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Updated: June 8, 2025
Upon this trail we found our first swinging foot-bridges made of lianas, or vines, hanging from trees. These are, of course, only suitable for foot-travellers, but are a great convenience, where streams are likely to be swollen.
Inland the forest swells in a green wall, and farther off it lies in rounded cupolas and domes of soft green, fading into a light around the distant hills. Under overhanging branches I lie, sheltered from the sun; at my feet the ripples caress the bank; delicate lianas hang from the branches and trail lazily in the water.
They filled the space between the tree-tops and the undergrowth, entangled, crisscrossed, festooned, like a petrified mass of writhing snakes. Through this maddening obstacle Badshah forced his way; while Dermot hacked at the impeding lianas with a sharp kukri, the heavy-bladed Gurkha knife.
The peons come out less for their salaries than for good and plenty of food, which is very difficult to find in these scarce times.... "The plants are here one by one, and we have got but one tree with three plants. They are on the highest and biggest trees, and these must be cut down with axes. Below are all shrubs, full of climbers and lianas about a finger thick.
Arthur and I employed ourselves in dragging the logs up to them, and in cutting the lianas or sepos, which my father and Marian unwound and prepared for use as cordage. The task was a far more difficult one than it would have been had we possessed axes. Our knives served only to cut off the smaller boughs, and slightly to trim the logs or cut the lianas.
Lianas, of various foliage, intertwining themselves among the trees, form, here, arcades of foliage, there, long canopies of verdure. Most of these trees shed aromatic odours so powerful, that the garments of a traveller, who has passed through the forest, often retain for hours the most delicious fragrance.
Every object assumes a more majestic and picturesque character; the soil, watered by springs, is furrowed in every direction; trees of gigantic height, covered with lianas, rise from the ravines; their bark, black and burnt by the double action of the light and the oxygen of the atmosphere, contrasts with the fresh verdure of the pothos and dracontium, the tough and shining leaves of which are sometimes several feet long.
The cultivation of the cocoa-nut is extremely simple; the only hard work is the first clearing of the ground, and keeping the young trees free from lianas. Once they are grown up, they are able to keep down the bush themselves to a certain extent, and then the work consists in picking up the ripe nuts from the ground, husking and drying them.
Several species of aloes, the Indian fig, adorned with yellow flowers spotted with red, and the thorny torch thistle, grew upon the dark summits of the rocks, and seemed to aim at reaching the long lianas, which, laden with blue or scarlet flowers, hung scattered over the steepest parts of the mountain. I loved to trace the ingenuity he had exercised in the arrangement of these trees.
Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in dolce far niente, not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes.
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