128 A NATURALIST'S WANDERINOS 



bivouac, with trunk and limbs entwined and warped, often even 

 to fatal strangulation, by an impossible unravelment of lianes 

 and huge climbers, which hung in coils and loops, and stretched 

 from tree to tree for hundreds of yards, themselves adorned 

 as with finely curving scroll work, with ferns and orchids 

 and delicate twining epiphytes. Beneath this shade a second 

 forest grows of lesser trees, below which again a dense thicket 

 of low shrubs and herbs, Caladiums, and broad-leaved Scita- 

 mineas (or Ginger family) and of horrid thorn- and hook- 

 bearing rattan-palms, climbing and holding on to everything, 

 blocking up every unoccupied space— the whole forming an 

 impenetrable wall of vegetation. 



In this same portion of the road, a few weeks later, while 

 returning from the coast, on horseback alone and unarmed, 

 on a pitch dark night, I had a narrow escape from a tiger. 

 My horse suddenly snorted in a strange manner, and came 

 to a dead stop with its feet planted in the ground, then 

 reared back ; at the same moment the great body of a tiger 

 shot close past my face and alighted with a heavy thud in 

 the jungle on my other side. Haunted with the idea that I 

 was perhaps being stalked, the night became doubly dismal to 

 me. My horse, a miserable pony at best, was so terror-stricken 

 as to be almost useless, and the seven miles that I traversed 

 before the light of my own dwelling flashed on me seemed 

 the longest I ever rode. 



Mr. Wallace's truthful works have, or ought to have, now 

 dispelled the erroneous ideas about the wonderful profusion of 

 fine flowers existing in the tropics. This is just one of the 

 products of " the summer of the world " that the traveller fails 

 to see unless he search very well and very closely. The great 

 forest trees are too high for one to be able to see whether they 

 bear either fruit or flowers. It is only on rare occasions — and 

 then the sight repays him for many a weary mile — that he 

 alights on a grand specimen, whose top is a blaze of crimson 

 or gold ; more generally he knows that some high tree, which 

 of many it is often very difficult to say, is performing its func- 

 tions by seeing broken petals or fallen fruit spread over yards 

 and yards of the ground. Of the great mass of lower vege- 

 tation nothing is seen but green foliage. Hours and hours, 

 sometimes days even, I have traversed a forest-bounded road. 



