Oh, for the time--the reader would find the patience--to enumerate the charming products of this primitive nature, which shoots up and athwart, hangs, swings, juts out, crosses, interlaces, binds, twines, catches, encircles, and strays at random to the end of the naturalist's investigation, describing majestic parabolas, forming grandiose arcades, and finally completes the most splendid, aye, and sublime spectacle that is given to any man on the footstool to admire for superabundant contrasts, and enthralling harmonies.
The man in the balloon whom we imagine to be hovering over this mighty picture, even higher up than the eagle of the Sierra Madre itself, who sails in long circles above the bald-headed vulture about to descend on a prey, which the king of the air disdains--this lofty viewer, we say, would spy, on the afternoon when we guide the reader to these wilds apparently unpeopled, more than one human creature wriggling like worms in the labyrinth.
At one point some twenty men, white and yet swarthy, unlike in dress but similarly armed to the teeth, were separately "worming" their tortuous way, we repeat, through the _chaparral_ proper, or plantations of the low branching live oak, as well as the gigantic ferns, mesquite, cactus, nopal, and fruit laden shrubs, the oblong-leaved mahogany, the bread tree, the fan-leaved abanico, the pirijao languidly swinging its enormous golden fruit in clusters, the royal palm, devoid of foliage along the stem, but softly nodding its high, majestically plumed head; the guava, the banana, the intoxicating chirimoya, the cork oak, the Peruvian tree, the war palm letting its resinous gum slowly ooze forth to capture the silly moths, and even young snakes and lizards which squirmed on the hardening gum like a platter of Palissy ware abruptly galvanised into life.
These adventurers insinuated themselves through this tangle unseen and, perhaps, unsuspected by one another, all tending to the same point, probably the same rendezvous. A marked devil-may-care spirit, which tempered the caution of men brought up in the desert, betokened that they were master of the woods hereabouts, or, at least, only recognised the Indian rovers as their contesting fellow tenants.