"This way," said father. "Take it slowly. These cursed things will hold our weight, but I never feel very comfortable on them." We left the solid ground upon which Under Gardens was built, and I confess I never felt comfortable either, until we were back again. The inclined causeway was some twenty feet wide. It wound steeply upward through the forest growth, with a ten-foot space cleared over it like a tunnel. It was built of porous tree-trunks, lashed together with a heavy vegetable fiber laid on them for a walking surface. Its framework was bound to the trees and the thick vines which grew everywhere throughout this gigantic forest tangle. The whole structure bent and swayed beneath our weight as we advanced up it. I was reminded of the old-time giant bamboo bridges of Japan. We went up through some two hundred feet of the jungle and came abruptly into the broad daylight of its upper surface. We were in the heart of the city they called Garla; this small locality where we emerged was the center of population of all Xenephrene. "Here," said father, "come up here for a minute--I'll show you how it lies--Zetta, keep them back." A crowd of people already was gathering, staring at us silently. Father waved them away; and murmured a queer guttural command to our insect convoy. The things lay quiet in a group. Near at hand, on a tree-trunk framework, was a small platform some twenty feet in the air with a ladder leading up to it. "Come up," said father. "We can see better--a jumping platform, as I call it." * * * * * We mounted, and gazed upon as strange a scene as ever I could have imagined would be spread before me. The surface of Xenephrene here was covered, for an area of perhaps five miles square, with this dense forest growth. Its top--two hundred feet above the ground--was tangled and matted into an undulating upper surface. Upon this forest top, the main section of the city of Garla was built. The streets--we seemed now to be on one of the main ones--were narrow, crooked roadways of split porous logs, bound with matting. The tops of the jungle vines projected with waving branches between them. Houses lined the streets, fiber shacks of every size and shape, with large empty areas like gardens between them. Cubical, oval, triangular--some low like a bungalow--others tall and narrow as towers. Flimsy vegetable structures, with matted roofs to shed the rain; with windows, doorways, sometimes twenty feet above the roadway. Some of the houses were set like nests below the street level, in the vegetation itself, with entrance from the roof. Others clung between the trunks of taller projecting branches, bound there with living vines, half hidden by leaves and giant flowers.