Chapter VI: Part 6

Towards one in the morning, one of my acquaintances came climbing over the ruined wall of our court-yard to inquire after me, as he knew I was unwell; and he then proposed to me to take a walk through the town by moonlight. We took the direction of the market-place, where the Cathedral stood; and from what I saw I can truly say that the whole city was destroyed, for I did not see a _single_ house uninjured. Those that were not lying in ruin had so many rents, and damages of various kinds, as to be quite uninhabitable. The Cathedral--an elegant rather than imposing building--had escaped with less damage than many other churches; but the clock-tower had fallen, the portal was lying in fragments, and the walls were gaping open in two or three places.

The interior of the Franciscan convent, the door of which stood wide open, presented a sad picture of desolation. So many stones had fallen from the roof and such large portions of the walls, that most of the altars lay scattered in fragments, or were covered with rubbish; several of the colossal figures of saints had fallen from the niches, and lay with their finery all covered with dust and stones; but the people, who the day before had been carrying them about in triumph, now did not trouble themselves any more about them: everybody was occupied in saving his life, or, if possible, his most valuable possessions.

Of the new university buildings only one wing was left standing: it was the one containing the clock-tower, and in this the clock was still going on, regularly striking the hours. The roof of the Episcopal Palace had fallen in, and some stones had struck the sacred head of the bishop with no more ceremony than had been shown towards our profane pates, though this bishop was Don Tomaso Saldana, a man most justly held in high repute for the excellence of his life. Much injury had also been sustained by the President of the Republic, Senor Duenas, who was originally a monk, but afterwards a lawyer and statesman, and perhaps the man of the greatest capacity in the whole country.

The streets were empty and desolate, and we had to scramble over heaps of ruins to get through them: not a creature was to be seen but a few sentinels, and in the interior of the houses also there reigned the stillness of the grave. Even in the broadest streets the people did not think themselves safe, and rich and poor were huddled together indiscriminately in the great square, praying, singing, and screaming whenever a new shock startled them with its terrible explosion; but fortunately, in the midst of all this, the new President, Don Jose Maria San Martin, showed much presence of mind, and gave his orders for the preservation of property with much composure.

[Fortunately, the previous warning shock had driven most of the
people from their houses, a chance which saved most of their
lives, though several hundreds were found buried in the ruins.]

The rising sun of Easter Monday morning shone on a mournful spectacle, and the few people who were left in the town wandered about looking pale and worn, the women with a total disregard of their dress very unusual with them. Among these I noticed the wife of the President, who was entreating him to fly, like so many others, from the scene of danger; but he remained faithful to duty, and was exerting himself vigorously to keep order. He had established a kind of court-martial under a tent in the University Square, before which every thief caught in the act was brought, and, on the evidence of two witnesses against him, immediately shot.

Since the ruins of San Salvador could now no longer offer me a shelter, I set off on foot, at an early hour, towards the hacienda of Mr. Kronmeier, and on the way felt four more shocks, the strongest of which lasted six or seven seconds, and was accompanied by violent oscillations of the ground, and detonations like the salvos from Vesuvius, when, in the lesser eruptions, you stand near the crater while stones are being thrown up. I was now more than ever convinced that the centre of the subterranean action was very near, and that the explosive steam and glowing masses of the interior were seeking a new outlet.

The country-house of Mr. Kronmeier was still standing, but its thick walls had been rent in so many places that it offered only an uncomfortable and insecure shelter. From the steep cliffs on the left of the river's bed masses of rock and earth had fallen, and the hot springs at the foot of the hill had ceased to flow; the mill-stream was dry; one of the cocoa-palms was prostrate, and the whole landscape, so lovely before, had a dejected and melancholy aspect, increased, of course, by the general flight of the inhabitants of the district.... The shocks still went on, though they were not so frequent as on the two Easter nights; and, as the subterranean forces were evidently struggling for a new vent, no one could feel himself safe within the sphere of their operations.

Many of the people whom we met, however, were leaving the place, though not so much for any reason of this kind as on account of a prophecy of the worthy bishop, "that before the new moon the whole district of San Salvador, with the ruins of the city, would be swallowed up." But, unluckily for the bishop's character as a prophet, the prediction was not fulfilled.

SCENES IN TRINIDAD AND JAMAICA.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[Froude is scarcely known as a traveller, his reputation being
founded in another field of literature, that of history. Yet he
is the author of two works of travel,--"Oceana," from which we
have elsewhere given a selection, and "The English in the West
Indies," from which our present selection is derived. He
visited most of the British West Indies, and has given
picturesque descriptions of them all. We append some extracts
from his account of Trinidad.]

Trinidad is the largest, after Jamaica, of the British West Indian Islands, and the hottest absolutely after none of them. It is square-shaped, and, I suppose, was once a part of South America. The Orinoco River and the ocean-currents between them have cut a channel between it and the mainland, which has expanded into a vast shallow lake known as the Gulf of Paria. The two entrances by which the gulf is approached are narrow, and are called _bocas_, or mouths,--one the Dragon's Mouth, the other the Serpent's. When the Orinoco is in flood the water is brackish, and the brilliant violet hue of the Caribbean Sea is changed to a dirty yellow; but the harbor which is so formed would hold all the commercial navies of the world, and seems formed by nature to be the depot one day of an enormous trade.

[Landing was made at Port of Spain, the capital, so called when
Trinidad was a Spanish possession, and Mr. Froude found
pleasant quarters in the house of a friend.]

The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and the rain and the Johnny crows [a black vulture that acts as scavenger] between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a large savanna or park, where the villas are of the successful men of business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool, airy habitation, with open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off from the savanna by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a cabbage-palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit-trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G---- had collected in the woods.

The borders were blazing with varieties of the single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn-color, the largest that I had ever seen. The average diameter of each single flower was from seven to eight inches. Wind streamed freely through the long sitting-room, loaded with the perfume of orange-trees; on table and in bookcase the hand and mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular room assigned to myself would have been delightful, but that my possession of it was disputed, even in daylight, by mosquitoes, who for blood-thirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence over the worst that I had ever met with elsewhere. I killed one who was at work upon me, and examined him through a glass. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius, had drawn his exact likeness as the devil,--a long black stroke for a body, a nick for a neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a mouth, spindle arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed wings, and a tail. Line for line, there the figure was before me, which in the unforgetable tail-piece is driving the thief under the gallows, and I had a melancholy satisfaction in identifying him. I had been warned to be on the lookout for scorpions, centipedes, jiggers, and land-crabs, who would bite me if I walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met with none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of Trinidad is enough by himself. For malice, mockery, and venom of tooth and trumpet he is without a match in the world.

From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco-smoke, or hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed is provided. Otherwise I found every provision to make life pass deliciously. To walk is difficult in a damp, steamy atmosphere, hotter during daylight than the hottest forcing-house in Kew.... Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a carriage took us around the savanna. Tropical human beings, like tropical birds, are fond of fine colors, especially black human beings, and the park was as brilliant as Kensington Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene became even more wonderful, air, grass, and trees being alight with fireflies, each as brilliant as an English glow-worm. The palm-tree at our own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry sky, a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet of leaves and clashing against the stem as it was blown to and fro by the night-wind, while long-winged bats swept and whistled over our heads.

[The governor's residence and the botanical gardens next call
for attention.]

The "Residence" stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own, at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built, regardless of expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me, an enormous ceiba or silk-cotton-tree, umbrella-shaped, fifty yards in diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.

Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the negro, the temple of Jumbi, the proper house of Obeah. To cut down one is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the devil.

From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens. I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of others of which we cannot raise even Liliputian imitations. Let man be what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage towering up into the sky to the fan-palm of the desert whose fronds are reservoirs of water.

Of exogenous trees the majority were leguminous in some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seeds in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old-World names with characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no relations of peaches, and gum-trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another.

Again, you saw ferns which you seemed to recognize till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia nobilis_, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendent bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it had not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.

Underneath, and dispersed among the imperial beauties, were spice-trees, orange-trees, coffee plants, and cocoa, or again, shrubs with special virtues or vices. We had to be careful what we were about, for fruits of fairest appearance were tempting us all round. My companion was preparing to eat something to encourage me to do the same. A gardener stopped him in time. It was nux vomica. I was straying along a less frequented path, conscious of a heavy vaporous odor, in which I might have fainted had I remained exposed to it. I was close to a manchineel-tree.

