see. All you can see is, as you put your
chin close against the trunk of the tree and look up, as if you were
looking up against the side of a great ship set on end, that some
sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud, arms as big as English
forest trees branch off; and that out of their forks a whole green
garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and
half climbed up again. You scramble round the tree to find whence
this aerial garden has sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is
smooth and free from climbers; and that mass of verdure may belong
possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green
cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle, a
dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller
one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight
and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree. And what are
their species? what are their families? Who knows? Not even the
most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of
plants of which he only sees the stems. The leaves, the flowers,
the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even
always then, for sometimes the tree when cut refuses to fall, linked
as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around. Even that
wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of
three or even four different plants. {132}

Soon you will be struck by the variety of the vegetation, and will
recollect what you have often heard, that social plants are rare in
the tropic forests. Certainly they are rare in Trinidad; where the
only instances of social trees are the Moras (which I have never
seen growing wild) and the Moriche palms. In Europe, a forest is
usually made up of one dominant plant--of firs or of pines, of oaks
or of beeches, of birch or of heather. Here no two plants seem
alike. There are more species on an acre here than in all the New
Forest, Savernake, or Sherwood. Stems rough, smooth, prickly,
round, fluted, stilted, upright, sloping, branched, arched, jointed,
opposite-leaved, alternate-leaved, leaflets, or covered with leaves
of every conceivable pattern, are jumbled together, till the eye and
brain are tired of continually asking 'What next?' The stems are of
every colour--copper, pink, gray, green, brown, black as if burnt,
marbled with lichens, many of them silvery white, gleaming afar in