FLORA OF THE MOUNTAIN. 241 



attempted to penetrate their inextricable labyrinths.* They 

 are also the horror of the husbandman who has the audacity 

 to attempt to clear the surface where they grow ; but espe- 

 cially are they the trouble of the surveyor, who, with transit 

 and compass, axe and chain, intrudes upon them. Many a 

 youthful engineer will remember the days of his chain- 

 carrying and rod-fixing through these thickets, and how fre- 

 quently he found himself enveloped to the chin by a net of 

 iron thongs, which held him like the jaws of an insidious 

 trap. 



The style of growth of the Rhododendron is peculiar. 

 The stems writhe and twist themselves together in every 

 conceivable shape of knots and tortuosities, and wherever 

 the branches touch the ground they strike root, and the 

 plant grows afresh from this point ; it is thus that an inter- 

 laced web of stems, almost as stiff and hard as iron, is 

 stretched over large extents, which are as impassable as cane- 

 brakes. The traveler who attempts to traverse these thickets 

 finds himself continually caught by loops and dead-falls. 

 The lover of the beauty of the woods, however, will find in 

 these sylvan labyrinths, these evergreen seas of living plants, 

 an attractive department of the Mountain Flora. During 

 the inflorescence of this plant it is impossible to con- 

 ceive of anything more splendid than its mass of flowers, 

 which are borne in large showy terminal corymbs or clus- 

 ters. They are of a pale-rose color, and sometimes snow- 

 white, the greenish throat of each blossom being spotted 

 with yellow or red. Its large, thick, coriaceous leaves fre- 

 quently attain the length of a foot. During winter and in 

 intense cold, they fold or coil up longitudinally, each leaf 

 showing a roll not much larger than a cigar, which drops 

 down close along the terminal twigs of the plant. When a 



* The engineer corps who located the railroads across this moun- 

 tain chain, discovered the skeletons of several men who had been 

 lost and starved to death in these thickets of Laurel and Rhododen- 

 dron. 



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