156

You turn your back on the crash site and continue your descent, hoping to encounter the path before long. The terrain doesn’t improve however, and soon you are barely squeezing through a veritable barrage of low hanging branches, and bushes whose young growths are sharp and pointy, pricking your skin and tearing fabric from your clothes. At last you can go no further at ground level. You begin to feel your situation is hopeless, until you look upwards, and see the completely wild state of the trees growing down here. Each one has had centuries to grow hundreds of strong limbs and branches, many of which overlap with other trees, so that it would be trivially easy to move along above ground from one giant to the next. You struggle just a little further through the hellish mess of undergrowth until you can hoist yourself onto a low branch. From there, progress becomes fairly straightforward. Travelling high in the air, about half-way up each tree, you soon spot the path winding on its way below, and are able to monkey yourself about towards it. With only a two or three metre drop this time, you jump down onto the track landing square on your feet. Turn to 65.