And then when the liana ran down again to the ground the difficulty
of picking it out under the mass of lycopods, large-leaved
heliconias, rosy-tasseled calliandras, rhipsalas encircling it like
the thread on an electric reel, between the knots of the large white
ipomas, under the fleshy stems of the vanilla, and in the midst of
the shoots and branchlets of the grenadilla and the vine.

And when the cipo was found again what shouts of joy, and how they
resumed the walk for an instant interrupted!

For an hour the young people had already been advancing, and nothing
had happened to warn them that they were approaching the end.

They shook the liana with vigor, but it would not give, and the birds
flew away in hundreds, and the monkeys fled from tree to tree, so as
to point out the way.

If a thicket barred the road the felling-sword cut a deep gap, and
the group passed in. If it was a high rock, carpeted with verdure,
over which the liana twisted like a serpent, they climbed it and
passed on.

A large break now appeared. There, in the more open air, which is as
necessary to it as the light of the sun, the tree of the tropics,
_par excellence,_ which, according to Humboldt, "accompanies man in
the infancy of his civilization," the great provider of the
inhabitant of the torrid zones, a banana-tree, was standing alone.
The long festoon of the liana curled round its higher branches,
moving away to the other side of the clearing, and disappeared again