had kindly let down an air-root into the soil. We tightened the
root, set it perpendicular, cut it off exactly where it touched the
ground, and then pulled carefully till we brought the plant and half
a dozen more strange vegetables down on our heads. The length of
the air-root was just seventy-five feet. Some twenty feet or more
above that first fork was a second fork; and then the tree began.
Where its head was we could not see. We could only, by laying our
faces against the bole and looking up, discern a wilderness of
boughs carrying a green cloud of leaves, most of them too high for
us to discern their shape without the glasses. We walked up the
slope, and round about, in hopes of seeing the head of the tree
clear enough to guess at its total height: but in vain. It was
only when we had ridden some half mile up the hill that we could
discern its masses rising, a bright green mound, above the darker
foliage of the forest. It looked of any height, from one hundred
and fifty to two hundred feet; less it could hardly be. 'It made,'
says a note by one of our party, 'other huge trees look like
shrubs.' I am not surprised that my friend Mr. St. Luce D'Abadie,
who measured the tree since my departure, found it to be one hundred
and ninety-two feet in height.

I was assured that there were still larger trees in the island. A
certain Locust-tree and a Ceiba were mentioned. The Moras, too, of
the southern hills, were said to be far taller. And I can well
believe it; for if huge trees were as shrubs beside that Sandbox, it
would be a shrub by the side of those Locusts figured by Spix and
Martius, which fifteen Indians with outstretched arms could just
embrace. At the bottom they were eighty-four feet round, and sixty
where the boles became cylindrical. By counting the rings of such
parts as could be reached, they arrived at the conclusion that they
were of the age of Homer, and 332 years old in the days of
Pythagoras. One estimate, indeed, reduced their antiquity to 2052
years old; while another (counting, I presume, two rings of fresh
wood for every year) carried it up to 4104.

So we rode on and up the hills, by green and flowery paths, with
here and there a cottage and a garden, and groups of enormous
Palmistes towering over the tree-tops in every glen, talking over
that wondrous weed, whose head we saw still far below. For weed it
is, and nothing more. The wood is sof