134 THE COMBAT. 
Who could sustain the thunderous flash without reeling and without 
terror ? 
Just, indeed, and legitimate, is the 
traveller's hesitancy at the entrance of 
these fearful forests where Tropical Nature, 
under forms oftentimes of great beauty, 
wages her keenest strife. It is the place 
to pause when one knows that the most 
formidable defence of the Spanish fortresses 
is found in a simple grove of cactus, which, 
planted around them, speedily swarms with 
serpents. You frequently detect there a 
strong odour of musk, a nauseous, a sinister 
odour. It tells you that you are treading 
on the very dust of the dead: the wreck 
of animals which possessed that peculiar 
savour, tiger-cats, and crocodiles, vultures, 
vipers, and rattle-snakes. 
The peril is greatest, perhaps, in those 
virgin-forests where everything is eloquent 
of life, where nature’s seething crucible 
eternally boils and bubbles. 
Here and there their living shadows 
thicken with a threefold canopy—the 
colossal trees, the entwining and interlacing 
lianas, and herbs of thirty feet high with 
magnificent leaves. At intervals, these 
herbs sink into the ancient primeval slime ; 
while, at the height of a hundred feet, the 
lofty and puissant flowers break through 
the deep night to display themselves in 
the burning sun. 
In the clearances—the narrow alleys where his rays penetrate— 
there is a scintillation, an eternal murmuring, of beetles, butterflies, 
