1848.] 



THE VIRGIN FOREST, 



17 



perfectly straight ; the huge creepers, which climb about them, 

 sometimes stretching obliquely from their summits like the 

 stays of a mast, sometimes winding around their trunks like 

 immense serpents waiting for their prey. Here, two or three 

 together, twisting spirally round each other, form a complete 

 living cable, as if to bind securely these monarchs of the forest ; 

 there, they form tangled festoons, and, covered themselves 

 with smaller creepers and parasitic plants, hide the parent stem 

 from sight. 



Among the trees the various kinds that have buttresses 

 projecting around their base are the most striking and peculiar. 

 Some of these buttresses are much longer than they are high^i 

 springing from a distance of eight or ten feet from the base, 

 and reaching only four or five feet high on the trunk, while 

 others rise to the height of twenty or thirty feet, and can even 

 be distinguished as ribs on the stem to forty or fifty. They 

 are complete wooden walls, from six inches to a foot thick^ 

 sometimes branching into two or three, and extending straight: 

 out to such a distance as to afford room for a comfortable hut 

 in the angle between them. Large square pieces are often 

 cut out of them to make paddles, and for other uses, the wood 

 being generally very light and soft. 



Other trees, again, appear as if they were formed by a 

 number of slender stems growing together. They are deeply 

 furrowed and ribbed for their whole height, and in places these 

 furrows reach quite through them, like windows in a narrow 

 tower, yet they run up as high as the loftiest trees of the forest, 

 with a straight stem of uniform diameter. Another most 

 curious form is presented by those which have many of their 

 roots high above the surface of the ground, appearing to stand 

 on many legs, and often forming archways large enough for 

 a man to walk beneath. 



The stems oT all these trees, and the climbers that wind or 

 wave around them, support a multitude of dependants. Til- 

 landsias and other Bro7neliacece^ resembling wild pine-apples, 

 large climbing Arums, with their dark green arrowhead-shaped 

 leaves, peppers in great variety, and large-leaved ferns, shoot 

 out at intervals all up the stem, to the very topmost branches. 

 Eetween these, creeping ferns and delicate little species like 

 our Hymenophyllum abound, and in moist dark places the 

 leaves of these are again covered with minute creeping mosses 



