Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/474

458 Under these trees tall, sturdy grasses rise up to your shoulders and with great straggling bushes do their best to prevent the fruit trees from gaining a living for themselves, much less for the parasites that swarm over their branches.

The house itself is almost hidden in foliage. On the brick pillars wild figs have germinated and already insinuated their aerial roots into every crevice, while their glossy stems and leaves almost cover the sides of the building. Then, that rampant creeper, the cissus (C. sicyoides), is running up the walls and over the roof, which it covers entirely. Clearing away the vegetation which blocks the entrance, you find the stairs falling to pieces, and only by climbing can you reach what was once the front door. After hacking with the cutlass, room is made to push through and you enter. But don't be in a hurry; take care of the flooring; hold on to the creepers until you have sounded the boards, or you may fall through. Crash! There goes one foot through the first board. Draw it up and try another. It cracks but does not yield, and as your eyes become accustomed to the half light a dark cave with brown stalactites is dimly seen. These stalactites are the aërial roots of the cissus, which have been thrown straight down through holes in the roof, and now spread great masses of fibers over the floor, some finding their way into cracks and joints and thence to the earth below. In the corners of the rooms are great oval brown masses, the nests of termites or wood ants, the inhabitants of which are hard at work tunneling every board and rafter until they will become so brittle as to almost fall to pieces by their own weight. Ultimately, when the house frame is thus weakened, the structure will be only kept in shape by its wild figs and creeper stems, the roof will fall in, and the whole become an intricate jungle of interlacing stems.

A few years later trees have grown up to smother the creepers, and only an expert can say that a clearing once existed here.

If an estate of several hundred acres can be so easily effaced, what shall we say of the ordinary squatter's clearing? On the upper Demerara River are hundreds of little settlements in the possession of negroes and half-Indians. Some are crowded with fruit trees struggling with a thick and almost impregnable undergrowth, which is partly cleared now and then to admit of picking the fruit. Near the river stands the dwelling house—a shed thatched with palm leaves—on either side of which will be one of two calabash trees to supply the substitute for plates and dishes which is so indispensable. On these grow scarlet rodriguezias and other small orchids, while even a specimen of the "baboon's throat" (Coryanthes) or "thick-leaf parasite" (Oncidium lanceanum) may have been put up in the forks. If there are any young