e oily swell; and under Huevos, and round into a lonely
cove, with high crumbling cliffs bedecked with Cereus and Aloes in
flower, their tall spikes of green flowers standing out against the
sky, twenty or thirty feet in height, and beds of short wild pine-
apples, {106} like amber-yellow fur, and here and there hanging
leaves trailing down to the water; and on into a nook, the sight of
which made us give up all hopes of the cave, but which in itself was
worth coming from Europe to see. The work of ages of trade-surf had
cut the island clean through, with a rocky gully between soft rocks
some hundred feet in width. It was just passable at high tide; and
through it we were to have rowed, and turned to the left to the cave
in the windward cliffs. But ere we reached it the war outside said
'No' in a voice which would take no denial, and when we beached the
boat behind a high rock, and scrambled up to look out, we saw a
sight, one half of which was not unworthy of the cliffs of Hartland
or Bude. On the farther side of the knife edge of rock, crumbling
fast into the sea, a waste of breakers rolled through the chasm,
though there was scarcely any wind to drive them, leaping, spouting,
crashing, hammering down the soft cliffs, which seemed to crumble,
and did doubtless crumble, at every blow; and beyond that the open
blue sea, without a rock or a sail, hazy, in spite of the blazing
sunlight, beneath the clouds of spray. But there ceased the
likeness to a rock scene on the Cornish coast; for at the other foot
of the rock, not twenty yards from that wild uproar, the land-locked
cove up which we had come lay still as glass, and the rocks were
richer with foliage than an English orchard. Everywhere down into
the very sea, the Matapalos held and hung; their air-roots dangled
into the very water; many of them had fallen into it, but grew on
still, and blossomed with great white fragrant flowers, somewhat
like those of a Magnolia, each with a shining cake of amber wax as
big as a shilling in the centre; and over the Matapalos, tree on
tree, liane on liane, up to a negro garden, with its strange huge-
leaved vegetables and glossy fruit-trees, and its black owner
standing on the cliff, and peering down out of his little nest with
grinning teeth and white wondering eyes, at the white men who were
gathering, off a few yards of beach, among the great fallen leaves
of the Matapalos, such shells as del