supported at their roots by three buttresses, behind which thirty men
could find shelter. On many of the top branches of these, other trees
have taken root from seeds deposited by birds, and have attained
considerable size; and all send down, as it _appears_, extraordinary
cylindrical strands from two to six inches in diameter, and often one
hundred and fifty feet in length, smooth and straight until they root
themselves, looking like the guys of a mast. Under these giants stand
the lesser trees grouped in glorious confusion,--cocoa, sago, areca,
and gomuti palms, nipah and nibong palms, tree ferns fifteen and twenty
feet high, the bread-fruit, the ebony, the damar, the india rubber, the
gutta-percha, the cajeput, the banyan, the upas, the bombax or cotton
tree, and hosts of others, many of which bear brilliant flowers, but
have not yet been botanized; and I can only give such barbarous names
as chumpaka, Kamooning, marbow, seum, dadap; and, loveliest of all, the
waringhan, a species of ficus, graceful as a birch; and underneath
these again great ferns, ground orchids, and flowering shrubs of heavy,
delicious odor, are interlocked and interwoven. Oh that you could see
it all! It is wonderful; no words could describe it, far less mine. Mr.
Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and such tropics) is
like a visit to a new planet. This new wonder-world, so enchanting,
tantalizing, intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see
what I am seeing! Amidst all this wealth of nature and in this
perennial summer heat I quite fail to realize that it is January, and
that with you the withered plants are shriveling in the frost-bound
earth, and that leafless twigs and the needles of half-starved pines
are shivering under the stars in the aurora-lighted winter nights.

But to the jungle again, The great bamboo towers up along the river
sides in its feathery grace, and behind it the much prized Malacca
cane, the rattan, creeping along the ground or climbing trees and