Cook Does Not Feel These Forest Charms, And Gives Me
Notice After An Hour's Experience Of Mountain Forest-Belt Work; What
Cook Would Not?
As we get higher we have to edge and squeeze every few minutes
through the aerial roots of some tremendous kind of tree, plentiful
hereabouts.
One of them we passed through I am sure would have run
any Indian banyan hard for extent of ground covered, if it were
measured. In the region where these trees are frequent, the
undergrowth is less dense than it is lower down.
Imagine a vast, seemingly limitless cathedral with its countless
columns covered, nay, composed of the most exquisite dark-green,
large-fronded moss, with here and there a delicate fern embedded in
it as an extra decoration. The white, gauze-like mist comes down
from the upper mountain towards us: creeping, twining round, and
streaming through the moss-covered tree columns - long bands of it
reaching along sinuous, but evenly, for fifty and sixty feet or
more, and then ending in a puff like the smoke of a gun. Soon,
however, all the mist-streams coalesce and make the atmosphere all
their own, wrapping us round in a clammy, chill embrace; it is not
that wool-blanket, smothering affair that we were wrapped in down by
Buana, but exquisitely delicate. The difference it makes to the
beauty of the forest is just the same difference you would get if
you put a delicate veil over a pretty woman's face or a sack over
her head.
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