, is in common use to designate all the elevated
land, the extended ridges which serve as water-sheds for the torrents
of the rainy season, as well as the isolated hillocks, clothed in wood,
which look like huge hay-cocks,--those, for instance, which rise in the
rear of Cap Haytien. The aspect of the higher hills in the interior
might mislead an etymologist to derive the word _morne_ from the French
adjective which means _gloomy_, they are so marked by the ravages of the
hurricane and earthquake, so ploughed up into decrepit features by the
rains, the pitiless vertical heat, the fires, and the landslides. The
soft rock cannot preserve its outlines beneath all these influences; its
thin covering of soil is carried off to make the river-silt, and then
it crumbles away beneath the weather. Great ruts are scored through the
forests where the rock has let whole acres of trees and rubbish slip;
they sometimes cover the negro-cabins and the coffee-walks below. These
mountains are capricious and disordered masses of grayish stone; there
are no sustained lines which sweep upward from the green plantations and
cut sharply across the sky, no unchangeable walls of cool shadow, no
delicate curves, as in other hills, where the symmetry itself seems
to protect the material from the wear and tear of the atmosphere. The
_mornes_ are decaying hills; they look as if they emerged first from the
ocean and were the oldest parts of the earth, not merely weather-beaten,
but profligately used up with a too tropical career, which deprives
their age of all grandeur: they bewilder and depress.

There are delightful valleys below these sullen hills. In the dry season
their torrents are stony bridle-paths, with only two or three inches
of water, along which the traveller can pass from the flourishing
plantations, where all the forms of a torrid vegetation are displayed,
into this upper region of decay. The transition is sudden and
unpleasant. Everything below is stately, exuberant: the sugar-cane, the
cotton-tree, the coffee-shrub are suggestive of luxury; the orange
and lemon shine through the glossy leaves; the palm-tree, the elegant
_papayo_, the dark green candle-wood, the feathery bamboo, the fig,
the banana, the mahogany, the enormous _Bombax ceiba_, the sablier,[B]
display their various shapes; shrubs and bushes, such as the green
and red pimento, the vanilla, the pomegranate, the citron, the
sweet-smelling acacia, and the red jasmine, contest