Such travel in such a country would be impossible but for the excellent
national roads,--limestone highways, solid, broad, faultlessly
graded,--that wind from town to town, from hamlet to hamlet, over
mountains, over ravines; ascending by zigzags to heights of twenty-five
hundred feet; traversing the primeval forests of the interior; now
skirting the dizziest precipices, now descending into the loveliest
valleys. There are thirty-one of these magnificent routes, with a total
length of 488,052 metres (more than 805 miles), whereof the construction
required engineering talent of the highest order,--the building of
bridges beyond counting, and devices the most ingenious to provide
against dangers of storms, floods and land-slips. Most have
drinking-fountains along their course at almost regular
intervals,--generally made by the negroes, who have a simple but
excellent plan for turning the water of a spring through bamboo pipes to
the road-way. Each road is also furnished with milestones, or rather
kilometre-stones; and the drainage is perfect enough to assure of the
highway becoming dry within fifteen minutes after the heaviest rain, so
long as the surface is maintained in tolerably good condition. Well-kept
embankments of earth (usually covered with a rich growth of mosses,
vines, and ferns), or even solid walls of masonry, line the side that
overhangs a dangerous depth. And all these highways pass through
landscapes of amazing beauty,--visions of mountains so many-tinted and
so singular of outline that they would almost seem to have been created
for the express purpose of compelling astonishment. This tropic Nature
appears to call into being nothing ordinary: the shapes which she evokes
are always either gracious or odd,--and her eccentricities, her
extravagances, have a fantastic charm, a grotesqueness as of artistic
whim. Even where the landscape-view is cut off by high woods the forms
of ancient trees--the infinite interwreathing of vine growths all on
fire with violence of blossom-color,--the enormous green outbursts of
balisiers, with leaves ten to thirteen feet long,--the columnar
solemnity of great palmistes,--the pliant quivering exquisiteness of
bamboo,--the furious splendor of roses run mad--more than atone for the
loss of the horizon. Sometimes you approach a steep covered with a
growth of what, at first glance, looks precisely like fine green fur: it
is a first-growth of young bamboo. Or you see a hill-side covered with
huge green feathers, all shelving down and overlapping as in the tail of
some unutterable bird: these are baby ferns. And where the road leaps
some deep ravine with a double or triple bridge of white stone, note
well what delicious shapes spring up into sunshine from the black
profundity on either hand! Palmiform you might hastily term them,--but
no palm was ever so gracile; no palm ever bore so dainty a head of green
plumes light as lace! These likewise are ferns (rare survivors, maybe,
of that period of monstrous vegetation which preceded the apparition of
man), beautiful tree-ferns, whose every young plume, unrolling in a
spiral from the bud, at first assumes the shape of a crozier,--a crozier
of emerald! Therefore are some of this species called "archbishop-trees"
no doubt.... But one might write for a hundred years of the sights to be
seen upon such a mountain road.