fine trees,
prolific nature has given birth to a crowd of climbing plants of
a most remarkable description. The rattan and the flexible liana
mount up to the topmost branches, and re-descending to the earth,
take fresh root, receive new sustenance, and then remount anew, and
at various distances they join themselves to the friendly trunks
of their supporting columns, and thus they form very often most
beautiful decorations. Varieties of the pandanus are to be seen,
of which the leaves, in bunches, start from the ground, forming
beautiful sheaves. Enormous ferns were to be met with, real trees
in shape, and up which we clambered often, to cut the top branches,
for their delicious perfume and which serve as food nearly the same as
the palms. But, in the midst of this extraordinary vegetation nature
is gloomy and silent; not a sound is to be heard, unless perhaps
the wind that shakes the tops of the trees, or from time to time the
distant noise of a torrent, which, falling precipitately, cascades
from the heights of the mountains to their base. The ground is moist,
as it never receives the sun's rays: the little lakes and the rivers,
that never flow unless when swollen by the storms, present to the eye
water black and stagnant, on which the reflection of the fine clear
blue sky is never to be seen.

The sole inhabitants of these melancholy though majestic solitudes
are deer, buffaloes and wild boars, which being hidden in their lairs
and dens in the daytime, come out at night in search of food. Birds
are seldom seen, and the monkeys so common in the Philippines, shun
the solitude of these immense forests. One kind of insect is met
with in great abundance, and it plagues the traveller to the utmost;
they are the small leeches, which are found on all the mountains of
the Philippines that are covered with forests. They lie close to the
ground in the grass, or on the leaves of the trees, and dart like
grasshoppers on their prey, to which they fasten. Travellers are
therefore always provided with little knives, cut from the bamboo,
to loosen the hold of the insects, after which they rub the wound
with a little chewed tobacco. But soon another leech, attracted by
the flowing blood, takes the place of the one which was removed, and
constant care is necessary to avoid being victimised by those little
insects, of which the voracity far exceeds that of our common leeches.

Our way lay through these singular creations of nature, a