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The woody creepers, themselves covered by other creepers, were of great thickness: some which I measured were two feet in circumference. Many of the older trees presented a very curious appearance from the tresses of a liana hanging from their boughs, and resembling bundles of hay.
The pathless jungles of teak and iron wood, inextricably tangled by ropes of liana or ladders of rattan, latticed with creepers and wreathed with clambering fern, make an impenetrable barrier between the settlements of the coast and the unknown interior, where barbarism still reigns triumphant, and "head-hunting" remains the traditional sport.
The Political Officer, looking about him, pointed to a thick creeper with withered-seeming bark and said with a laugh: "There's your water, Wargrave. Lots of it on tap. See here." He cut off a length of the liana, which contained a whitish, pulpy interior. From the two ends of the piece water began to drip steadily and increased to a thin stream.
The Ticuna poison, to which La Condamine has given so much celebrity in Europe, and which somewhat improperly begins to bear the name of ticuna, is extracted from a liana which grows in the island of Mormorote, on the Upper Maranon.
He describes the least suggestion of a trail, a footprint, or a knife-cut, or a torn leaf. As the white man finds his way about a city by means of street signs, so the savage reads his directions in the forest from the trees and the ground. He knows every plant and its uses, the best wood for fires; he knows when he may expect to find water, and which liana makes the strongest rope.
The planks were bound together by a sort of liana, or creeping-plant, and caulked with moss steeped in pitch, which was turned by contact with the sea-water to a substance as hard as metal. I have nothing special to record during the week that succeeded our departure. The breeze blew steadily from the south, and we did not meet with any unfavourable current between the banks of the Jane Sound.
The Indians of America carry all their products, such as maize, sugar, coffee, etc., in bags made of this leaf, which they know how to arrange so well, that they transport an "arroba," or twenty-five pounds any distance without a single grain escaping, and without any appliance other than a liana or creeper to tie it up with. As to the medicinal qualities of the leaves, they are numerous.
And Lina pointed to a liana of the "cipos" kind, twisted round a gigantic sensitive mimosa, whose leaves, light as feathers, shut up at the least disturbance. "Well?" said Benito. "I proposed," replied Minha, "that we try to follow that liana to its very end."
An individual was selected about eight feet long one man holding his head and another his tail, whilst a third took a few lengths of a flexible liana, and deliberately bound the jaws and the legs. Thus secured, the beast was laid across the benches of the boat on which we sat during the hour and a half's journey to the settlement.
He warmly thanked Lina for the good idea she had had of following the liana, and they all started on the road to the fazenda, where Fragoso was received in a way that gave him neither wish nor want to try his wretched task again. THE HALF-MILE square of forest was cleared.
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