recollect what you have often heard, that social plants are rare in
the tropic forests. Certainly they are in the Trinidad; where the
only instances of social trees are the Moras (which I have never
seen growing wild) and the Moriche palms. In Europe, a forest is
usually made up of one dominant plant of firs or of pines, of oaks or
of beeches, of birch or of heather. Here no two plants seem alike.
There are more species on an acre here than in all the New Forest,
Savernake, or Sherwood. Stems rough, smooth, prickly, round, fluted,
stilted, upright, sloping, branched, arched, jointed, opposite-leaved,
alternate-leaved, leafless, or covered with leaves of every conceivable
pattern, are jumbled together, till the eye and brain are tired of
continually asking “What next?” The stems are of every colour--copper,
pink, grey, green, brown, black as if burnt, marbled with lichens, many
of them silvery white, gleaming afar in the bush, furred with mosses
and delicate creeping film-ferns, or laced with air-roots of some
parasite aloft. Up this stem scrambles a climbing Seguine with entire
leaves; up the next another quite different, with deeply-cut leaves;
up the next the Ceriman spreads its huge leaves, latticed and forked
again and again. So fast do they grow, that they have not time to
fill up the spaces between their nerves, and are consequently full of
oval holes; and so fast does its spadix of flowers expand, that (as do
some other Aroids) an actual genial heat, and fire of passion, which
may be tested by the thermometer, or even by the hand, is given off
during fructification. Beware of breaking it, or the Seguines. They
will probably give off an evil smell, and as probably a blistering
milk. Look on at the next stem. Up it, and down again, a climbing fern
which is often seen in hothouses has tangled its finely-cut fronds. Up
the next, a quite different fern is crawling, by pressing tightly to
the rough bark its creeping root-stalks, furred like a hare’s leg. Up
the next, the prim little Griffe-chatte plant has walked, by numberless
clusters of small cats’-claws, which lay hold of the bark. And what is
this delicious scent about the air? Vanille? Of course it is; and up
that stem zigzags the green fleshy chain of the Vanille Orchis. The
scented pod is far above, out of your reach; but not out of the reach
of the next parrot, or monkey, or Negro hunter, who winds the treasure.
And the stems themselves: to what trees do they belong? It would be
absurd for one to try to tell you who cannot tell one-twentieth of
them himself. Suffice it to say, that over your head are perhaps a
dozen kinds of admirable timber, which might be turned to a hundred
uses in Europe, were it possible to get them thither: your guide (who
here will be a second hospitable and cultivated Scot) will point with
pride to one column after another, straight as those of a cathedral,
and sixty to eighty feet without branch or knob. That, he will say,
is Fiddlewood; that a Carapo, that a Cedar, that a Roble (oak); that,
larger than all you have seen yet, a Locust; that, a Poui; that, a
Guatecare; that an Olivier, woods which, he will tell you, are all
but incorruptible, defying weather and insects. He will show you,
as curiosities, the smaller but intensely hard Letter wood, Lignum
vitæ, and Purple heart. He will pass by as useless weeds, Ceibas and
Sandbox-trees, whose bulk appalls you. He will look up, with something
like a malediction, at the Matapalos, which, every fifty yards, have
seized on mighty trees, and are enjoying, I presume, every different
stage of the strangling art, from the baby Matapalo, who, like one
which you saw in the Botanic Garden, has let down his first air-root
along his victim’s stem, to the old sinner whose dark crown of leaves
is supported, eighty feet in air, on innumerable branching columns
of every size, cross-clasped to each other by transverse bars. The
giant tree on which his seed first fell has rotted away utterly, and
he stands in its place, prospering in his wickedness, like certain
folk whom David knew too well. Your guide walks on with a sneer. But
he stops with a smile of satisfaction as he sees lying on the ground
dark green glossy leaves, which are fading into a bright crimson; for
overhead somewhere there must be a Balata, the king of the forest;
and there, close by, is his stem--a madder-brown column, whose head
may be a hundred and fifty feet or more aloft. The forester pats the
side of his favourite tree, as a breeder might that of his favourite
race-horse. He goes on to evince his affection, in the fashion of West
Indians, by giving it a chop with his cutlass; but not in wantonness.
