What are they?
Air roots of wild Pines, {131c} or of Matapalos, or of Figs, or of Seguines, {131d} or of some other parasite?
Probably: but you cannot see.

All you can see is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud, arms as big as English forest trees branch off; and that out of their forks a whole green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and half climbed up again.

You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has sprung: you cannot tell.

The tree-trunk is smooth and free from climbers; and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle, a dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree.

And what are their species?
what are their families?
Who knows?
Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems.