And yet it is all beautiful--but there must be no sitting or lying down on this seething earth. It is not like your pine groves and your dainty woods in England. It is a tropic world, and to enjoy it you must keep slowly moving. Imagine the whole of France and the Iberian peninsula closely packed with trees varying from 20 to 180 feet high, whose crowns of foliage interlace and prevent any view of sky and sun, and each tree from a few inches to four feet in diameter. Then from tree to tree run cables from two inches to fifteen inches in diameter, up and down in loops and festoons and W’s and badly-formed M’s; fold them round the trees in great tight coils, until they have run up the entire height, like endless anacondas; let them flower and leaf luxuriantly, and mix up above with the foliage of the trees to hide the sun, then from the highest branches let fall the ends of the cables reaching near to the ground by hundreds with frayed extremities, for these represent the air roots of the Epiphytes; let slender cords hang down also in tassels with open thread-work at the ends. Work others through and through these as confusedly as possible, and pendent from branch to branch--with absolute disregard of material, and at every fork and on every horizontal branch plant cabbage-like lichens of the largest kind, and broad spear-leaved plants--these would represent the elephant-eared plant--and orchids and clusters of vegetable marvels, and a drapery of delicate ferns which abound. Now cover tree, branch, twig, and creeper with a thick moss like a green fur. Where the forest is compact as described above, we may not do more than cover the ground closely with a thick crop of phrynia, and amoma, and dwarf bush; but if the lightning, as frequently happens, has severed the crown of a proud tree, and let in the sunlight, or split a giant down to its roots, or scorched it dead, or a tornado has been uprooting a few trees, then the race for air and light has caused a multitude of baby trees to rush upward--crowded, crushing, and treading upon and strangling one another, until the whole is one impervious bush. But the average forest is a mixture of these scenes. There will probably be groups of fifty trees standing like columns of a cathedral, grey and solemn in the twilight, and in the midst there will be a naked and gaunt patriarch, bleached white, and around it will have grown a young community, each young tree clambering upward to become heir to the area of light and sunshine once occupied by the sire. The law of primogeniture reigns here also.