Page:In Desert and Wilderness (Sienkiewicz, tr. Drezmal).djvu/248

 240 were overgrown with ferns, compressed into one impenetrable thicket, here low and expansive, there high, entwined with climbing plants, as though distaffs, reaching up to the first boughs of the trees and spreading under them in delicate green lace. In the depths there was a great variety of trees; date, raffia, fan-palm, sycamore, bread-fruit, euphorbia, immense varieties of senna, acacia; trees with foliage dark and glittering and light or red as blood grew side by side, trunk by trunk, with entangled branches from which shot yellow and purple flowers resembling candlesticks. In some groups the tree-tops could not be seen as the climbing plants covered them from top to bottom, and leaping from trunk to trunk formed the letters W and M and hung in form of festoons, portières, and whole curtains. Caoutchouc lianas just strangled the trees with thousands of serpentine tendrils and transformed them into pyramids, buried with white flowers like snow. About the greater lianas the smaller entwined and the medley became so thick that it formed a wall through which neither man nor animal could penetrate. Only in places where the elephants, whose strength nothing can resist, forced their way, were there beaten down in the thicket deep and winding passageways, as it were.

The song of birds which so pleasantly enlivens the European forest could not be heard at all; instead, on the tree-tops resounded the strangest calls, similar to the sound of a saw, to the beating of a drum, to the clatter of a stork, to the squeaking of old doors, to the clapping of hands, to caterwauling, or even to the loud, excited talk of men. From time to time soared above the trees flocks of parrots, gray, green, white, or a small bevy of gaudily plumaged toucans in a quiet, wavy flight. On the snowy background of the rubber climbing plants glimmered like