Even the animals seem to shun the dark forest depths; only on the highest trees a few pigeons bathe in the sun, and as they fly heavily over the wood, their call sounds, melancholy as a sad dream, from afar. A lonely butterfly flutters among the trees, a delicate being, unused to this dark world, seeking in vain for a ray of sun and a breath of fresh air. Sometimes we hear the grunt of an invisible pig, the breaking of branches and the rustling of leaves as it runs away. Moisture and lowering gloom brood over the swampy earth; one would not be surprised if suddenly the ground were to move and wriggle like slimy snakes tightly knotted around each other. Thorns catch the limbs, vines catch the feet, and the wanderer, stumbling along, almost fancies he can hear the spiteful laughter of malicious demons. One feels tired, worried, unsafe, as if in an enemy's country, helplessly following the guide, who walks noiselessly on the soft ground. With a branch he sweeps aside the innumerable spider-webs that droop across the path, to keep them from hanging in our faces. Silently the other men follow behind; once in a while a dry branch snaps or a trunk creaks. In this dark monotony we go on for hours, without an outlook, and seemingly without purpose or direction, on a hardly visible path, in an endless wilderness. We pass thousands of trees, climb over hundreds of fallen trunks and brush past millions of creepers. Sometimes we enter a clearing, where a giant tree has fallen or a village used to stand. Sometimes great coral rocks lie in the thicket; the pools at their foot are a wallowing-place for pigs. It is a confusing walk; one feels quite dizzy with the constantly passing stems and branches, and a white man would be lost in this wilderness without the native, whose home it is. He sees everything, every track of beast or bird, and finds signs on every tree and vine, peculiarities of shape or grouping, which he recognizes with unerring certainty. He describes the least suggestion of a trail, a footprint, or a knife-cut, or a torn leaf. As the white man finds his way about a city by means of street signs, so the savage reads his directions in the forest from the trees and the ground. He knows every plant and its uses, the best wood for fires; he knows when he may expect to find water, and which liana makes the strongest rope. Yet even he seems to feel something of the appalling loneliness of the primeval forest.