He wishes to show you the hidden virtues, of this (in his eyes)
noblest of trees--how there issues out swiftly from the wound a flow
of thick white milk, which will congeal, in an hour’s time, into a gum
intermediate in its properties between caoutchouc and gutta-percha. He
talks of a time when the English gutta-percha market shall be supplied
from the Balatas of the northern hills, which cannot be shipped away
as timber. He tells you how the tree is a tree of a generous, virtuous
and elaborate race--“a tree of God, which is full of sap,” as one said
of old of such--and what could he say better, less or more? For it is
a Sapota, cousin to the Sapodilla, and other excellent fruit-trees,
itself most excellent even in its fruit-bearing power; for every
five years it is covered with such a crop of delicious plums, that
the lazy Negro thinks it worth his while to spend days of hard work,
besides incurring the penalty of the law (for the trees are Government
property), in cutting it down for the sake of its fruit. But this tree
your guide will cut himself. There is no gully between it and the
Government station; and he can carry it away; and it is worth his while
to do so; for it will square, he thinks, into a log more than three
feet in diameter, and eighty, ninety--he hopes almost a hundred--feet
in length of hard, heavy wood, incorruptible, save in salt water;
better than oak, as good as teak, and only surpassed in this island
by the Poui. He will make a stage round it, some eight feet high, and
cut it above the spurs. It will take his convict gang (for convicts
are turned to some real use in Trinidad) several days to get it down,
and many more days to square it with the axe. A trace must be made to
it through the wood, clearing away vegetation for which a European
millionaire, could he keep it in his park, would gladly pay a hundred
pounds a yard. The cleared stems, especially those of the palms, must
be cut into rollers; and the dragging of the huge log over them will be
a work of weeks, especially in the wet season. But it can be done, and
it shall be; so he leaves a significant mark on his new-found treasure,
and leads you on through the bush, hewing his way with light strokes
right and left, so carelessly that you are inclined to beg him to hold
his hand, and not destroy in a moment things so beautiful, so curious,
things which would be invaluable in an English hothouse.
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 hothouse, 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 this 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, who 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 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 quite
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 trees, and actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood
there would be a foot--perhaps two feet--of black soil, renewed 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 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.
Look here at a fresh wonder. Away in front of us a smooth grey pillar
glistens on high. You can see neither the top nor the bottom of it.
But its colour, and its perfectly cylindrical shape, tell you what it
is--a glorious Palmiste; one of those queens of the forest which you
saw standing in the fields; with its capital buried in the green cloud
and its base buried in that bank of green velvet plumes, which you must
skirt carefully round, for they are prickly dwarf palm, called Black
Roseau. Close to it rises another pillar, as straight and smooth, but
one-fourth of the diameter--a giant’s walking cane. Its head, too, is
in the green cloud. But near are two or three younger ones only forty
or fifty feet high, and you see their delicate feather heads, and are
told that they are Manacques; the slender nymphs which attend upon the
forest queen, as beautiful, though not as grand, as she.
The land slopes down fast now. You are tramping through stiff mud,
and those Roseaux are a sign of water. There is a stream or gulley
near: and now for the first time you can see clear sunshine through
the stems; and see, too, something of the bank of foliage on the other
side of the brook. You can catch sight, it may be, of the head of a
tree aloft, blazing with golden trumpet flowers, which is a Poui; and
of another low-one covered with hoar-frost, perhaps a Croton; and of
another, a giant covered with purple tassels. That is an Angelim.
Another giant overtops even him. His dark glossy leaves toss off sheets
of silver light as they flicker in the breeze; for it blows hard aloft
outside while you are in the stifling calm. That is a Balata. And
what is that on high? Twenty or thirty square yards of rich crimson
a hundred feet above the ground. The flowers may belong to the tree
itself. It may be Mountain-mangrove, which I have never seen in
flower: but take the glasses and decide. No. The flowers belong to a
liane. The “wonderful” Prince of Wales’ feather has taken possession
of the head of a huge Mombin, and tiled it all over with crimson combs
which crawl out to the ends of the branches, and dangle twenty or
thirty feet down, waving and leaping in the breeze. And all over blazes
the cloudless blue.
You gaze astounded. Ten steps downward, and the vision is gone. The
green cloud has closed again over your head, and you are stumbling in
the darkness of the bush, half blinded by the sudden change from the
blaze to the shade. Beware. “Take care of the Croc-chien!” shouts your
companion: and you are aware of, not a foot from your face, a long,
green, curved whip, armed with pairs of barbs some four inches apart;
and you are aware also, at the same moment, that another has seized you
by the arm, another by the knees, and that you must back out, unless
you are willing to part with your clothes, and your flesh afterwards.
You back out, and find that you have walked into the tips--luckily only
into the tips--of the fern-like fronds of a trailing and climbing palm
such as you see in the Botanic Gardens. That came from the East, and
furnishes the rattan-canes. This furnishes the gri-gri-canes, and is
rather worse to meet, if possible, than the rattan. Your companion,
while he helps you to pick the barbs out, calls the palm laughingly by
another name, “Suelta-mi-Ingles”; and tells you the old story of the
Spanish soldier at San Josef. You are near the water now; for here is
a thicket of Balisiers. Push through, under their great plantain-like
leaves. Slip down the muddy bank to that patch of gravel. See first,
though, that it is not tenanted already by a deadly Mapepire, or
rattlesnake, which has not the grace, as his cousin in North America
has, to use his rattle.