Prettiest and freshest were the nutmegs, which had a glen all to themselves and perfumed the surrounding air. In Trinidad and in Grenada I believe the nutmegs are the largest that are known, being from thirty to forty feet high; leaves brilliant green, something like the leaves of an orange, but extremely delicate and thin, folded one over the other, the lowest branches sweeping to the ground till the whole tree forms a natural bower, which is proof against a tropical shower. The fragrance attracts moths and flies; not mosquitoes, who prefer a ranker atmosphere. I saw a pair of butterflies the match of which I do not remember even in any museum, dark blue shot with green like a peacock's neck, and the size of English bats. I asked a black boy to catch me one. "That sort no let catchee, massa," he said; and I was penitently glad to hear it.

Among the wonders of the garden are the vines, as they call them, that is, the creepers of various kinds that climb about the other trees. Standing in an open space there was what once had been a mighty "cedar." It was now dead, only the trunk and dead branches remaining, and had been murdered by a "fig-vine" which had started from the root, twined itself like a python round the stem, strangled out the natural life, and spreading out in all directions, had covered boughs and twigs with a foliage not its own. So far the "vine" had done no worse than ivy does at home, but there was one feature about it which puzzled me altogether. The lowest of the original branches of the cedar were about twenty feet above our heads. From these in four or five places the parasite had let fall shoots, perhaps an inch in diameter, which descended to within a foot of the ground and then suddenly, without touching that or anything, formed a bight like a rope, went straight up again, caught hold of the branch from which they started, and so hung suspended exactly as an ordinary swing.

In three distinctly perfect instances the "vine" had executed this singular evolution, while at the extremity of one of the longest and tallest branches high up in the air it had made a clean leap of fifteen feet without visible help and had caught hold of another tree adjoining on the same level. These performances were so inexplicable that I conceived that they must have been a freak of the gardener's. I was mistaken. He said that at particular times in the year the fig-vine threw out fine tendrils which hung downward like strings. The strongest among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them, the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.

But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage at the extreme angle of it, where Kingsley[A] had been the guest of Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep verandas lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out into the savanna through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos, the canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred feet into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape, peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing evening of his own life.

[Footnote A: Charles Kingsley, who wrote here his "At Last," descriptive of tropical scenes.]

[Happiness makes its home with the negroes of Trinidad, whom
nature keeps in pristine idleness. They have little to do other
than to pull and eat.]

In Trinidad there are eighteen thousand freeholders, most of them negroes and representatives of the old slaves. Their cabins are spread along the road on either side, overhung with bread-fruit-trees, tamarinds, calabash-trees, out of which they make their cups and water-jugs; the luscious granadilla climbs among the branches; plantains throw their cool shade over the doors; oranges and limes and citrons perfume the air, and droop their boughs under the weight of their golden burdens. There were yams in the gardens and cows in the paddocks, and cocoa-bushes loaded with purple or yellow pods. Children played about in swarms in happy idleness and abundance, with schools, too, at intervals, and an occasional Catholic chapel, for the old religion prevails in Trinidad, never having been disturbed.

What form could human life assume more charming than that which we were now looking on? Once more, the earth does not contain any peasantry so well off, so well cared for, so happy, so sleek and contented as the sons and daughters of the emancipated slaves in the English West Indian Islands. Sugar may fail the planter, but cocoa, which each peasant can grow with small effort for himself, does not fail and will not. He may "better his condition," if he has any such ambition, without stirring beyond his own ground, and so far, perhaps, his ambition may extend, if it is not turned off upon politics.

Even the necessary evils of the tropics are not many or serious. His skin is proof against mosquitoes. There are snakes in Trinidad as there were snakes in Eden. "Plenty snakes," said one of them who was at work in his garden, "plenty snakes, but no bitee." As to costume, he would prefer the costume of innocence if he were allowed. Clothes in such a climate are superfluous for warmth, and to the minds of the negroes, unconscious as they are of shame, superfluous for decency. European prejudice, however, still passes for something; the women have a love for finery, which would prevent a complete return to African simplicity; and in the islands which are still French, and in those like Trinidad, which the French originally colonized, they dress themselves with real taste. They hide their wool in red or yellow handkerchiefs, gracefully twisted; or perhaps it is not only to conceal the wool. Columbus found the Carib women of the island dressing their hair in the same fashion.

