Now nothing was assuredly less easy in that jumble of knots, among
which twisted the liana in the middle of bromelias, _"karatas,"_
armed with their sharp prickles, orchids with rosy flowers and violet
lips the size of gloves, and oncidiums more tangled than a skein of
worsted between a kitten's paws.
And then when the liana ran down again to the ground the difficulty
of picking it out under the mass of lycopods, large-leaved
heliconias, rosy-tasseled calliandras, rhipsalas encircling it like
the thread on an electric reel, between the knots of the large white
ipomas, under the fleshy stems of the vanilla, and in the midst of
the shoots and branchlets of the grenadilla and the vine.
And when the cipo was found again what shouts of joy, and how they
resumed the walk for an instant interrupted!
For an hour the young people had already been advancing, and nothing
had happened to warn them that they were approaching the end.
They shook the liana with vigor, but it would not give, and the birds
flew away in hundreds, and the monkeys fled from tree to tree, so as
to point out the way.
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