‘rastrajo,’ which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared—­all utterly impassable.  These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me.  I might have spent weeks in botanising merely at them:  but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo toward growing enormous rounded leaves.  How to get at the giants behind was the only question to one who for forty years had been longing for one peep at Flora’s fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last.  There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season.  And on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace.  I hurried down it like any schoolboy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured Negroes, who expected the respectable elderly ‘buccra’ to come to grief; struggled perspiring up the other side of the gully; and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short, breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.

In the primeval forest; looking upon that upon which my teachers and masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace, Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine, comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare in ignorance.  There was actually, then, such a sight to be seen on earth; and it was not less, but far more wonderful than they had said.

My first feeling on entering the high woods was helplessness, confusion, awe, all but terror.  One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards.  Without a compass or the landmark of some opening to or from which he can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness is there in the infinite variety.  That sameness and variety make it impossible to give any general sketch of a forest.  Once inside, ‘you cannot see the wood for the trees.’  You can only wander on as far as you dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines, all straining upwards, in fierce competition, towards the light-food far above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round your head, and rises, thickening and thickening to an unknown height.  The upward lines are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what leaves they bear, being for the most part on the tips of the twigs, give a scattered, mist-like appearance to the under-foliage.  For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an English wood.  But try to walk through it, and ten steps undeceive you.  Around your knees are probably Mamures, {129a} with creeping stems and fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young coconut palm.  You try