Off to the left the great silver head of Orizaba looked down at them benignantly, and before them they saw the vast flowering robe of the tierra caliente into which they pushed boldly, even as Cortez and his men had entered it.
Ned was almost overpowered by a vegetation so grand and magnificent.
Except on the paths which they followed, it was an immense and tangled mass of gigantic trees and huge lianas.

Many of the lianas had wound themselves like huge serpents about the trees and had gradually pulled them, no matter how strong, into strange and distorted shapes.

Overhead parrots and paroquets chattered amid the vast and gorgeous bloom of red and pink, yellow and white.

Ned and Obed were forced to keep to the narrow peon paths, because elsewhere one often could not pass save behind an army of axes.
The trees were almost innumerable in variety.

They saw mahogany, rosewood, Spanish cedar and many others that they did not know.