Not even monkeys are to be seen, although the trees must produce fruit and seed.

Everything appears to have deserted the country, and to have yielded it as the sole territory of Nature on a stupendous scale.

The creepers lie serpent-like along the ground to the thickness of a man's waist, and, rearing their twisted forms on high, they climb the loftiest trees, hanging in festoons from stern to stem like the cables of a line-of-battle-ship, and extending from tree to tree for many hundred yards; now felling to the earth and striking a fresh root; then, with increased energy, remounting the largest trunks, and forming a labyrinth of twisted ropes along the ceiling of the forest.

From these creepers hang the sabre-beans.

Everything seems on a supernatural scale--the bean-pod four feet or more in length, by three inches in breadth; the beans two inches in diameter.
Here may be seen the most valuable woods of Ceylon.