... If it is possible for a West Indian forest to be described at all,
it could not be described more powerfully than it has been by Dr. E.
Rufz, a creole of Martinique, from one of whose works I venture to
translate the following remarkable pages:
... "The sea alone, because it is the most colossal of earthly
spectacles,--only the sea can afford us any term of comparison for the
attempt to describe a _grand-bois_;--but even then one must imagine the
sea on a day of storm, suddenly immobilized in the expression of its
mightiest fury. For the summits of these vast woods repeat all the
inequalities of the land they cover; and these inequalities are
mountains from 4200 to 4800 feet in height, and valleys of corresponding
profundity. All this is hidden, blended together, smoothed over by
verdure, in soft and enormous undulations,--in immense billowings of
foliage. Only, instead of a blue line at the horizon, you have a green
line; instead of flashings of blue, you have flashings of green,--and in
all the tints, in all the combinations of which green is capable: deep
green, light green, yellow-green, black-green.
"When your eyes grow weary--if it indeed be possible for them to
weary--of contemplating the exterior of these tremendous woods, try to
penetrate a little into their interior. What an inextricable chaos it
is! The sands of a sea are not more closely pressed together than the
trees are here: some straight, some curved, some upright, some
toppling,--fallen, or leaning against one another, or heaped high upon
each other. Climbing lianas, which cross from one tree to the other,
like ropes passing from mast to mast, help to fill up all the gaps in
this treillage; and parasites--not timid parasites like ivy or like
moss, but parasites which are trees self-grafted upon trees--dominate
the primitive trunks, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage,
and fall back to the ground, forming factitious weeping-willows. You do
not find here, as in the great forests of the North, the eternal
monotony of birch and fir: this is the kingdom of infinite
variety;--species the most diverse elbow each other, interlace, strangle
and devour each other: all ranks and orders are confounded, as in a
human mob. The soft and tender _balisier_ opens its parasol of leaves
beside the _gommier_, which is the cedar of the colonies;--you see the
_acomat_, the _courbaril_, the mahogany, the _tendre-à-caillou_, the
iron-wood... but as well enumerate by name all the soldiers of an army!
Our oak, the balata, forces the palm to lengthen itself prodigiously in
order to get a few thin beams of sunlight; for it is as difficult here
for the poor trees to obtain one glance from this King of the world, as
for us, subjects of a monarchy, to obtain one look from our monarch. As
for the soil, it is needless to think of looking at it: it lies as far
below us probably as the bottom of the sea;--it disappeared, ever so
long ago, under the heaping of débris,--under a sort of manure that has
been accumulating there since the creation: you sink into it as into
slime; you walk upon putrefied trunks, in a dust that has no name! Here
indeed it is that one can get some comprehension of what vegetable
antiquity signifies;--a lurid light (_lurida lux_), greenish, as wan at
noon as the light of the moon at midnight, confuses forms and lends them
a vague and fantastic aspect; a mephitic humidity exhales from all
parts; an odor of death prevails; and a calm which is not silence (for
the ear fancies it can hear the great movement of composition and of
decomposition perpetually going on) tends to inspire you with that old
mysterious horror which the ancients felt in the primitive forests of
Germany and of Gaul:"
"'Arboribus suus horror inest.'"[3]
[Footnote 3: "Enquête sur le Serpent de la Martinique (Vipère Fer-de-Lance,
Bothrops Lancéolé, etc.)." Par le Docteur E. Rufs. 2 ed. 1859 Paris:
Germer-Ballière, pp. 55-57 (note).]