s for miles through the dense forest without once using knives
at all; although necessarily a knife must be carried, as there are
places where a cut from its blade will make passing through more
comfortable. This is particularly true of the Brazilian forest. The
forests of that country, especially in the central region where I was
then travelling, were wonderfully clean, when once you entered them,
although, when seen from the river, they appeared impenetrable. Near the
water, owing to the moisture, there was frequently a thick but narrow
belt--only a few metres wide--of dense growth. Beyond it, when you were
in the forest itself, nothing grew under the trees, and the ground was
just as clean as the best kept English park. One could walk in comfort
without the slightest trouble, an occasional well-applied blow with the
heavy-bladed knife disentangling in a second an interfering _liana_ which
might stand in one's way.

It must not be forgotten that you can get under or over _liane_, or shift
them on one side, without ever having the trouble of severing them. It is
only occasionally, when they are entangled, that it saves time to cut
them. Barring an occasional thick belt along the Amazon River, it is
almost safe to assert that an experienced man can travel, alone, anywhere
in the forests of Brazil without carrying a penknife. This is not the
case, of course, when you are travelling with a caravan and with baggage,
when a sufficiently large passage has to be opened.

In Africa the equatorial forests are incomparably more difficult to
traverse than the Brazilian forests, and those who assert the Brazilian
forests to be impenetrable only say so because they do not know what
they are talking about. Even when it comes to actually chopping down
trees in the Brazilian forests, one blow with the axe or with the knife
will easily cut down a fair-sized tree. As I have already stated
elsewhere, most of the Brazilian forest trees have no resistance
whatever. They are full of water, and, with a judicious blow, can be cut
almost as easily as celery. Many are the trees also, the inside of which
near the ground has been eaten up entirely by ants, and it was not
uncommon when you leant heavily against a tree that you and the tree
tumbled down. Ants do not seem to attack lactiferous trees, such as those
producing rubber, which therefore flourished in that particular region.

Most of the trees in that particular part of the forest were sm