At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

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. ⁹³  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, ⁹⁴ 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. ⁹⁵  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. ⁹⁶  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, ⁹⁷ or tiny peevish Sapajou, ⁹⁸ 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, ⁹⁹ or of Matapalos, or of Figs, or of Seguines, ¹⁰⁰ 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. ¹⁰¹

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 ¹⁰² with entire leaves; up the next another quite different, with deeply-cut leaves; ¹⁰³ up the next the Ceriman ¹⁰⁴ 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 ¹⁰⁵ 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 ¹⁰⁶ 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. ¹⁰⁷  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; ¹⁰⁸ that a Carapo, ¹⁰⁹ that a Cedar, ¹¹⁰ that a Roble ¹¹¹ (oak); that, larger than all you have seen yet, a Locust; ¹¹² that a Poui; ¹¹³ that a Guatecare, ¹¹⁴ that an Olivier, ¹¹⁵ 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, ¹¹⁶ Lignum vitæ, ¹¹⁷ and Purple heart. ¹¹⁸  He will pass by as useless weeds, Ceibas ¹¹⁹ and Sandbox-trees, ¹²⁰ 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, ¹²¹ 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. ¹²²  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; ¹²³ 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; ¹²⁴ 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, ¹²⁵ 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 ¹²⁶ has taken possession of the head of a huge Mombin, ¹²⁷ 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 ¹²⁸ 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. ¹²⁹  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, ¹³⁰ 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 ¹³¹—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, ¹³² 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.