Meanwhile, the old story of Jack and the Bean-stalk comes into your
mind. In such a forest was the old dame's hut, and up such a bean-stalk
Jack climbed, to fight a giant and a castle high above. Why not? What
may not be up there? You look up into the green cloud, and long for
a moment to be a monkey. There may be monkeys up there over your
head,--burly red Howler, or tiny peevish Sapajou, peering down at you,
but you cannot peer up at them. The monkeys, and the parrots, and the
humming-birds, and the flowers, and all the beauty, are upstairs--up
above the green cloud. You are in "the empty nave of the cathedral," and
the service is being celebrated aloft in the blazing roof.
We will hope that, as you look up, you have not been careless enough to
walk on, for if you have you will be tripped up at once; nor to put your
hand out incautiously to rest it against a tree, or what not, for fear
of sharp thorns, ants, and wasp-nests. If you are all safe, your next
steps, probably, as you struggle through the bush between tree-trunks of
every possible size, will bring you face to face with huge upright walls
of seeming boards, whose rounded edges slope upward till, as your eye
follows them, you find them enter an enormous stem, perhaps round, like
one of the Norman pillars of Durham nave, and just as huge; perhaps
fluted, like one of William of Wykeham's columns at Winchester.
There is the stem, but where is the tree? Above the green cloud. You
struggle up to it between two of the board walls, but find it not so
easy to reach. Between you and it are half a dozen tough strings which
you had not noticed at first,--the eye cannot focus itself rapidly
enough in this confusion of distances,--which have to be cut through ere
you can pass. Some of them are rooted in the ground, straight and tense;
some of them dangle and wave in the wind at every height. What are they?
Air-roots of wild pines, or of Matapalos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or
of some other parasite? Probably; but you cannot see. All you can see
is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look
up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on
end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud arms as big as
English forest-trees branch off, and that out of their forks a whole
green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and
half climbed up again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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