The brooklet, muddy with last night’s rain, is dammed and bridged by
winding roots, in the shape like the jointed wooden snakes which we
used to play with as children. They belong probably to a fig, whose
trunk is somewhere up in the green cloud. Sit down on one, and look,
around and aloft. From the soil to the sky, which peeps through here
and there, the air is packed with green leaves of every imaginable
hue and shape. Round our feet are Arums, with snow-white spadixes and
hoods, one instance among many here of brilliant colour developing
itself in deep shade. But is the darkness of the forest actually as
great as it seems? Or are our eyes, accustomed to the blaze outside,
unable to expand rapidly enough, and so liable to mistake for darkness
air really full of light reflected downwards, again and again, at every
angle, from the glossy surfaces of a million of leaves? At least we
may be excused; for a bat has made the same mistake, and flits past us
at noonday. And there is another--No; as it turns, a blaze of metallic
azure off the upper side of the wings proves this one to be no bat, but
a Morpho--a moth as big as a bat. And what was that second larger flash
of golden green, which dashed at the moth, and back to yonder branch
not ten feet off? A Jacamar--kingfisher, as they miscall her here,
sitting fearless of man, with the moth in her long beak. Her throat is
snowy white, her under-parts rich red brown. Her breast, and all her
upper plumage and long tail, glitter with golden green. There is light
enough in this darkness, it seems. But now look again at the plants.
Among the white-flowered Arums are other Arums, stalked and spotted, of
which beware; for they are the poisonous Seguine-diable, the dumb-cane,
of which evil tales were told in the days of slavery. A few drops of
its milk, put into the mouth of a refractory slave, or again into the
food of a cruel master, could cause swelling, choking, and burning
agony for many hours.
Over our heads bend the great arrow leaves and purple leaf-stalks of
the Tanias; and mingled with them, leaves often larger still: oval,
glossy, bright, ribbed, reflecting from their underside a silver light.
They belong to Arumas; and from their ribs are woven the Indian baskets
and packs. Above these, again, the Balisiers bend their long leaves,
eight or ten feet long apiece; and under the shade of the leaves their
gay flower-spikes, like double rows of orange and black-birds’ beaks
upside down. Above them, and among them, rise stiff upright shrubs,
with pairs of pointed leaves, a foot long some of them, pale green
above, and yellow or fawn-coloured beneath. You may see, by the three
longitudinal nerves in each leaf, that they are Melastomas of different
kinds--a sure token that you are in the Tropics--a probable token that
you are in Tropical America.
And over them, and among them, what a strange variety of foliage. Look
at the contrast between the Balisiers and that branch which has thrust
itself among them, which you take for a dark copper-coloured fern,
so finely divided are its glossy leaves. It is really a Mimosa-Bois
Mulâtre as they call it here. What a contrast again, the huge feathery
fronds of the Cocorite palms which stretch right away hither over our
heads, twenty and thirty feet in length. And what is that spot of
crimson flame hanging in the darkest spot of all from an under-bough
of that low weeping tree? A flower-head of the Rosa del Monte. And
what that bright straw-coloured fox’s brush above it, with a brown
hood like that of an Arum, brush and hood nigh three feet long each?
Look--for you require to look more than once, sometimes more than
twice--here, up the stem of that Cocorite, or as much of it as you can
see in the thicket. It is all jagged with the brown butts of its old
fallen leaves; and among the butts perch broad-leaved ferns, and fleshy
Orchids, and above them, just below the plume of mighty fronds, the
yellow fox’s brush, which is its spathe of flower.
What next? Above the Cocorites dangle, amid a dozen different kinds of
leaves, festoons of a liane, or of two, for one has purple flowers, the
other yellow--Bignonias, Bauhinias--what not? And through them a Carat
palm has thrust its thin bending stem, and spread out its flat head
of fan-shaped leaves twenty feet long each: while over it, I verily
believe, hangs eighty feet aloft the head of the very tree upon whose
roots we are sitting. For amid the green cloud you may see sprigs of
leaf somewhat like that of a weeping willow; and there, probably, is
the trunk to which they belong, or rather what will be a trunk at last.
At present it is like a number of round edged boards of every size,
set on end, and slowly coalescing at their edges. There is a slit down
the middle of the trunk, twenty or thirty feet long. You may see the
green light of the forest shining through it. Yes, that is probably the
fig; or, if not, then something else. For who am I, that I should know
the hundredth part of the forms on which we look?
