eastward through central Asia. I will only mention the strange
salt-steppes, which in summer often glitter like newly fallen
snow, from the salt which effloresces from the soil and nourishes a
wholly peculiar vegetation. Yet I can not refrain from attempting
a brief description of the sparingly populated but still inhabited
Tartarian steppes of Pontus. These do not uniformly present a
level surface, being broken by the durrinas, low tracts of bush of
blackthorns, hawthorns, roses and brambles. But the remaining part of
the vegetation is also divided by the inhabitants of lesser Russia,
according to its use for pasture, into two essentially distinct
groups, the truwa, the turf, and the burian, the rough, branching
plants which, on account of their woody stem, afford no sustenance
to the herds of the steppes. The feather-grass[7] is the principal
among the Graminaceous plants. Directly after flowering, it expands
its long, delicately feathered awns, not unlike marabout feathers,
from the spike which rises high above the tuft of narrow, dry leaves.
The older the steppe, the higher develops the woody root-stock above
the soil, to the annoyance of the mower. Whoever travels but a few
miles into the steppes soon hears the word burian. Against the burian
inveighs the herdsman with his oxen and horses; over the burian
laments the husbandman; the burian is the curse of the gardener
and the hope of the cook. For in the soil of the steppe, which is
peculiarly fertile for certain plants, which we call weeds, these
shoot up to an incredible height, wherever cultivation has loosened
the solid soil, which they avoid, and their peculiar use is that,
dried up in the autumn, they furnish the only fuel of those regions.
Above all, as in the pampas of Buenos Ayres, the thistles distinguish
themselves, acquiring a size, a development, and ramification which
is really marvelous. Often do they stand like little trees around the
humble earth-hovels of the country people; on favorable soil, they
often form extensive bush, even overtopping the horseman, who is as
helpless in it as in a wood, since they intercept the sight and yet
afford no trunk which might be climbed. Beside the thistle rises
the wormwood, intermingled with the gigantic mullein or hightaper,
the “steppe-light” of lesser Russia. Even the little milfoil grows
several feet high and is not a little prized, since the inhabitants,
from their poor provision, value it as the best material for fuel.
But the most characteristic of all the plants of the burian is that
which the Russians call “Perekatipole,” the “Leaf in the Field,” and
the German colonists, almost more happily, the “Wind Witch.” A poor
thistle-plant, it divides its strength in the formation of numerous
dry, slender shoots, which spread out on all sides and are entangled
with one another. More bitter than wormwood, the cattle will not
touch it even in times of the utmost famine. The domes which it forms
upon the turf are often three feet high and sometimes ten to fifteen
in circumference, arched over with naked, delicate thin branches. In
the autumn the stem of the plant rots off, and the globe of branches
dries up into a ball, light as a feather, which is then driven
through the air by the autumnal winds over the steppe. Numbers of
such balls often fly at once over the plain with such rapidity that
no horseman can catch them; now hopping with short, quick springs
along the ground, now whirling in great circles round each other,
rolling onward in a spirit-like dance over the turf, now, caught by
an eddy, rising suddenly a hundred feet into the air. Often one wind
witch hooks on to another, twenty more join company, and the whole
gigantic yet airy mass rolls away before the piping east wind.
THE HIGH WOODS
--CHARLES KINGSLEY
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 can not see the woods 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 upward, in fierce
competition, toward the light-food far above; and next on 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, with creeping stems and fan-shaped
leaves, something like those of a young cocoanut palm. You try to
brush among 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 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. 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 eyes, 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 Indian, is
a Liantasse. 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 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 upward before
he could cut it off above. Meanwhile the old story of Jack and the
Beanstalk comes into your mind. In such a forest was the old dame’s
hut, and up such a beanstalk Jack climbed to fight 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, or tiny,
peevish Sapajou, peering at you, but you can not 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 can not 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, or of Matapolos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or of
some other parasite? Probably; but you can not 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 can not 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.
Soon you will be struck by the variety of vegetation, and you 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, 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 color, 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 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 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,
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 Griffechatte plant has walked,
by numberless clusters of small cat’s 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
can not 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 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 Fiddle-wood; that a
Carap; 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 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
sides of his favorite tree as a breeder might that of his favorite
race-horse. He goes on to evince his affection, in the fashion of
the 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 can
not 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; 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, as one rides by, and to guess what exquisite and fantastic
forms 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.
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 color 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. 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 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;
and of another, a giant covered with purple tassels: this 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, 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 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 its branches, and
dangle twenty or thirty feet down, waving and leaping in the breeze.
And over all blazes the cloudless blue.
You gaze astonished. 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 afterward. 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,
“Sueltami-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--step
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, with snow-white spadixes and
hoods, one instance among many here of brilliant color 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--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 under side 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-colored 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-colored
fern, so finely divided are its glossy leaves. 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-colored 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 Corcorites 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?