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He lives on small mammals and birds, eggs and fruits, but before he swallows his food he cleans it well, generally in water. There is a perpetual gloom under the crowns of the foliaged trees and palms. It is the home of shadows. Only lianas, these parasites of the vegetable kingdom, raise their stems above the dusky vault to open their calyces in the sun.
Hanging from the highest branches or swinging between the massive boles creepers of every kind rioted in bewildering confusion, a chaos of natural cordage, of festooned lianas thick as a liner's hawser, some twisting around each other, others coiling about the tree-trunks, biting deep into the bark or striving to strangle them in a cruel grip.
"Let me cease, O thou Perfectly Awakened, to remain as an Ape in the World-forest, forever ascending and descending in search of the fruits of folly. Swift as the twining of serpents, vast as the growth of lianas in a forest, are the all-encircling growths of the Plant of Desire. "O the Jewel in the Lotos!" Vain his prayer, alas! vain also his invocation!
Beneath one tufted bower of gum trees, interwoven with lianas, no object whatever could be perceived: while the point of the adjoining rock, jutting out from the mountain, commanded a view of the whole enclosure, and of the distant ocean, where, occasionally, we could discern the distant sail, arriving from Europe, or bound thither.
We found there two men who had just been brought down the Rio Frio by their companions, greatly injured, by the lianas up which they had made their ladder to ascend one of the rubber trees, having broken and precipitated them to the ground. I learnt that this was a very unusual accident, the lianas generally being very tough and strong, like great cables.
The path is a difficult one, and the lake itself is less interesting than the lovely vegetation by which it is surrounded. Ferns and bracken cover the hillside, pollipods predominating, orchids cling to tree stems, and higher up, the curious nest-fern and various forms of plant life attract attention. Tree is woven to tree by a network of mighty lianas.
I have said nothing about the magnificence of the scenery for a part of the way, where the road goes through a grand mountain pass, where all the vegetable glories of the tropics seem assembled, and one gets a new idea of what scenery can be; while beneath superb tree-ferns and untattered bananas, and palms, and bright-flowered lianas, and graceful trailers, and vermilion-colored orchids, and under sun-birds and humming birds and the most splendid butterflies I ever saw, a torrent, as clear as crystal, dashes over the rocks, and adds the music of tumbling water to the enchantment of a scene whose loveliness no words can give any idea of.
A whole forest of slender poles, connected with each other by lianas, from which large quantities of fish were suspended, drying in the sun, and which, by the way, gave off a most intolerable odour, indicated that the inhabitants depended as much upon the river as upon the soil for their subsistence.
They then brought the tops of the saplings all together and bound them; thus producing a skeleton structure exactly shaped like a bee-hive. This skeleton they then strengthened by interweaving it with stout lianas or "monkey-rope," as the sailors call the long, tough stems of the creepers that interlace themselves about the trees in tropical countries.
And then, one day without warning came the sound of an ax, and another and another. From that moment the songs, cries, chirps and roars of the jungle were seldom heard from our camp. Every day saw new phalanxes of splendid primeval trees fallen, or half suspended in their rigging of lianas. The leaves withered, the flower petals fell and we heard no more the crackling of bamboos in the wind.
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