I have seen them at last. I have been at last in the High Woods, as
the primeval forest is called here; and they are not less, but more,
wonderful than I had imagined them. But they must wait awhile; for
in reaching them, though they were only ten miles off, I passed
through scenes so various, and so characteristic of the Tropics,
that I cannot do better than sketch them one by one.
I drove out in the darkness of the dawn, under the bamboos, and
Bauhinias, and palms which shade the road between the Botanic
Gardens and the savannah, toward Port of Spain. The frogs and
cicalas had nearly finished their nightly music. The fireflies had
been in bed since midnight. The air was heavy with the fragrance of
the Bauhinias, and after I passed the great Australian Blue-gum
which overhangs the road, and the Wallaba-tree, {120a} with its thin
curved pods dangling from innumerable bootlaces six feet long,
almost too heavy with the fragrance of the 'white Ixora.' {120b} A
flush of rose was rising above the eastern mountains, and it was
just light enough to see overhead the great flowers of the 'Bois
chataigne,' {120c} among its horse-chestnut-like leaves; red flowers
as big as a child's two hands, with petals as long as its fingers.
Children of Mylitta the moon goddess, they cannot abide the day; and
will fall, brown and shrivelled, before the sun grows high, after
one night of beauty and life, and probably of enjoyment. Even more
swiftly fades an even more delicate child of the moon, the Ipomoea,
Bona-nox, whose snow-white patines, as broad as the hand, open at
nightfall on every hedge, and shrivel up with the first rays of
dawn.
On through the long silent street of Port of Spain, where the air
was heavy with everything but the fragrance of Ixoras, and the dogs
and vultures sat about the streets, and were all but driven over
every few yards, till I picked up a guide--will he let me say a
friend?--an Aberdeenshire Scot, who hurried out fresh from his bath,
his trusty cutlass on his hip, and in heavy shooting-boots and
gaiters; for no clothing, be it remembered, is too strong for the
bush; and those who enter it in the white calico garments in which
West-India planters figure on the stage, are like to leave in it,
not only their clothes, but their skin besides.
In five minutes more we were on board the gig, and rowing away south
over the muddy mirror; and in ten minutes more the sun was up, and
blazing so fiercely that we were glad to cool ourselves in fancy, by
talking over salmon-fishings in Scotland and New Brunswick, and
wadings in icy streams beneath the black pine-woods.
Behind us were the blue mountains, streaked with broad lights and
shades by the level sun. On our left the interminable low line of
bright green mangrove danced and quivered in the mirage, and loomed
up in front, miles away, till single trees seemed to hang in air far
out at sea. On our right, hot mists wandered over the water,
blotting out the horizon, till the coasting craft, with distorted
sails and masts, seemed afloat in smoke. One might have fancied
oneself in the Wash off Sandringham on a burning summer's noon.
Soon logs and stumps, standing out of the water, marked the mouth of
the Caroni; and we had to take a sweep out seaward to avoid its mud-
banks. Over that very spot, now unnavigable, Raleigh and his men
sailed in to conquer Trinidad.
On one log a huge black and white heron moped all alone, looking in
the mist as tall as a man; and would not move for all our shouts.
Schools of fish dimpled the water; and brown pelicans fell upon
them, dashing up fountains of silver. The trade-breeze, as it rose,
brought off the swamps a sickly smell, suggestive of the need of
coffee, quinine, Angostura bitters, or some other febrifuge. In
spite of the glorious sunshine, the whole scene was sad, desolate,
almost depressing, from its monotony, vastness, silence; and we were
glad, when we neared the high tree which marks the entrance of the
Chaguanas Creek, and turned at last into a recess in the mangrove
bushes; a desolate pool, round which the mangrove roots formed an
impenetrable net. As far as the eye could pierce into the tangled
thicket, the roots interlaced with each other, and arched down into
the water in innumerable curves, by no means devoid of grace, but
hideous just because they were impenetrable. Who could get over
those roots, or through the scrub which stood stilted on them,
letting down at every yard or two fresh air-roots from off its
boughs, to add fresh tangle, as they struck into the mud, to the
horrible imbroglio? If one had got in among them, I fancied, one
would never have got out again. Struggling over and under endless
trap-work, without footing on it or on the mud below, one must have
sunk exhausted in an hour or two, to die of fatigue and heat, or
chill and fever.
