Orchids, and above them, just below the plume of mighty fronds, the
yellow fox's brush, which is its spathe of flower.

What next? Above the Cocorites dangle, amid a dozen different kinds
of leaves, festoons of a liane, or of two, for one has purple
flowers, the other yellow--Bignonias, Bauhinias--what not? And
through them a Carat {140a} palm has thrust its thin bending stem,
and spread out its flat head of fan-shaped leaves twenty feet long
each: while over it, I verily believe, hangs eighty feet aloft the
head of the very tree upon whose roots we are sitting. For amid the
green cloud you may see sprigs of leaf somewhat like that of a
weeping willow; {140b} and there, probably, is the trunk to which
they belong, or rather what will be a trunk at last. At present it
is like a number of round-edged boards of every size, set on end,
and slowly coalescing at their edges. There is a slit down the
middle of the trunk, twenty or thirty feet long. You may see the
green light of the forest shining through it. Yes. That is
probably the fig; or, if not, then something else. For who am I,
that I should know the hundredth part of the forms on which we
look?--And above all you catch a glimpse of that crimson mass of
Norantea which we admired just now; and, black as yew against the
blue sky and white cloud, the plumes of one Palmiste, who has
climbed toward the light, it may be for centuries, through the green
cloud; and now, weary and yet triumphant, rests her dark head among
the bright foliage of a Ceiba, and feeds unhindered on the sun.

There, take your tired eyes down again; and turn them right, or
left, or where you will, to see the same scene, and yet never the
same. New forms, new combinations; a wealth of creative Genius--let
us use the wise old word in its true sense--incomprehensible by the
human intellect or the human eye, even as He is who makes it all,
Whose garment, or rather Whose speech, it is. The eye is not filled
with seeing, or the ear with hearing; and never would be, did you
roam these forests for a hundred years. How many years would you
need merely to examine and discriminate the different species? And
when you had done that, how many more to learn their action and
reaction on each other? How many more to learn their virtues,
properties, uses? How many more to answer the perhaps ever
unanswerable question--How they exist and grow at all? By what
miracle t