11 
a.**." nXZ--'- * 
in front of the door of a little arriiazem ^siiop), or a mule lodened 
with 
hags 0 i charcoal, or perhaps an ole noiTjan painfully cli ihing the steep slopes 
x.jside t^.e picket and 'nire lence punctuated by a si;iall turnstile, we ascended 
a stone pathway carpeted by lovely Selagin ella and little ferns. I had seen 
licnens and fungi even on the steel railroad tracks, and here they grew 
everjnvhare , and the vertical rocks which had been cut through to iiiake the 
path were covered witn cra3"green circular fungi which had the texture of 
velvet- and the thinness of parchment, ihe typical pointed leaves of rain- 
forest vegetation hung all around us dripping with mist, and the tops of the 
trees below us contained gorgeous orange -flowered Bromeliads and a host 
of little Tillandsias and orchids, now at the end of their season of bloomirg 
tinkle of bells seemingly just under my feet made me look' down and there 
a huni red jnards beloiv and almost straight down was ariother path cut in the 
hillside, along ?/hich a procession of five mules ?/as coming, with 3 hags of 
cnarcoal piled, on the back of each. A minute later we came to a rise in 
path, v/ith a of mist-crowned mountains £;nd the thread of railroad 
stretching over the opposite slope towards Santos an, the sea. But the mist 
closed in again, and we saw trees outlined dimly against the ghostly curtain 
with swinging epiph^ytic roots sharplj^ etched across it, and silence, 
silence except for the drip of the mist from a laillion leaf- tips and far 
awajr the shriek of a train on the siding . IToviT we saw a fence of branches 
laced together seeming to arrive towards us out of a cloud, and Joachim 
armounced that we wrere at the biological station. Imother turnstile (I 
wonoer now the half-wild cattle could possibly clinib up, to make one 
necessary), and, we pushed into a garden of close-cut turf in the center 
of which was a pond full of yellow waterlillies and-rmore irap.ortant to me— 
luultitudes of little black tadpoles. The biological station itself vies 
a wooden tumble-down building, very creak 5 '' as to floors, but aaed to a 
