Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/415

 ground and to their fellows by the numerous vines, sheltered and protected also by their fellows from the shock of storms, their huge trunks have little to do except support the direct weight of the tops, and they rarely fall until they have reached the last stages of decay. Then some day the sudden impact of a ton or two of water dropped from some furious tropical shower, or the vibrations from a hurrying troop of monkeys, or the spring of a tiger, is too much for one of the giant branches heavy with its load of vines and parasites, and it gives way, breaking the vines in every direction and splitting a huge strip from the main trunk. With its supports thus broken and the whole weight of the remaining branches on one side, the weakened trunk sways for a moment then bows to its fate. The remaining vines break with the resistless strain, and the old giant gathering velocity as he falls and dragging with him everything in his reach, crashes to the earth with a roar which elicits cries of terror from bird and beast, and goes booming through the quivering forest like the report of a heavy cannon. A patch of blue sky overhead and a pile of impenetrable debris below, mark for years the grave of the old hero.

As regards the insect and reptile pests of the country it has been my experience that both their numbers and capacity for torment have been greatly exaggerated. Mosquitoes, flies of various sizes, wasps and stinging ants exist, and the first in some places in large numbers; yet to a person who has any of the woodsman's craft of taking care of himself, and whose blood is not abnormally sensitive to insect poisons, they present no terrors and but slight annoyances. At our headquarters camp on San Francisco island, we had no mosquitoes from sunrise to sunset, and even after sunset they were not especially numerous. At another camp only a few miles away there were black flies only and no mosquitoes, at another both, while at the camps up in the hills there were neither. It was only at camps in the wet lowlands and near swamps, that they became an almost unendurable annoyance. Even here it was those who remained in camp that suffered most. Men out in the thick brush were but little annoyed by them, and when on their return to camp they had finished their dinner and gotten into their mosquito bars they were out of their reach. As to snakes, the danger from them even to a European, is practically nothing. Not a man of the several hundred that have been engaged in the