Let the mangrove foliage be as gay and green as it may--and it is
gay and green--a mangrove swamp is a sad, ugly, evil place; and so I
felt that one to be that day.
The only moving things were some large fish, who were leaping high
out of water close to the bushes, glittering in the sun. They
stopped as we came up: and then all was still, till a slate-blue
heron {122a} rose lazily off a dead bough, flapped fifty yards up
the creek, and then sat down again. The only sound beside the
rattle of our oars was the metallic note of a pigeon in the high
tree, which I mistook then and afterwards for the sound of a horn.
On we rowed, looking out sharply right and left for an alligator
basking on the mud among the mangrove roots. But none appeared,
though more than one, probably, was watching us, with nothing of him
above water but his horny eyes. The heron flapped on ahead, and
settled once more, as if leading us on up the ugly creek, which grew
narrower and fouler, till the oars touched the bank on each side,
and drove out of the water shoals of four-eyed fish, ridiculous
little things about as long as your hand, who, instead of diving to
the bottom like reasonable fish, seemed possessed with the fancy
that they could succeed better in the air, or on land; and
accordingly jumped over each other's backs, scrambled out upon the
mud, swam about with their goggle-eyes projecting above the surface
of the water, and, in fact, did anything but behave like fish.
This little creature (Star-gazer, {122b} as some call him) is, you
must understand, one of the curiosities of Trinidad and of the
Guiana Coast. He looks, on the whole, like a gray mullet, with a
large blunt head, out of which stand, almost like horns, the eyes,
from which he takes his name. You may see, in Wood's Illustrated
Natural History, a drawing of him, which is--I am sorry to say--one
of the very few bad ones in the book; and read how, 'at a first
glance, the fish appears to possess four distinct eyes, each of
these organs being divided across the middle, and apparently
separated into two distinct portions. In fact an opaque band runs
transversely across the corner of the eye, and the iris, or coloured
portion, sends out two processes, which meet each other under the
transverse band of the cornea, so that the fish appears to possess
even a double pupil. Still, on closer investigation, the
connection, between the divisions of the pupil are apparent, and can
readily be seen in the young fish. The lens is shaped something
like a jargonelle pear, and so arranged that its broad extremity is
placed under the large segment of the cornea.'
These strangely specialised eyes--so folks believe here--the fish
uses by halves. With the lower halves he sees through the water,
with the upper halves through the air; and, elevated by this quaint
privilege, he aspires to be a terrestrial animal, emulating, I
presume, the alligators around, and tries to take his walks upon the
mud. You may see, as you go down to bathe on the east coast, a
group of black dots, in pairs, peering up out of the sand, at the
very highest verge of the surf-line. As you approach them, they
leap up, and prove themselves to belong to a party of four-eyes, who
run--there is no other word--down the beach, dash into the roaring
surf, and the moment they see you safe in the sea run back again on
the next wave, and begin staring at the sky once more. He who sees
four-eyes for the first time without laughing must be much wiser, or
much stupider, than any man has a right to be.
Suddenly the mangroves opened, and the creek ended in a wharf, with
barges alongside. Baulks of strange timbers lay on shore. Sheds
were full of empty sugar-casks, ready for the approaching crop-time.
A truck was waiting for us on a tramway; and we scrambled on shore
on a bed of rich black mud, to be received, of course, in true West
Indian fashion, with all sorts of courtesies and kindnesses.
And here let me say, that those travellers who complain of
discourtesy in the West Indies can have only themselves to thank for
it. The West Indian has self-respect, and will not endure people
who give themselves airs. He has prudence too, and will not endure
people whom he expects to betray his hospitality by insulting him
afterwards in print. But he delights in pleasing, in giving, in
showing his lovely islands to all who will come and see them;
Creole, immigrant, coloured or white man, Spaniard, Frenchman,
Englishman, or Scotchman, each and all, will prove themselves
thoughtful hosts and agreeable companions, if they be only treated
as gentlemen usually expect to be treated elsewhere. On board a
certain steamer, it was once proposed that the Royal Mail Steam
Packet Company should issue cheap six-month season tickets to the
West Indies, available for those who wished to spend the winter in
wandering from island to island. The want of hotels was objected,
naturally enough, by an Englishman present. But he was answered at
once, that one or two good introductions to a single island would
ensure hospitality throughout the whole archipelago.
