Perhaps the most impressive feature of the jungle—­that which takes fast hold, clings most tenaciously, and leaves the most irritating remembrances—­is what is known as the lawyer cane or vine (Calamus).  It is a vegetable of tortuous ambitions, that defies you, that embarrasses with attention, arrests your progress, occasionally envelops you in a net work of bewildering, slender, and cruelly-armed tentacles, that everywhere bristles with points, that curves back on itself, and makes loops and wriggles; that springs from a thin, sprawling and helpless beginning, and develops into almost miraculous lengths, and ramifies and twists and turns in “verdurous glooms,” ascends and descends, grovels in the moist earth and among mouldy leaves, clasps with aerial rootlets every possible support, and eventually clambers and climbs above the tallest tree, twirling its armed tentacles round airy nothings.  It blossoms inconspicuously, and its fruit is as hard, tough and dry as an argument on torts.  Ordinary mortals call it a vine.  Botanists describe it as a prickly climbing palm, and no jungle is complete without it.  There are several varieties of this interesting plant, all more or less of a grasping, clinging character, and each of vital importance in the republic of vegetation.

Sometimes when it is severed with a sharp knife there flows from the cane a fluid bright and limpid as a judge’s summing up; occasionally it is all as dry as dust and as sneezy, and its prickly leaf sheathes the abode of that vexing insect which causes the scrub itch.

This plant produces lengths of cane similar in every respect to the schoolmaster’s weapon—­familiar but immortal—­varying in diameter from a quarter of an inch to an inch and a half, and in length, as some assert, to no less than 500 and 600 feet.  Certainly 300 feet is not uncommon, and one can readily concede an additional 100 feet, knowing the extravagance of the remarkable palm under ordinary circumstances.  And the cane weaves and entangles the jungle, binds and links mighty trees together, and with the co-operation of other clinging, and creeping, and trailing plants—­some massive as ship’s cables, and some thin and fine as fishing-lines—­forms compact masses of vegetation to penetrate which tracks must be cut yard by yard.  When this disorderly conglomeration of trees and saplings, vines, creepers, trailers and crawlers, complicated and confused, has to be cleared, as civilisation demands the use of the soil, sometimes a considerable area will remain upright, although every connection with Mother Earth is severed, so interlaced and interwoven and anchored are the vines with those clinging to trees yet uncut.  Then, in a moment, as some leading strand gives way, the whole mass falls—­smothered, bruised, and crushed—­to be left for a month and more before the fires destroy the faded relics of the erstwhile gloriously rampant jungle.  In all this the lawyer cane is the most aggressive and