it--'If I tap da wan momant ma, I
catch da confection,' while, of course, a bucket or two of hot water
was emptied on us out of a passing cloud, I got on board the
steamer, and away to San Fernando, to wash away dirt and forget
fatigue, amid the hospitality of educated and high-minded men, and
of even more charming women.

CHAPTER XI: THE NORTHERN MOUNTAINS

I had heard and read much of the beauty of mountain scenery in the
Tropics. What I had heard and read is not exaggerated. I saw, it
is true, in this little island no Andes, with such a scenery among
them and below them as Humboldt alone can describe--a type of the
great and varied tropical world as utterly different from that of
Trinidad as it is from that of Kent--or Siberia. I had not even the
chance of such a view as that from the Silla of Caraccas described
by Humboldt, from which you look down at a height of nearly six
thousand feet, through layer after layer of floating cloud, which
increases the seeming distance to an awful depth, upon the blazing
shores of the Northern Sea.

That view our host and his suite had seen themselves the year
before; and they assured me that Humboldt had not overstated its
grandeur. The mountains of Trinidad do not much exceed three
thousand feet in height, and I could hope at most to see among them
what my fancy had pictured among the serrated chines and green
gorges of St. Vincent, Guadaloupe, and St. Lucia, hanging gardens
compared with which those of Babylon of old must have been Cockney
mounds. The rock among these mountains, as I have said already, is
very seldom laid bare. Decomposed rapidly by the tropic rain and
heat, it forms, even on the steepest slopes, a mass of soil many
feet in depth, ever increasing, and ever sliding into the valleys,
mingled with blocks and slabs of rock still undecomposed. The waste
must be enormous now. Were the forests cleared, and the soil no
longer protected by the leaves and bound together by the roots, it
would increase at a pace of which we in this temperate zone can form
no notion, and the whole mountain-range slide down in deluges of
mud, as, even in the temperate zone, the Mont Ventoux and other
hills in Provence are sliding now, since they have been rashly
cleared of their primeval coat of woodland.

To this degrading influence of mere rain and air must be attributed,
I think, those vast deposits of boulder which encumber the mouth