time
to one still undefiled. We hurried down a narrow grass path, the
Cannes de Riviere and the Balisiers brushing our heads as we passed;
while round us danced brilliant butterflies, bright orange, sulphur-
yellow, black and crimson, black and lilac, and half a dozen hues
more, till we stopped, surprised and delighted. For beneath us lay
the sea, seen through a narrow gap of richest verdure.

On the left, low palms feathered over the path, and over the cliff.
On the right--when shall we see it again?--rose a young 'Bois flot,'
{164} of which boys make their fishing floats, with long, straight,
upright shoots, and huge crumpled, rounded leaves, pale rusty
underneath--a noble rastrajo plant, already, in its six months'
growth, some twenty feet high. Its broad pale sulphur flowers were
yet unopened; but, instead, an ivy-leaved Ipomoea had climbed up it,
and shrouded it from head to foot with hundreds of white
convolvulus-flowers; while underneath it grew a tuft of that
delicate silver-backed fern, which is admired so much in hothouses
at home. Between it and the palms we saw the still, shining sea;
muddy inshore, and a few hundred yards out changing suddenly to
bright green; and the point of the cove, which seemed built up of
bright red brick, fast crumbling into the sea, with all its palms
and cactuses, lianes and trees. Red stacks and skerries stood
isolated and ready to fall at the end of the point, showing that the
land has, even lately, extended far out to sea; and that Point
Rouge, like Point Courbaril and Point Galba--so named, one from some
great Locust-tree, the other from some great Galba--must have once
stood there as landmarks. Indeed all the points of the peninsula
are but remnants of a far larger sheet of land, which has been
slowly eaten up by the surges of the gulf; which has perhaps
actually sunk bodily beneath them, even as the remnant, I suspect,
is sinking now. We scrambled twenty feet down to the beach, and lay
down, tired, under a low cliff, feathered with richest vegetation.
The pebbles on which we sat were some of pitch, some of hard
sandstone, but most of them of brick; pale, dark, yellow, lavender,
spotted, clouded, and half a dozen more delicate hues; some coarse,
some fine as Samian ware; the rocks themselves were composed of an
almost glassy substance, strangely jumbled, even intercalated now
and then with soft sand. This, we were told, is a bit of