A long-legged mule, after gibbing enough to satisfy his own self-
respect, condescended to trot off with us up the tramway, which lay
along a green drove strangely like one in the Cambridgeshire fens.
But in the ditches grew a pea with large yellow flower-spikes, which
reminded us that we were not in England; and beyond the ditches rose
on either side, not wheat and beans, but sugar-cane ten and twelve
feet high. And a noble grass it is, with its stems as thick as
one's wrist, tillering out below in bold curves over the well-hoed
dark soil, and its broad bright leaves falling and folding above in
curves as bold as those of the stems: handsome enough thus, but
more handsome still, I am told, when the 'arrow,' as the flower is
called, spreads over the cane-piece a purple haze, which flickers in
long shining waves before the breeze. One only fault it has; that,
from the luxuriance of its growth, no wind can pass through it; and
that therefore the heat of a cane-field trace is utterly stifling.
Here and there we passed a still uncultivated spot; a desolate reedy
swamp, with pools, and stunted alder-like trees, reminding us again
of the Deep Fens, while the tall chimneys of the sugar-works, and
the high woods beyond, completed the illusion. One might have been
looking over Holm Fen toward Caistor Hanglands; or over Deeping
toward the remnants of the ancient Bruneswald.
Soon, however, we had a broad hint that we were not in the Fens, but
in a Tropic island. A window in heaven above was suddenly opened;
out of it, without the warning cry of Gardyloo--well known in
Edinburgh of old--a bucket of warm water, happily clean, was emptied
on each of our heads; and the next moment all was bright again. A
thunder-shower, without a warning thunder-clap, was to me a new
phenomenon, which was repeated several times that day. The
suddenness and the heaviness of the tropic showers at this season is
as amusing as it is trying. The umbrella or the waterproof must be
always ready, or you will get wet through. And getting wet here is
a much more serious matter than in a temperate climate, where you
may ride or walk all day in wet clothes and take no harm; for the
rapid radiation, produced by the intense sunshine, causes a chill
which may beget, only too easily, fever and ague not to be as easily
shaken off.
The cause of these rapid and heavy showers is simple enough. The
trade-wind, at this season of the year, is saturated with steam from
the ocean which it has crossed; and the least disturbance in its
temperature, from ascending hot air or descending cold, precipitates
the steam in a sudden splash of water, out of a cloud, if there
happens to be one near; if not, out of the clear air. Therefore it
is that these showers, when they occur in the daytime, are most
common about noon; simply because then the streams of hot air rise
most frequently and rapidly, to struggle with the cooler layers
aloft. There is thunder, of course, in the West Indies, continuous
and terrible. But it occurs after midsummer, at the breaking up of
the dry season and coming on of the wet.
At last the truck stopped at a manager's house with a Palmiste,
{124} or cabbage-palm, on each side of the garden gate, a pair of
columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments for his
lawn. It is the fashion here, and a good fashion it is, to leave
the Palmistes, a few at least, when the land is cleared; or to plant
them near the house, merely on account of their wonderful beauty.
