f the Brinvilliers.
{127} 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