warmest
green. It passes not over merely, but through, the semi-transparent
straw and amber of the older leaves. It falls on yellow spadices
and flowers, and rich brown spathes, and on great bunches of green
nuts, to acquire from them more yellow yet; for each fruit-stalk and
each flower-scale at the base of the nut is veined and tipped with
bright orange. It pours down the stems, semi-gray on one side, then
yellow, and then, on the opposite side, covered with a powdery
lichen varying in colour from orange up to clear vermilion, and
spreads itself over a floor of yellow sand and brown fallen nuts,
and the only vegetation of which, in general, is a long crawling
Echites, with pairs of large cream-white flowers. Thus the
transparent shade is flooded with gold. One looks out through it at
the chequer-work of blue sky, all the more intense from its
contrast; or at a long whirl of white surf and gray spray; or,
turning the eyes inland toward the lagoon, at dark masses of
mangrove, above which rise, black and awful, the dying balatas,
stag-headed, blasted, tottering to their fall; and all as through an
atmosphere of Rhine wine, or from the inside of a topaz.

We rode along, mile after mile, wondering at many things. First,
the innumerable dry fruits of Timit palm, which lay everywhere;
mostly single, some double, a few treble, from coalition, I suppose,
of the three carpels which every female palm flower ought to have,
but of which it usually develops only one. They may have been
brought down the lagoon from inland by floods; but the common belief
is, that most of them come from the Orinoco itself, as do also the
mighty logs which lie about the beach in every stage of wear and
tear; and which, as fast as they are cut up and carried away, are
replaced by fresh ones. Some of these trees may actually come from
the mainland, and, drifting into this curving bay, be driven on
shore by the incessant trade wind. But I suspect that many of them
are the produce of the island itself; and more, that they have
grown, some of them, on the very spot where they now lie. For there
are, I think, evidences of subsidence going on along this coast.
Inside the Cocal, two hundred yards to the westward, stretches
inland a labyrinth of lagoons and mangrove swamps, impassable to
most creatures save alligators and boa-constrictors. But amid this
labyrinth grow everywhere mighty trees--balatas in plenty a