Explore "The Trapper's Daughter" by Gustave Aimard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Travellers and tourists who have only seen European forests, cannot imagine the grand, majestic, and sublime view offered by a virgin forest in the New World. There are none of those glades four or five yards wide, stretching out before you, straight and stiff for miles, but everything is abrupt and savage. There is no prospect, for the eye cannot see more than thirty or forty paces at the most in any direction. The primitive soil has disappeared beneath the detritus of trees dead from old age, and which time, rain, and sunshine have reduced to dust.
The trees grow very freely, enveloped by thick lianas, which twine around the stems and branches in the strangest curves, dashing in every direction, plunging into the ground to reappear again a yard further on, and chaining the trees together for enormous distances. The wood varies but slightly in certain districts, and hence, one tree serves the repetition of all. Then again, a grass, close and thick like the straw of a wheat field, grows to a height of five and often six feet.