One Palmiste was pointed out to me, in a field near the road, which
had been measured by its shadow at noon, and found to be one hundred
and fifty-three feet in height. For more than a hundred feet the
stem rose straight, smooth, and gray. Then three or four spathes of
flowers, four or five feet long each, jutted out and upward like;
while from below them, as usual, one dead leaf, twenty feet long or
more, dangled head downwards in the breeze. Above them rose, as
always, the green portion of the stem for some twenty feet; and then
the flat crown of feathers, as dark as yew, spread out against the
blue sky, looking small enough up there, though forty feet at least
in breadth. No wonder if the man who possessed such a glorious
object dared not destroy it, though he spared it for a different
reason from that for which the Negroes spare, whenever they can, the
gigantic Ceibas, or silk cotton trees. These latter are useless as
timber; and their roots are, of course, hurtful to the canes. But
the Negro is shy of felling the Ceiba. It is a magic tree, haunted
by spirits. There are 'too much jumbies in him,' the Negro says;
and of those who dare to cut him down some one will die, or come to
harm, within the year. In Jamaica, says my friend Mr. Gosse, 'they
believe that if a person throws a stone at the trunk, he will be
visited with sickness, or other misfortune. When they intend to cut
one down, they first pour rum at the root as a propitiatory
offering.' The Jamaica Negro, however, fells them for canoes, the
wood being soft, and easily hollowed. But here, as in Demerara, the
trees are left standing about in cane-pieces and pastures to decay
into awful and fantastic shapes, with prickly spurs and board-walls
of roots, high enough to make a house among them simply by roofing
them in; and a flat crown of boughs, some seventy or eighty feet
above the ground, each bough as big as an average English tree, from
which dangles a whole world, of lianes, matapalos, orchids, wild
pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least,
that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you
mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's
hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate
kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment,
that it is an abnormal form of Cactus--a family which it resembles,
save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the
Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough,
it has been discovered in Angola--the only species of the Cactus
tribe in the Old World.
And now we set ourselves to walk up 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 hothouse 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, {126} 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 coco-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 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 sold 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 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
nought 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.
{127} 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 visual 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 toward some
immensely ancient civilisation in the Tropics, and a civilisation
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 botanising merely
at them: but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in
other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo toward growing
enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the
only question to 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
schoolboy, 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 a 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
upwards, 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 and 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 the 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, {129a} with creeping stems and fan-shaped leaves, something
like those of a young coconut 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 network 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 if
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. {129b} 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 cables into the tree-tops.
One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the Negro and the
Indian, is a Liantasse. {129c} 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 iron 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 upwards 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 find 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, {131a} or tiny peevish Sapajou,
{131b} 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 wasps' 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, {131c} or of Matapalos, or
of Figs, or of Seguines, {131d} 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. {132}
Soon you will be struck by the variety of the vegetation, and will
recollect what you have often heard, that social plants are rare in
the tropic forests. Certainly they are rare in 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, leaflets, 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, gray, 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 the air-roots of some parasite aloft. Up this stem
scrambles a climbing Seguine {133a} with entire leaves; up the next
another quite different, with deeply-cut leaves; {133b} up the next
the Ceriman {133c} 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 indeed 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 {133d} 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 {133e} 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. {133f} 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; {133g} that a
Carapo, {133h} that a Cedar, {133i} that a Roble {133j} (oak); that,
larger than all you have seen yet, a Locust; {133k} that a Poui;
{133l} that a Guatecare, {133m} that an Olivier, {133n} 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, {133o} Lignum vitae, {133p} and Purple
heart. {134a} He will pass by as useless weeds, Ceibas {134b} and
Sandbox-trees, {134c} whose bulk appals 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 the 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, {134d} 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
sides of his favourite tree, as a breeder might that of his
favourite racehorse. 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 an 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
Fertilisation 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
Look here at a fresh wonder. Away in front of us a smooth gray
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 a prickly
dwarf palm, called here black Roseau. {137a} 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; {137b} 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 gully
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 catch sight, it may be, of the head of
a tree aloft, blazing with golden trumpet flowers, which is a Poui;
and of another lower one covered with hoar-frost, perhaps a Croton;
{137c} 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 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 a Mountain-
mangrove, {137d} 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's Feather {137e} has taken possession of
the head of a huge Mombin, {137f} 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 over all
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 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 first, 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 {138a} 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. {138b} 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 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, {138c} 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 downward, again and again, at every angle, from the
glossy surfaces of a million 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 {138d}--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 a 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, {139a} 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 leafstalks of
the Tanias; {139b} and mingled with them, leaves often larger still:
oval, glossy, bright, ribbed, reflecting from their underside a
silver light. They belong to Arumas; {139c} 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
they 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 Mulatre, {139d} 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. {139e} And what is 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 {140a} 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; {140b} 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 toward 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; a 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 the 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 the 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.