ifty feet--and estimates, rapidly
and unconsciously, the height of the mountain by that standard. The
trees are actually nearer a hundred and fifty than fifty feet high;
and the mountain is two or three times as big as it looks.

But it is not their height, nor the beauty of their outline, nor the
size of the trunks which still linger on them here and there, which
gives these islands their special charm. It is their exquisite
little land-locked southern coves--places to live and die in--

'The world forgetting, by the world forgot.'

Take as an example that into which we rowed that day in Monos, as
the old Spaniards named it, from monkeys long since extinct; a
curved shingle beach some fifty yards across, shut in right and left
by steep rocks wooded down almost to the sea, and worn into black
caves and crannies, festooned with the night-blowing Cereus, which
crawls about with hairy green legs, like a tangle of giant spiders.
Among it, in the cracks, upright Cerei, like candelabra twenty and
thirty feet high, thrust themselves aloft into the brushwood. An
Aroid {103b} rides parasitic on roots and stems, sending downward
long air-roots, and upward brown rat-tails of flower, and broad
leaves, four feet by two, which wither into whity-brown paper, and
are used, being tough and fibrous, to wrap round the rowlocks of the
oars. Tufts of Karatas, top, spread their long prickly leaves among
the bush of 'rastrajo,' or second growth after the primeval forest
has been cleared, which dips suddenly right and left to the beach.
It, and the little strip of flat ground behind it, hold a three-
roomed cottage--of course on stilts; a shed which serves as a
kitchen; a third ruined building, which is tenanted mostly by
lizards and creeping flowers; some twenty or thirty coconut trees;
and on the very edge of the sea an almond-tree, its roots built up
to seaward with great stones, its trunk hung with fishing lines; and
around it, scattered on the shingle, strange shells, bits of coral,
coconuts and their fragments; almonds from the tree; the round scaly
fruit of the Mauritia palm, which has probably floated across the
gulf from the forests of the Orinoco or the Caroni; and the long
seeds of the mangrove, in shape like a roach-fisher's float, and
already germinating, their leaves showing at the upper end, a tiny
root at the lower. In that shingle they will not take root: but
they are quite ready