GIANTS. 



353 



keeping their watch on the edge of precipices and 

 gazing into the abyss." 



We who arc accustomed to see such climbing 

 plants in our woods as the honeysuckle and hop, 

 have but a poor conception of what climbing plants 

 become in a tropical forest. Kingsley alludes to a 

 magnificent wild vine or liantasse {Sc/mel/a excisa), 

 " so grand that its form strikes even the negro and 

 the Indian. 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 iron bars. At another of 

 the loops, about as thick as your arm, your com- 

 panion, 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 



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