The water-works, when we reached them, were even more beautiful than we had been taught to expect. A dam has been driven across a perfectly limpid mountain stream; a wide open area has been cleared, levelled, strengthened with masonry, and divided into deep basins or reservoirs, through which the current continually flows. Hedges of hibiscus shine with crimson blossoms. Innumerable humming-birds glance to and fro among the trees and shrubs, and gardens and ponds are overhung by magnificent bamboos, which so astonished me by their size that I inquired if their height had been measured. One of them, I was told, had lately fallen, and was found to be one hundred and thirty feet long. A single drawback only there was to this enchanting spot, and it was again the snakes. There are huge pythons in Trinidad which are supposed to have crossed the straits from the continent. Some washerwomen at work in the stream had been disturbed a few days before our visit by one of these monsters, who had come down to see what they were about. They are harmless, but trying to the nerves.

[We shall conclude this selection with a leap from Trinidad to
Jamaica, and the relation of an adventure experienced by our
author in that island. He was on his way back from an excursion
into the island.]

The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour before sunset. The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica. The sea-breeze had fallen, the land-breeze had not risen, and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge. Cherry Garden, to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would bring me to my destination before dark.

So I calculated; but alas! for human expectation. I engaged a "buggy" at the station, with a decent-looking conductor, who assured me that he knew the way to Cherry Garden as well as to his own door. His horse looked starved and miserable. He insisted that there was not another in Kingston that was more than a match for it. We set out, and for the first two or three miles we went on well enough, conversing amicably on things in general. But it so happened that it was market day. The road was thronged with women plodding along with their baskets on their heads, a single male on a donkey to each detachment of them, carrying nothing, like an officer with a detachment of soldiers.

Foolish indignation rose in me, and I asked my friend if he was not ashamed of seeing the poor creatures toiling so cruelly, while their lords and masters amused themselves. I appealed to his feelings as a man, as if it were likely that he had got any. The wretch only laughed. "Ah, massa," he said, with his tongue in his cheek, "women do women's work, men do men's work,--all right." "And what is men's work?" I asked. Instead of answering he went on, "Look at they women, massa,--how they laugh, how happy they be! Nobody more happy than black woman, massa."

I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till he got excited too, and we argued and contradicted each other, till at last the horse, finding he was not attended to, went his own way, and that was a wrong one. Between Kingston and our destination there is a deep sandy flat, overgrown with brush and penetrated in all directions with labyrinthine lanes. Into this we had wandered in our quarrels, and neither of us knew where we were. The sand was loose; our miserable beast was above his fetlocks in it, and was visibly drooping under his efforts to drag us along even at a walk.

The sun went down. The tropic twilight is short. The evening star shone out in the west, and the crescent moon over our heads. My man said this and said that; every word was a lie, for he had lost his way and would not allow it. We saw a light through some trees. I sent him to inquire. We were directed one way and another way, every way except the right one. We emerged at last upon a hard road of some kind. The stars told me the general direction. We came to cottages where the name of Cherry Garden was known, and we were told that it was two miles off; but alas! again there were two roads to it,--a short and good one and a long and bad one, and they sent us by the last. There was a steep hill to climb, for the house is eight hundred feet above the sea. The horse could hardly crawl, and my "nigger" went to work to flog him to let off his own ill-humor. I had to stop that by force, and at last, as it grew too dark to see the road under the trees, I got out and walked, leaving him to follow at a foot's pace. The night was lovely. I began to think that we should have to camp out after all, and that it would be no great hardship.

It was like the gloaming of a June night in England, the daylight in the open spots not entirely gone, and mixing softly with the light of moon and planet and the flashing of the fireflies. I plodded on, mile after mile, and Cherry Garden still receded to one mile farther. We came to a gate of some consequence. The outline of a large mansion was visible, with gardens round it. I concluded that we had arrived, and was feeling for the latch when the forms of a lady and gentleman appeared against the sky who were strolling in the grounds. They directed me still upward, with the mile which never diminished still to be travelled.

Like myself, our weary animal had gathered hopes from the sight of the gate. He had again to drag on as he could. His owner was subdued and silent, and obeyed whatever order I gave him. The trees now closed over us so thick that I could see nothing. Vainly I repented of my unnecessary philanthropy, which had been the cause of the mischief; what had I to do with black women, or white either, for that matter? I had to feel the way with my feet and a stick. I came to a place where the lane again divided. I tried the nearest turn. I found a trench across it three feet deep, which had been cut by a torrent. This was altogether beyond the capacity of our unfortunate animal, so I took the other boldly, prepared, if it proved wrong, to bivouac till morning with my "nigger," and go on with my argument.

