[Footnote 1: There is another small orchid bearing a slight resemblance to the wanna raja, which is often found growing along with it, called by the Singhalese iri raja, or "striped king." Its leaves are somewhat bronzed, but they are longer and narrower than those of the wanna raja; and, as its Singhalese name implies, it has two white stripes running through the length of each. They are not of the same genus; the wanna raja being the only species of _Anæctochilus_ yet found in Ceylon.]
The branches of all the lower trees and brushwood are so densely covered with convolvuli, and similar delicate climbers of every colour, that frequently it is difficult to discover the tree which supports them, owing to the heaps of verdure under which it is concealed. One very curious creeper, which always catches the eye, is the square-stemmed vine[1], whose fleshy four-sided runners climb the highest trees, and hang down in the most fantastic bunches. Its stem, like that of another plant of the same genus (the _Vitis Indica_), when freshly cut, yields a copious draught of pure tasteless fluid, and is eagerly sought after by elephants.
But it is the trees of older and loftier growth that exhibit the rank luxuriance of these wonderful epiphytes in the most striking manner. They are tormented by climbing plants of such extraordinary dimensions that many of them exceed in diameter the girth of a man; and these gigantic appendages are to be seen surmounting the tallest trees of the forest, grasping their stems in firm convolutions, and then flinging their monstrous tendrils over the larger limbs till they reach the top, whence they descend to the ground in huge festoons, and, after including another and another tree in their successive toils, they once more ascend to the summit, and wind the whole into a maze of living network as massy as if formed by the cable of a line-of-battle ship. When, by-and-by, the trees on which this singular fabric has become suspended give way under its weight, or sink by their own decay, the fallen trunk speedily disappears, whilst the convolutions of climbers continue to grow on, exhibiting one of the most marvellous and peculiar living mounds of confusion that it is possible to fancy. Frequently one of these creepers may be seen holding by one extremity the summit of a tall tree, and grasping with the other an object at some distance near the earth, between which it is strained as tight and straight as if hauled over a block. In all probability the young tendril had been originally fixed in this position by the wind, and retained in it till it had gained its maturity, where it has the appearance of having been artificially arranged as if to support a falling tree.