File:Greatest wonders of the world (1906) (14583049627).jpg

Identifier: greatestwonderso00sing (find matches)
Title: Greatest wonders of the world
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930
Subjects: Curiosities and wonders Landscapes
Publisher: New York, The Christian Herald
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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-load, and your view is mostly bamboo and tea.Graceful enough, and cool to the eye—the bamboos, hedgesor clumps of slender stem with plumes of pale leaf swing-ing and nodding above them; the tea, trim ranks and filesof short, well-furnished bushes with lustrous, dark-greenleaves, not unlike evergreens or myrtle in a nursery athome,—but you soon feel that you have known bambooand tea all your life. Then suddenly you begin to climb,and all at once you are in a new world—a world of plants. A new world is easy to say, but this is new indeed and avery world—such a primeval vegetable world as you haveread of in books and eked out with dreams. It has every-thing you know in your world, only everything expressedin vegetation. It is a world in its variety alone. Trees ofevery kind rise up round you at every angle—unfamiliar,most of them, and exaggerations of forms you know, as ifthey were seen through a microscope. You might comeon such broad fleshy leaves by way of Jacks giant bean-
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IN THE HIMALAYAS 73 Stalk. Other growths take the form of bushes as high asour trees; but beside them are skinny, stunted starvelings,such as the most niggardly country might show. Thenthere are grasses—tufted, ruddy bamboo grass, and hugeyellow straws with giant bents leaning insolently over toflick your face as you go by. Smaller still grow the ferns,lurking shyly in the crevices of the banks. And overeverything, most luxuriant of everything, crawl hundred-armed creepers, knitting and knotting the whole jungle intoone mellay of struggling life. The varieties—the trees and shrubs and grasses andferns and creepers—you would see in any tropical garden;but you could not see them at home. You could not seethem in their unpruned native intercourse one with theother. The rise and fall of the ground, the whims of lightand air, coax them into shapes that answer to the most fan-tastic imagination. Now you are going through the solemnaisles of a great cathedral—grey trunks for columns,

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