Happily there was no need; we came again on a gate which led into a field. There was a drive across it and wire fences. Finally lights began to glimmer and dogs to bark: we were at the real Cherry Garden at last, and found the whole household alarmed for what had become of us.

I could not punish my misleader by stinting his fare, for I knew that I had only myself to blame. He was an honest fellow after all. In the disturbance of my mind I left a rather valuable umbrella in his buggy. He discovered it after he had gone, and had grace enough to see that it was returned to me. My entertainers were much amused at the cause of the misadventure, perhaps unique of its kind: to address homilies to the black people on the treatment of their wives not being the fashion in those parts.

THE HIGH WOODS OF TRINIDAD.

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

[The skilled and popular novelist to whom we owe our present
selection seems to have entertained for years a vivid wish to
see the glory of the tropics, the achievement of which desire
is put upon record in "At Last," the work from which we quote.
In his "Westward Ho" he had years before given a
warmly-delineated imaginary picture of the tropics, but waited
for years afterwards to see these scenes in their picturesque
reality. He tells well the story of the tropical "High Woods."]

And now we set ourselves to walk to the depot, where the government timber was being felled, and the real "High Woods" to be seen at last. Our path lay along the half-finished tramway, through the first cacao plantation I had ever seen, though, I am happy to say, not the last by many a one.

Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large, long leaves. Each tree is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the path, grow plants of the common hot-house Datura, its long white flowers perfuming all the air. They have been planted as landmarks, to prevent the young cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs like a ceiba. You look up and see that they are Bois immortelles, fifty or sixty feet high, one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood under a Lombardy poplar in early spring and looked up at its buds and twigs showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt the beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly--but only faintly--the beauty of these "madres de cacao,"--cacao mothers, as they call them here,--because their shade is supposed to shelter the cacao-trees, while the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp.

I turned my dazzled eyes down again and looked into the delicious darkness under the bushes. The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem, and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem, and there, again, on a bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the cacao-pods, full of what are called at home cacao-nibs. And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them sat their brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a cloth. I went up and told him that I came from England, and never saw cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at which news he grinned amusement till his white teeth and eyeballs made a light in that dark place, and offered me a fresh broken pod, that I might taste the pink sour sweet pulp in which the rows of the nibs lie packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.

He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps in Paris to the chocolate-makers, who convert them into chocolate, "Menier" or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla--both, possibly, from this very island. This latter fact once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris. And (so goes the story) he succeeded; but the fair Creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and fro from that centre of fashion, Paris. So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat naught but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times as much as home-made chocolate need cost.

As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still unfinished), one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant, which bears in the island the ominous name of the Brinvilliers. It is one of those deadly poisons too common in the bush, and too well known to the negro Obi-men and Obi-women. And as I looked at the insignificant weed, I wondered how the name of that wretched woman should have spread to this remote island, and have become famous enough to be applied to a plant. French negroes may have brought the name with them; but then arose another wonder. How were the terrible properties of the plant discovered? How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the devil's work, and what long practice--considering its usual slowness and dulness--must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool for its jealousy and revenge! It may have taken ages to discover the Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known. Why not? As the Spaniards say, "The devil knows many things, because he is old." Surely this is one of the many facts which point towards some immensely ancient civilization in the tropics, and a civilization which may have had its ugly vices and have been destroyed thereby.

Now we left the cacao grove; and I was aware on each side of the trace of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams,--strange colossal shapes towering up a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach, for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling, and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the "rastrajo," which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared,--all utterly impassable. These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me. I might have spent weeks in botanizing merely at them; but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo towards growing enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the only question for one who for forty years had been longing for one peep at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season, and on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace. I hurried down it like any school-boy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured negroes, who expected the respectable elderly "buccra" to come to grief, struggled perspiring up the other side of the gully, and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short, breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.

In the primeval forest, looking upon that upon which my teachers and masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace, Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine, comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare in ignorance. There was actually, then, such a sight to be seen on earth, and it was not less, but far more, wonderful than they had said.

My first feeling on entering the high woods was helplessness, confusion, awe, all but terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards. Without a compass, or the landmark of some opening to or from which he can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it impossible to give any general sketch of the forest. Once inside "you cannot see the wood for the trees." You can only wander on as far as you dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines all straining upward, in fierce competition, towards the light-food far above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round your head, and rises thickening to an unknown height. The upward lines are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what leaves they bear, being for most part on the tips of the twigs, give a scattered, mist-like appearance to the under foliage.

