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"It is an idea, and it is an object!" observed Benito, "to follow this liana, no matter what may be the obstacles, thickets, underwood, rocks, brooks, torrents, to let nothing stop us, not even " "Certainly, you are right, brother!" said Minha; "Lina is a trifle absurd." "Come on, then!" replied her brother; "you say that Lina is absurd so as to say that Benito is absurd to approve of it!"
No Norwegian peasant ever towed home a Yule log with a greater exhibition of joy than those savages displayed as they hauled us through the thickets. They had a contempt for open places. They chose the most intricate paths they could find, and if a tough liana gripped Holman or me around the throat, the fiends found great fun in straining upon the rope till the wire-like creepers gave way.
The liana was for the purpose of stringing the fish on, should the catch be large. He led the way down the grassy sward to the lagoon where the dinghy lay, close up to the bank, and moored to a post driven into the soft soil. Emmeline got in, and, taking the sculls, he pushed off. The tide was going out. I have said that the reef just here lay a great way out from the shore.
And then when the liana ran down again to the ground the difficulty of picking it out under the mass of lycopods, large-leaved heliconias, rosy-tasseled calliandras, rhipsalas encircling it like the thread on an electric reel, between the knots of the large white ipomas, under the fleshy stems of the vanilla, and in the midst of the shoots and branchlets of the grenadilla and the vine.
Besides, the colour of the one upon the vine was entirely different. It was of a uniform black all over smooth and glittering. It was the black snake then the `constrictor' of the north. "When we first noticed it, it was wound upon the liana in spiral rings, like the worm of a gigantic screw.
In every other way they were our friends one might almost say our devoted slaves but when it was suggested that they should help us to make and carry a plank which would bridge the chasm, or when we wished to get from them thongs of leather or liana to weave ropes which might help us, we were met by a good-humored, but an invincible, refusal.
There were other blossoms mingling with these, for still other parasites smaller ones were twined around it; and we could distinguish the beautiful star-like flowers of the cypress vine. Among these an object was in motion a living object a body the body of a great snake, nearly as thick as the liana itself. "Another rattlesnake! No; the rattlesnake is not a tree-climber, it could not be that.
Fascinated, he stared wide-eyed at the tree with its wealth of parasite life sapping its vitality. Trailing orchids and tree-ferns festooned its limbs; liana and bajuca vines smothered it in death-like embrace.
In Albano's silent heart, therefore, there was to be seen a saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael's Mary, but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week, hanging behind a veil.
Fragoso ended by exclaiming; "but it is not to me that all this happiness is due, it is due to Lina!" "To me?" replied the young mulatto. "No doubt of it. Without the liana, without the idea of the liana, could I ever have been the cause of so much happiness?"
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