What a contrast again, the huge feathery fronds of the Cocorite palms which stretch right away hither over our heads, twenty and thirty feet in length.

And what is that spot of crimson flame hanging in the darkest spot of all from an under-bough of that low weeping tree?
A flower-head of the Rosa del Monte.

{139e} And what is that bright straw- coloured fox's brush above it, with a brown hood like that of an Arum, brush and hood nigh three feet long each?
Look--for you require to look more than once, sometimes more than twice--here, up the stem of that Cocorite, or as much of it as you can see in the thicket.

It is all jagged with the brown butts of its old fallen leaves; and among the butts perch broad-leaved ferns, and fleshy Orchids, and above them, just below the plume of mighty fronds, the yellow fox's brush, which is its spathe of flower.
What next?
Above the Cocorites dangle, amid a dozen different kinds of leaves, festoons of a liane, or of two, for one has purple flowers, the other yellow--Bignonias, Bauhinias--what not?
And through them a Carat {140a} palm has thrust its thin bending stem, and spread out its flat head of fan-shaped leaves twenty feet long each: while over it, I verily believe, hangs eighty feet aloft the head of the very tree upon whose roots we are sitting.

For amid the green cloud you may see sprigs of leaf somewhat like that of a weeping willow; {140b} and there, probably, is the trunk to which they belong, or rather what will be a trunk at last.