The land slopes down fast now. You are tramping through stiff mud, and those Roseaux are a sign of water. There is a stream or gully near; and now, for the first time, you can see clear sunshine through the stems, and see, too, something of the bank of foliage on the other side of the brook. You catch sight, it may be, of the head of a tree aloft, blazing with golden trumpet-flowers, which is a Poui; and of another lower one covered with hoar-frost, perhaps a Croton; and of another, a giant covered with purple tassels: this is an Angelim. Another giant overtops even him. His dark, glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light as they flicker in the breeze, for it blows hard aloft outside while you are in stifling calm. That is a Balata. And what is that on high--twenty or thirty square yards of rich crimson a hundred feet above the ground? The flowers may belong to the tree itself. It may be a mountain mangrove, which I have never seen in flower; but take the glasses and decide. No. The flowers belong to a liane. The “wonderful” Prince of Wales’s feather has taken possession of the head of a huge Mombin, and tiled it all over with crimson combs, which crawl out to the ends of its branches, and dangle twenty or thirty feet down, waving and leaping in the breeze. And over all blazes the cloudless blue. You gaze astonished. Ten steps downward and the vision is gone. The green cloud has closed again over your head and you are stumbling in the darkness of the bush, half blinded by the sudden change from the blaze to the shade. Beware. “Take care of the Croc-chien!” shouts your companion; and you are aware of, not a foot from your face, a long, green, curved whip armed with pairs of barbs some four inches apart; and are aware also at the same moment that another has seized you by the arm, another by the knees, and that you must back out, unless you are willing to part with your clothes first and your flesh afterward. You back out, and find that you have walked into the tips--luckily only into the tips--of the fern-like fronds of a trailing and climbing palm such as you see in the Botanic Gardens. That came from the East, and furnishes the rattan canes. This furnishes the gri-gri canes, and is rather worse to meet, if possible, than the rattan. Your companion, while he helps you to pick the barbs out, calls the palm laughingly by another name, “Sueltami-Ingles,” and tells you the old story of the Spanish soldier at San Josef. You are near the water now, for here is a thicket of Balisiers. Push through, under their great plantain-like leaves--step down the muddy bank to that patch of gravel. See first, though, that it is not tenanted already by a deadly Mapepire, or rattlesnake, which has not the grace, as his cousin in North America has, to use his rattle.