, probably, as you struggle through the bush between tree-trunks of every possible size, will bring you face to face with huge upright walls of seeming boards, whose rounded edges slope upward till, as your eye follows them, you find them enter an enormous stem, perhaps round, like one of the Norman pillars of Durham nave, and just as huge; perhaps fluted, like one of William of Wykeham’s columns at Winchester.

There is the stem, but where is the tree? Above the green cloud. You struggle up to it between two of the board walls, but find it not so easy to reach. Between you and it are half a dozen tough strings which you had not noticed at first,—the eye cannot focus itself rapidly enough in this confusion of distances,—which have to be cut through ere you can pass. Some of them are rooted in the ground, straight and tense; some of them dangle and wave in the wind at every height. What are they? Air-roots of wild pines, or of Matapalos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or of some other parasite? Probably; but you cannot see. All you can see is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud arms as big as English forest-trees branch off, and that out of their forks a whole green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and half climbed up again.

You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is smooth and free from climbers, and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle a dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight, and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree. And what are their species? What are their families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree, when cut, refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around. Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of three or even four different plants....

And where are the famous Orchids? They perch on every bough and stem; but they are not, with three or four exceptions, in flower in the winter; and if they were, I know nothing about them; at least I know enough to know how little I know. Whosoever has read Darwin’s “Fertilization of Orchids,” and finds in his own reason that the book is true, had best say nothing about the beautiful monsters till he has seen with his own eyes more than his master.

And yet even the three or four that are in flower are worth going many a mile to see. In the hot-house they seem almost artificial from their strangeness; but to see them “natural,” on natural boughs, gives a sense of their reality which no unnatural situation can give. Even to look up at them perched on bough and stem, as one rides by, and to guess what exquisite and fantastic form may issue, in a few months or weeks, out of those fleshy, often unsightly, leaves, is a strange pleasure,—a spur to the fancy which is surely wholesome, if we will but believe that all these things were invented by a Fancy, which desires to call out in us, by contemplating them, such small fancy as we possess, and to make us poets, each according to his power, by showing a world in which, if rightly looked at, all is poetry.

Another fact will soon force itself on your attention, unless you wish to tumble down and get wet up to your knees. The soil is furrowed everywhere by holes, by graves some two or three feet wide and deep, and of uncertain length and shape, often wandering about for thirty or forty feet, and running confusedly into each other. They are not the work of man, nor of an animal, for no earth seems to have been thrown out of them. In the bottom of the dry graves you sometimes see a decaying root; but most of them just now are full of water, and of tiny fish also, which burrow in the mud, and sleep during the dry season, to come out and swim during the wet. These graves are, some of them, plainly quite new. Some, again, are very old, for trees of all sizes are growing in them and over them.