The Queen of the Savannah by Gustave Aimard

American forests, when night sets in, assume a character of grandeur and majesty, of which our European forests cannot supply an idea. The aged trees, which grow more than one hundred feet in height, and whose tufted crests form splendid arches of foliage, the lianas which spread in every direction with the strangest parabolas, the moss, called Spaniard's beard, which hangs in long festoons from all the branches, impart to these vast solitudes an aspect at once grand and mysterious, which leads the mind to reverie and fills it with religious and melancholy thoughts.

When the sun has disappeared and made way for darkness, when the night breeze murmurs in the foliage, and the hollow sound of some unknown rivulet coursing over the gravel, is blended with the myriad indistinct noises of the insects hidden in the crevices of the trees and rocks; when the wild beasts, awaking at nightfall, leave their secret dens to proceed to their watering places, uttering at intervals hoarse yells -- the forests in the pale moonbeams, which filter timidly through the branches, really become to the man who ventures into them the grand laboratory in which nature likes to assay in gloom and mystery the most powerful and strangest of her productions.