Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
green,—which on being disturbed rose into the air by hundreds, forming clouds of varie-
gated colours.
Such gorges, chasms, and precipices as here abound, I have nowhere seen in the Ar-
chipelago. A sloping surface is scarcely anywhere to be found, huge walls and rugged
masses of rock terminating all the mountains and inclosing the valleys. In many parts there
are vertical or even overhanging precipices five or six hundred feet high, yet completely
clothed with a tapestry of vegetation. Ferns, Pandanaceæ, shrubs, creepers, and even forest
trees, are mingled in an evergreen network, through the interstices of which appears the
white limestone rock or the dark holes and chasms with which it abounds. These precipices
are enabled to sustain such an amount of vegetation by their peculiar structure. Their sur-
faces are very irregular, broken into holes and fissures, with ledges overhanging the mouths
of gloomy caverns; but from each projecting part have descended stalactites, often forming
a wild gothic tracery over the caves and receding hollows, and affording an admirable sup-
port to the roots of the shrubs, trees, and creepers, which luxuriate in the warm pure atmo-
sphere and the gentle moisture which constantly exudes from the rocks. In places where the
precipice offers smooth surfaces of solid rock, it remains quite bare, or only stained with
lichens and dotted with clumps of ferns that grow on the small ledges and in the minutest
crevices.
The reader who is familiar with tropical nature only through the medium of topics and
botanical gardens, will picture to himself in such a spot many other natural beauties. He will
think that I have unaccountably forgotten to mention the brilliant flowers, which, in gor-
geous masses of crimson gold or azure, must spangle these verdant precipices, hang over the
cascade, and adorn the margin of the mountain stream. But what is the reality? In vain did I
gaze over these vast walls of verdure, among the pendant creepers and bushy shrubs, all
around the cascade, on the river's bank, or in the deep caverns and gloomy fissures,—not
one single spot of bright colour could be seen, not one single tree or bush or creeper bore a
flower sufficiently conspicuous to form an object in the landscape. In every direction the
eye rested on green foliage and mottled rock. There was infinite variety in the colour and as-
pect of the foliage, there was grandeur in the rocky masses and in the exuberant luxuriance
of the vegetation, but there was no brilliancy of colour, none of those bright flowers and
gorgeous masses of blossom, so generally considered to be everywhere present in the trop-
ics. I have here given an accurate sketch of a luxuriant tropical scene as noted down on the
spot, and its general characteristics as regards colour have been so often repeated, both in
South America and over many thousand miles in the Eastern tropics, that I am driven to
conclude that it represents the general aspect of nature in the equatorial (that is, the most
