Across Nicaragua with Transit and Machete. 329 



ground aud to their fellows by the numerous vines, sheltered and 

 protected also by their fellows from the shock of storms, their 

 huge trunks have little to do except support the direct weight of 

 the tops, and they rarely fall until they have reached the last stages 

 of decay. Then some day the sudden impact of a ton or two of 

 water dropped from some furious tropical shower, or the vibra- 

 tions from a hurrying troop of monkeys, or the spring of a tiger, 

 is too much for one of the giant branches heavy with its load of 

 vines and parasites, and it gives way, breaking the vines in ewerj 

 direction and splitting a huge strip from the main trunk. With 

 its supports thus broken and the whole weight of the remaining 

 branches on one side, the weakened trunk sways fof a moment 

 then bows to its fate. The remaining vines break with the resist- 

 less strain, and the old giant gathering velocity as he falls and 

 dragging with him everything in his reach, crashes to the earth 

 with a roar which elicits cries of terror from bird and beast, 

 and goes booming through the quivering forest like the report 

 of a heavy cannon. A patch of blue sky overhead and a pile of 

 impenetrable debris below, mark for years the grave of the old 

 hero. 



As regards the insect and reptile pests of the country it has 

 been my experience that both their numbers and capacity for 

 torment have been greatly exaggerated. Mosquitoes, flies of 

 various sizes, wasps and stinging ants exist, and the first in 

 some places in large numbers ; yet to a person who has any 

 of the woodsman's craft of taking care of himself, and whose 

 blood is not abnormally sensitive to insect poisons, they pre- 

 sent no terrors and but slight annoyances. At our headquarters 

 camp on San Francisco island, we had no mosquitoes from 

 sunrise to sunset, and even after sunset they were not especially 

 numerous. At another camp only a few miles away there w^ere 

 black flies only and no mosquitoes, at another both, while at 

 the camps up in the hills there were neither. It was only at 

 camps in the wet lowlands and near swamps, that they became an 

 almost unendurable annoyance. Even here it was those who 

 remained in camp that suffered most. Men out in the thick 

 brush were but little annoyed by them, and when on their return 

 to camp they had finished their dinner and gotten into their 

 mosquito bars they were out of their reach. As to snakes, the 

 danger from them even to a European, is practically nothing. 

 Not a man of the several hundred that have been engaged in the 