For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an English wood. But try to walk through it, and ten steps undeceive you. Around your knees are probably Mamures, with creeping stems and fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young cocoa-nut-palm. You try to brush through them, and are caught up instantly by a string or wire belonging to some other plant. You look up and round, and then you find that the air is full of wires,--that you are hung up in a net-work of fine branches belonging to half a dozen different sorts of young trees, and intertwined with as many different species of slender creepers. You thought at your first glance among the tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire rigging, and must use the cutlass right and left at every five steps.

You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you they are only three and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to it either way, but gradually discover that it is the leaf-stalk of a young Cocorite palm. The leaf is five-and-twenty feet long, and springs from a huge ostrich plume, which is sprawling out of the ground and up above your head a few yards off. You cut the leaf-stalk through right and left and walk on, to be stopped suddenly (for you get so confused by the multitude of objects that you never see anything till you run against it) by a gray lichen-covered bar as thick as your ankle. You follow it up with your eye, and find it entwine itself with three or four other bars, and roll over with them in great knots, and festoons, and loops twenty feet high, and then go up with them into the green cloud over your head, and vanish, as if a giant had thrown a ship's cable into the tree-tops.

One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the negro and the Indian, is a Liantasse. You see that at once by the form of its cable,--six or eight inches across in one direction, and three or four in another, furbelowed all down the middle into regular knots, and looking like a chain cable between two flexible bars. At another of the loops, about as thick as your arm, your companion, if you have a forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few blows of his cutlass he will sever it as high up as he can reach, and again below, some three feet down; and, while you are wondering at this seemingly wanton destruction, he lifts the bar on high, throws his head back, and pours down his thirsty throat a pint or more of pure cold water. This hidden treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending sap, or rather the ascending pure rain-water which has been taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft, to be elaborated into sap, and leaf, and flower, and fruit, and fresh tissue for the very stem up which it originally climbed, and therefore it is that the woodman cuts the water-vine through first at the top of the piece which he wants, and not at the bottom; for so rapid is the ascent of the sap, that if he cut the stem below, the water would have all fled upward before he could cut it off above.

Meanwhile, the old story of Jack and the Bean-stalk comes into your mind. In such a forest was the old dame's hut, and up such a bean-stalk Jack climbed, to fight a giant and a castle high above. Why not? What may not be up there? You look up into the green cloud, and long for a moment to be a monkey. There may be monkeys up there over your head,--burly red Howler, or tiny peevish Sapajou, peering down at you, but you cannot peer up at them. The monkeys, and the parrots, and the humming-birds, and the flowers, and all the beauty, are upstairs--up above the green cloud. You are in "the empty nave of the cathedral," and the service is being celebrated aloft in the blazing roof.

We will hope that, as you look up, you have not been careless enough to walk on, for if you have you will be tripped up at once; nor to put your hand out incautiously to rest it against a tree, or what not, for fear of sharp thorns, ants, and wasp-nests. If you are all safe, your next steps, probably, as you struggle through the bush between tree-trunks of every possible size, will bring you face to face with huge upright walls of seeming boards, whose rounded edges slope upward till, as your eye follows them, you find them enter an enormous stem, perhaps round, like one of the Norman pillars of Durham nave, and just as huge; perhaps fluted, like one of William of Wykeham's columns at Winchester.

There is the stem, but where is the tree? Above the green cloud. You struggle up to it between two of the board walls, but find it not so easy to reach. Between you and it are half a dozen tough strings which you had not noticed at first,--the eye cannot focus itself rapidly enough in this confusion of distances,--which have to be cut through ere you can pass. Some of them are rooted in the ground, straight and tense; some of them dangle and wave in the wind at every height. What are they? Air-roots of wild pines, or of Matapalos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or of some other parasite? Probably; but you cannot see. All you can see is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud arms as big as English forest-trees branch off, and that out of their forks a whole green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and half climbed up again.

You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is smooth and free from climbers, and that mass of verdure may belong possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle a dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight, and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree. And what are their species? What are their families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree, when cut, refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around. Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of three or even four different plants....

And where are the famous Orchids? They perch on every bough and stem; but they are not, with three or four exceptions, in flower in the winter; and if they were, I know nothing about them; at least I know enough to know how little I know. Whosoever has read Darwin's "Fertilization of Orchids," and finds in his own reason that the book is true, had best say nothing about the beautiful monsters till he has seen with his own eyes more than his master.

