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In a few hours, with the help of the felling-sword, they had cleared the ground, cut down the underwood, and opened large gaps into the densest portions of the wood. In this way the work progressed. The ground was cleared in front of the woodmen. The old trunks were divested of their clothing of creepers, cacti, ferns, mosses, and bromelias.
Only part of it could be seen; the hinder half and the tail were hidden among the bromelias and vines that in huge masses clustered around the trunk of the zamang, and the head was among the leaflets of the mimosa; but what they saw was enough to convince them that it was a snake of the largest size the great "water boa" the anaconda!
A delightful residence was made of the house; it was raised a story, surrounded by a veranda, and half hidden under beautiful trees mimosas, fig-sycamores, bauhinias, and paullinias, whose trunks were invisible beneath a network of scarlet-flowered bromelias and passion-flowers.
One of the trees from which the vines hung was a perfect mass of ferns, orchids and bromelias of many kinds. On the great slope back of us, toward the gap through which the brook had broken, were great cliffs of massive rock; otherwise the whole mountain slope was a sheet of richest green. The ascent was long and difficult, and the party went slowly, with many rests.
Blending their foliage with these fair indigenes are an hundred lovely exotics the orange, lemon, and fig; the Indian-lilac and tamarind; olives, myrtles, and bromelias; while the Babylonian willow contrasts its drooping fronds with the erect reeds of the giant cane, or the lance-like blades of the yucca gloriosa.
We soon found ourselves upon the damp slope in a forest, almost the counterpart of those with which we were familiar in the land of the Mixes. Great oaks were loaded with bromelias and dotted with orchids; ferns of many beautiful kinds grew along the roadside. Unlike the forest of the Mixes, the trees here were hung with masses of golden-yellow moss, presenting a curious and mysterious aspect.
Keeping continuously upon the crest, we had upon the one side the dry slope, with the pine forest, and on the other the damp slope, densely grown with low oaks, heavily clad with orchids and bromelias and weighted with great bunches of gray moss. The road passed up and down gentle and abrupt slopes separated by level spaces.
In the midst of these plains there are some rocky knolls, like islands, on which grow spiny cactuses, low leathery-leaved trees, slender, spiny palms, with plum-like fruit, prickly acacias, and thorny bromelias. This spiny character of vegetation seems to be characteristic of dry rocky places and tracts of country liable to great drought.
This he fastened on with a fibre of an aloe plant one of the bromelias; and the cotton, when thus secured, assumed a conical or spindle shape, having its larger end toward the butt of the arrow.
From the basement to the roof it was literally covered with foliage. A confused mass of orchids, bromelias, and climbing plants, all in flower, rooted in boxes of excellent soil hidden beneath masses of verdure. The trunk of some ficus or mimosa was never covered by a more startlingly tropical attire.
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