Now
And Again We Passed Among Vast Stems Of Buttressed Trees, Sometimes
Enormous In Girth; And From Their Far-Away
Summits hung great bush-
ropes, some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round, and
intertwined among each other, until
One could fancy one was looking
on some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents, that had
been arrested at its height by some magic spell. All these bush-
ropes were as bare of foliage as a ship's wire rigging, but a good
many had thorns. I was very curious as to how they got up straight,
and investigation showed me that many of them were carried up with a
growing tree. The only true climbers were the calamus and the
rubber vine (Landolphia), both of which employ hook tackle.
Some stretches of this forest were made up of thin, spindly stemmed
trees of great height, and among these stretches I always noticed
the ruins of some forest giant, whose death by lightning or by his
superior height having given the demoniac tornado wind an extra grip
on him, had allowed sunlight to penetrate the lower regions of the
forest; and then evidently the seedlings and saplings, who had for
years been living a half-starved life for light, shot up. They
seemed to know that their one chance lay in getting with the
greatest rapidity to the level of the top of the forest. No time to
grow fat in the stem. No time to send out side branches, or any of
those vanities. Up, up to the light level, and he among them who
reached it first won in this game of life or death; for when he gets
there he spreads out his crown of upper branches, and shuts off the
life-giving sunshine from his competitors, who pale off and die, or
remain dragging on an attenuated existence waiting for another
chance, and waiting sometimes for centuries. There must be tens of
thousands of seeds which perish before they get their chance; but
the way the seeds of the hard wood African trees are packed, as it
were in cases specially made durable, is very wonderful. Indeed the
ways of Providence here are wonderful in their strange dual
intention to preserve and to destroy; but on the whole, as Peer Gynt
truly observes, "Ein guter Wirth - nein das ist er nicht."
We saw this influence of light on a large scale as soon as we
reached the open hills and mountains of the Sierra del Cristal, and
had to pass over those fearful avalanche-like timber falls on their
steep sides. The worst of these lay between Efoua and Egaja, where
we struck a part of the range that was exposed to the south-east.
These falls had evidently arisen from the tornados, which from time
to time have hurled down the gigantic trees whose hold on the
superficial soil over the sheets of hard bed rock was insufficient,
in spite of all the anchors they had out in the shape of roots and
buttresses, and all their rigging in the shape of bush ropes.
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