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This hidden treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending sap, or rather the ascending pure rain-water which has been taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft, to be elaborated into sap, and leaf, and flower, and fruit, and fresh tissue for the very stem up which it originally climbed, and therefore it is that the woodman cuts the Water-vine through first at the top of the piece which he wants, and not at the bottom, for so rapid is the ascent of the sap that if he cut the stem below, the water would have all fled upwards before he could cut it off above.
Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of three or even four different plants. Soon you will be struck by the variety of the vegetation, and will recollect what you have often heard, that social plants are rare in the tropic forests. In Europe, a forest is usually made up of one dominant plant of firs or of pines, of oaks or of beeches, of birch or of heather.
By boring a hole just under the joints of each cane more than half a litre of clear water, not very fresh, but wholesome and good, gushes out. It is rather bitter to the taste and serves to restore one's forces as well as to quench one's thirst. The water-vine also acts as a Samaritan in the jungle.
And so, leading our tired horses, we went cheerily down the mountain side in Indian file, hopping and slipping from ledge to mud and mud to ledge, and calling a halt every five minutes to look at some fresh curiosity: now a tree-fern, now a climbing fern; now some huge tree-trunk, whose name was only to be guessed at; now a fresh armadillo-burrow; now a parasol-ants' warren, which had to be avoided lest horse and man should sink in it knee-deep, and come out sorely bitten; now some glimpse of sea and forest far below; now we cut a water-vine, and had a long cool drink; now a great moth had to be hunted, if not caught; or a toucan or some other strange bird listened to; or an eagle watched as he soared high over the green gulf.
He merely recalled that he had been compelled to eat of disagreeable things and face undesirable emergencies, to drink of the severed Water-vine, to partake of monkey-steak and broiled parrot, to sleep in poisonous swamplands.
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