The characteristics of many kinds of palm have been made familiar by
pictures and photographs. But the giant palms of the American tropics
cannot be adequately represented by the modern methods of pictorial
illustration: they must be seen. You cannot draw or photograph a palm
two hundred feet high.
The first sight of a group of such forms, in their natural environment
of tropical forest, is a magnificent surprise,--a surprise that strikes
you dumb. Nothing seen in temperate zones,--not even the huger growths
of the Californian slope,--could have prepared your imagination for the
weird solemnity of that mighty colonnade. Each stone-grey trunk is a
perfect pillar,--but a pillar of which the stupendous grace has no
counterpart in the works of man. You must strain your head well back to
follow the soaring of the prodigious column, up, up, up through abysses
of green twilight, till at last--far beyond a break in that infinite
interweaving of limbs and lianas which is the roof of the forest--you
catch one dizzy glimpse of the capital: a parasol of emerald feathers
outspread in a sky so blinding as to suggest the notion of azure
electricity.
* * * * *
Now what is the emotion that such a vision excites,--an emotion too
powerful to be called wonder, too weird to be called delight? Only
when the first shock of it has passed,--when the several elements
that were combined in it have begun to set in motion widely different
groups of ideas,--can you comprehend how very complex it must have
been. Many impressions belonging to personal experience were
doubtless revived in it, but also with them a multitude of sensations
more shadowy,--accumulations of organic memory; possibly even vague
feelings older than man,--for the tropical shapes that aroused the
emotion have a history more ancient than our race.
One of the first elements of the emotion to become clearly
distinguishable is the aesthetic; and this, in its general mass, might be
termed the sense of terrible beauty. Certainly the spectacle of that
unfamiliar life,--silent, tremendous, springing to the sun in colossal
aspiration, striving for light against Titans, and heedless of man in
the gloom beneath as of a groping beetle,--thrills like the rhythm of
some single marvellous verse that is learned in a glance and remembered
forever. Yet the delight, even at its vividest, is shadowed by a queer
disquiet. The aspect of that monstrous, pale, naked, smooth-stretching
column suggests a life as conscious as the serpent's. You stare at the
towering lines of the shape,--vaguely fearing to discern some sign of
stealthy movement, some beginning of undulation. Then sight and reason
combine to correct the suspicion. Yes, motion is there, and life
enormous--but a life seeking only sun,--life, rushing like the jet of a
geyser, straight to the giant day.