palm-trees, with slender, graceful, and glossy stems; and
cacao-trees, which shoot up of their own accord on the banks of the
Amazon and its tributaries, having different melastomas, some with
red flowers and others ornamented with panicles of whitish berries.

But the halts! the shouts of cheating! when the happy company thought
they had lost their guiding thread! For it was necessary to go back
and disentangle it from the knot of parasitic plants.

"There it is!" said Lina, "I see it!"

"You are wrong," replied Minha; "that is not it, that is a liana of
another kind."

"No, Lina is right!" said Benito.

"No, Lina is wrong!" Manoel would naturally return.

Hence highly serious, long-continued discussions, in which no one
would give in.

Then the black on one side and Benito on the other would rush at the
trees and clamber up to the branches encircled by the cipo so as to
arrive at the true direction.

Now nothing was assuredly less easy in that jumble of knots, among
which twisted the liana in the middle of bromelias, _"karatas,"_
armed with their sharp prickles, orchids with rosy flowers and violet
lips the size of gloves, and oncidiums more tangled than a skein of
worsted between a kitten's paws.