there was a Mangrove swamp and a lagoon in front, for which they,
bold lads, cared nothing.

We passed over a sort of open down, from which all vegetation had
been cleared, save the Palmistes--such a wood of them as I had never
seen before. A hundred or more, averaging at least a hundred feet
in height, stood motionless in the full cut of the strong trade-
wind. One would have expected them, when the wood round was felled,
to feel the sudden nakedness. One would have expected the inrush of
salt air and foam to have injured their foliage. But, seemingly, it
was not so. They stood utterly unharmed; save some half-dozen who
had had their tops snapped off by a gale--there are no hurricanes in
Trinidad--and remained as enormous unmeaning pikes, or posts, fifty
to eighty feet high, transformed, by that one blast, from one of the
loveliest to one of the ugliest natural objects.

Through the Palmiste pillars; through the usual black Roseau scrub;
then under tangled boughs down a steep stony bank; and we were on a
long beach of deep sand and quartz gravel. On our right the Shore-
grapes with their green bunches of fruit, the Mahauts {226} with
their poplar-like leaves and great yellow flowers, and the
ubiquitous Matapalos, fringed the shore. On our left weltered a
broad waste of plunging foam; in front green mountains were piled on
mountains, blazing in sunlight, yet softened and shrouded by an air
saturated with steam and salt. We waded our horses over the mouth
of the little Yarra, which hurried down through the sand, brown and
foul from the lagoon above. We sat down on bare polished logs,
which floods had carried from the hills above, and ate and drank--
for our Negroes had by now rejoined us; and then scrambled up the
shore back again, and into a trace running along the low cliff, even
more beautiful, if possible, than that which we had followed in the
morning. Along the cliff tall Balatas and Palmistes, with here and
there an equally tall Cedar, and on the inside bank a green wall of
Balisiers, with leaves full fifteen feet long and heads of scarlet
flowers, marked the richness of the soil. Here and there, too, a
Cannon-ball tree rose, grand and strange, among the Balatas; and in
one place the ground was strewn with large white flowers, whose
peculiar shape told us at once of some other Lecythid tree high
overhead. These Lecythids are peculiar to the hottest parts of
South Ameri