And yet even the three or four that are in flower are worth going many a mile to see. In the hot-house they seem almost artificial from their strangeness; but to see them "natural," on natural boughs, gives a sense of their reality which no unnatural situation can give. Even to look up at them perched on bough and stem, as one rides by, and to guess what exquisite and fantastic form may issue, in a few months or weeks, out of those fleshy, often unsightly, leaves, is a strange pleasure,--a spur to the fancy which is surely wholesome, if we will but believe that all these things were invented by a Fancy, which desires to call out in us, by contemplating them, such small fancy as we possess, and to make us poets, each according to his power, by showing a world in which, if rightly looked at, all is poetry.

Another fact will soon force itself on your attention, unless you wish to tumble down and get wet up to your knees. The soil is furrowed everywhere by holes, by graves some two or three feet wide and deep, and of uncertain length and shape, often wandering about for thirty or forty feet, and running confusedly into each other. They are not the work of man, nor of an animal, for no earth seems to have been thrown out of them. In the bottom of the dry graves you sometimes see a decaying root; but most of them just now are full of water, and of tiny fish also, which burrow in the mud, and sleep during the dry season, to come out and swim during the wet. These graves are, some of them, plainly quite new. Some, again, are very old, for trees of all sizes are growing in them and over them.

What makes them? A question not easily answered. But the shrewdest foresters say that they have held the roots of trees now dead. Either the tree has fallen, and torn its roots out of the ground, or the roots and stumps have rotted in their place, and the soil above them has fallen in.

But they must decay very quickly, these roots, to leave their quiet fresh graves thus empty; and--now one thinks of it--how few fallen trees, or even dead sticks, there are about. An English wood, if left to itself, would be cumbered with fallen timber; and one has heard of forests in North America through which it is all but impossible to make way, so high are piled up, among the still growing trees, dead logs in every stage of decay. Such a sight may be seen in Europe among the high silver-fir forests of the Pyrenees. How is it not so here? How, indeed? And how comes it--if you will look again--that there are few or no fallen leaves, and actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood there would be a foot--perhaps two feet--of black soil, renewed by every autumn leaf-fall. Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty feet of leaf- and timber-mould. And here, in a forest equally ancient, every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam as it might in a well-hoed garden-bed. Is it not strange?

Most strange, till you remember where you are,--in one of Nature's hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable sun force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates again as swiftly as it destroys. Here, when the forest giant falls, as some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side; then

"Nothing in him that doth fade,
But doth suffer an _air_-change
Into something rich and strange."

Under the genial rain and genial heat, the timber-tree itself, all its tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves, snapped off not only by the blow, but by the very wind of the falling tree, all melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months--say almost a few days--into the water, and carbonic acid, and sunlight out of which they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not a wrack behind. Explained thus,--and this I believe to be the true explanation,--the absence of leaf-mould is one of the grandest, as it is one of the most startling, phenomena of the forest.

[And thus the writer rambles on, telling fresh marvels of the
tropic woods, from which a knowledge is attained that "defies
all analysis."]

[It is that of] the causes and effects of their beauty; that "aesthetic" of plants, of which Schleiden has spoken so well in that charming book of his, "The Plant," which all should read who wish to know somewhat of "The Open Secret." But when they read it let them read with open hearts. For that same "Open Secret" is, I suspect, one of those which God may hide from the wise and prudent, and yet reveal to babes.

At least, so it seemed to me, the first day that I went, awe-struck, into the High Woods; and so it seemed to me, the last day that I came, even more awe-struck, out of them.

ANIMALS OF BRITISH GUIANA.

C. BARRINGTON BROWN.

[British Guiana, the land which seems so strongly inclined to
extend its borders at the expense of Venezuela, is as yet very
far from being the active and well-developed settlement which
might be imagined from the aggressiveness of its rulers. Mr.
Brown's story of it indicates a land of which nature is still
largely the lord, and which is so little known that he, as late
as twenty years ago, was able to discover a river and a
cataract not previously heard of. The selection we append,
descriptive of the wild animals of the country, is significant
of an undeveloped land. Mr. Brown, in his "Canoe and Camp Life
in British Guiana," describes a number of unsuccessful efforts
to shoot jaguars, and continues:]