The pale sun burned away the morning chill and the clinging dampness, revealing a gigantic silent world. Enormous trees with trunks forty, feet in diameter rose two hundred feet overhead, where they spread their dense leafy canopy, blocking out the sky and perpetually dripping water to the ground below. Curtains of gray moss, and the creepers and lianas, hung down in a tangle from the trees; parasitic orchids sprouted from the trunks. At ground level, huge ferns, gleaming with moisture, grew higher than a man’s chest and held the low ground fog. Here and there was a spot of color: the red acanthema blossoms, which were deadly poison, and the blue dicindra vine, which only opened in early morning. But the basic impression was of a vast, oversized, gray-green world an alien place inhospitable to man. Jan Kruger put aside his rifle and stretched his stiff muscles. Dawn came quickly at the equator; soon it was quite light, although the mist remained.