And above all you catch a glimpse of that crimson mass of Norantea
which we admired just now; and, black as yew against the blue sky and
white cloud, the plumes of one Palmiste, who has climbed towards the
light, it may be for centuries, through the green cloud; and now, weary
and yet triumphant, rests her dark head among the bright foliage of a
Ceiba, and feeds unhindered on the sun.
There, take your tired eyes down again; and turn them right, or left,
or where you will, to see the same scene, and yet never the same. New
forms, new combinations; wealth of creative Genius--let us use the wise
old word in its true sense--incomprehensible by the human intellect
or the human eye, even as He is who makes it all, Whose garment, or
rather Whose speech, it is. The eye is not filled with seeing, or the
ear with hearing; and never would be, did you roam these forests for
a hundred years. How many years would you need merely to examine and
discriminate the different species? And when you had done that, how
many more to learn their action and reaction on each other? How many
more to learn their virtues, properties, uses? How many more to answer
that perhaps ever unanswerable question--How they exist and grow at
all? By what miracle they are compacted out of light, air, and water,
each after its kind. How, again, those kinds began to be, and what
they were like at first? Whether those crowded, struggling, competing
shapes are stable or variable? Whether or not they are varying still?
Whether even now, as we sit here, the great God may not be creating,
slowly but surely, new forms of beauty round us. Why not? If He chose
to do it, could He not do it? And even had you answered that question,
which would require whole centuries of observation as patient and
accurate as that which Mr. Darwin employed on Orchids and climbing
plants, how much nearer would you be to the deepest question of all--Do
these things exist, or only appear? Are they solid realities, or a mere
phantasmagoria, orderly indeed, and law-ruled, but a phantasmagoria
still; a picture-book by which God speaks to rational essences, created
in His own likeness? And even had you solved that old problem, and
decided for Berkeley or against him, you would still have to learn from
these forests a knowledge which enters into man not through the head,
but through the heart; which (let some modern philosophers say what
they will) defies all analysis, and can be no more defined or explained
by words than a mother’s love. I mean, the causes and effects of their
beauty; that “Æsthetic 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.
_At Last: a Christmas in the West Indies_ (London and New York, 1871).
THE YO-SEMITÉ VALLEY
(_UNITED STATES_)
C. F. GORDON-CUMMING
The valley can be approached from several different points. That by
which we entered is, I think, known as Inspiration Point. When we
started from Clarke’s Ranch, we were then at about the same level as
we are at this moment--namely, 4,000 feet above the sea. The road
gradually wound upwards through beautiful forest and by upland valleys,
where the snow still lay pure and white: and here and there, where
it had melted and exposed patches of dry earth, the red flame-like
blossoms of the snow-plant gleamed vividly.
It was slow work toiling up those steep ascents, and it must have taken
us much longer than our landlord had expected, for he had despatched us
without a morsel of luncheon; and ere we reached the half-way house,
where we were to change horses, we were all ravenous. A dozen hungry
people, with appetites sharpened by the keen, exhilarating mountain
air! No provisions of any sort were to be had; but the compassionate
horse-keeper, hearing our pitiful complaints, produced a loaf and a pot
of blackberry jelly, and we all sat down on a bank, and ate our “piece”
(as the bairns in Scotland would say) with infinite relish, and drank
from a clear stream close by. So we were satisfied with bread here in
the wilderness. I confess to many qualms as to how that good fellow
fared himself, as loaves cannot grow abundantly in those parts.
Once more we started on our toilsome way across mountain meadows and
forest ridges, till at last we had gained a height of about 7,000 feet
above the sea. Then suddenly we caught sight of the valley lying about
3,000 feet below us, an abrupt chasm in the great rolling expanse
of billowy granite ridges--or I should rather describe it as a vast
sunken pit, with perpendicular walls, and carpeted with a level meadow,
through which flows a river gleaming like quicksilver.
Here and there a vertical cloud of spray on the face of the huge crags
told where some snow-fed stream from the upper levels had found its way
to the brink of the chasm--a perpendicular fall of from 2,000 to 3,000
feet.
The fall nearest to where we stood, yet a distance of seven miles, was
pointed out as the Bridal Veil. It seemed a floating film of finest
mist, on which played the loveliest rainbow lights. For the sun was
already lowering behind us, though the light shown clear and bright on
the cold white granite crags, and on the glittering snow-peaks of the
high Sierras.
Each mighty precipice, and rock-needle, and strange granite dome was
pointed out to us by name as we halted on the summit of the pass ere
commencing the steep descent. The Bridal Veil falls over a granite
crag near the entrance of the valley, which, on the opposite side, is
guarded by a stupendous square-cut granite mass, projecting so far as
seemingly to block the way. These form the gateway of this wonderful
granite prison. Perhaps the great massive cliff rather suggests the
idea of a huge keep wherein the genii of the valley braved the siege of
the Ice-giants.