You gaze astounded.  Ten steps downward, and the vision is gone.  The green cloud has closed again over your head, and you are stumbling in the darkness of the bush, half blinded by the sudden change from the blaze to the shade.  Beware.  ’Take care of the Croc-chien!’ shouts your companion:  and you are aware of, not a foot from your face, a long, green, curved whip, armed with pairs of barbs some four inches apart; and are aware also, at the same moment, that another has seized you by the arm, another by the knees, and that you must back out, unless you are willing to part with your clothes first, and your flesh afterwards.  You back out, and find that you have walked into the tips—­luckily only into the tips—­of the fern-like fronds of a trailing and climbing palm such as you see in the Botanic Gardens.  That came from the East, and furnishes the rattan-canes.  This {138a} furnishes the gri-gri-canes, and is rather worse to meet, if possible, than the rattan.  Your companion, while he helps you to pick the barbs out, calls the palm laughingly by another name, ‘Suelta-mi-Ingles’; and tells you the old story of the Spanish soldier at San Josef.  You are near the water now; for here is a thicket of Balisiers. {138b} Push through, under their great plantain-like leaves.  Slip down the muddy bank to that patch of gravel.  See first, though, that it is not tenanted already by a deadly Mapepire, or rattlesnake, which has not the grace, as his cousin in North America has, to use his rattle.

The brooklet, muddy with last night’s rain, is dammed and bridged by winding roots, in shape like the jointed wooden snakes which we used to play with as children.  They belong probably to a fig, whose trunk is somewhere up in the green cloud.  Sit down on one, and look, around and aloft.  From the soil to the sky, which peeps through here and there, the air is packed with green leaves of every imaginable hue and shape.  Round our feet are Arums, {138c} with snow-white spadixes and hoods, one instance among many here of brilliant colour developing itself in deep shade.  But is the darkness of the forest actually as great as it seems?  Or are our eyes, accustomed to the blaze outside, unable to expand rapidly enough, and so liable to mistake for darkness air really full of light reflected downward, again and again, at every angle, from the glossy surfaces of a million leaves?  At least we may be excused; for a bat has made the same mistake, and flits past us at noonday.  And there is another—­No; as it turns, a blaze of metallic azure off the upper side of the wings proves this one to be no bat, but a Morpho—­a moth as big as a bat.  And what was that second larger flash of golden green, which dashed at the moth, and back to yonder branch not ten feet off?  A Jacamar {138d}—­kingfisher, as they miscall her here, sitting fearless of man, with the moth in her long beak.  Her throat is snowy