I might have spent weeks in botanising merely at them: but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo toward growing enormous rounded leaves.

How to get at the giants behind was the only question to one who for forty years had been longing for one peep at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last.

There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season.

And on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace.

I hurried down it like any schoolboy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured Negroes, who expected the respectable elderly 'buccra' to come to grief; struggled perspiring up the other side of the gully; and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short, breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.
In the primeval forest; looking upon that upon which my teachers and masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace, Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine, comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare in ignorance.