pper end, just where
the mountain-spurs run together in an amphitheatre; and being
favoured (it may be supposed) by the special richness of the down-
washed soil at that spot, grows to one of those vast air-gardens of
creepers and parasites of which we have so often read and dreamed.
Such a one is this: but we will not go up to it now. This sketch
shall be completed by the background of green and gray, fading aloft
into tender cobalt: the background of mountain, ribbed and gullied
into sharpest slopes by the tropic rains, yet showing, even where
steepest, never a face of rock, or a crag peeping through the trees.
Up to the sky-line, a thousand feet aloft, all is green; and that,
instead of being, as in Europe, stone or moor, is jagged and
feathered with gigantic trees. How rich! you would say. Yet these
West Indians only mourn over its desolation and disfigurement; and
point to the sheets of gray stems, which hang like mist along the
upper slopes. They look to us, on this 30th of December, only as
April signs that the woodlands have not quite burst into full leaf.
But to the inhabitants they are tokens of those fearful fires which
raged over the island during the long drought of this summer; when
the forests were burning for a whole month, and this house scarcely
saved; when whole cane-fields, mills, dwelling-houses, went up as
tinder and flame in a moment, and the smoky haze from the burning
island spread far out to sea. And yet where the fire passed six
months ago, all is now a fresh impenetrable undergrowth of green;
creepers covering the land, climbing up and shrouding the charred
stumps; young palms, like Prince of Wales's feathers, breaking up,
six or eight feet high, among a wilderness of sensitive plants,
scarlet-flowered dwarf Balisiers, {81a} climbing fern, {81b}
convolvuluses of every hue, and an endless variety of outlandish
leaves, over which flutter troops of butterflies. How the seeds of
the plants and the eggs of the insects have been preserved, who can
tell? But there their children are, in myriads; and ere a
generation has passed, every dead gray stem will have disappeared
before the ants and beetles and great wood-boring bees who rumble
round in blue-black armour; the young plants will have grown into
great trees beneath the immeasurable vital force which pours all the
year round from the blazing sun above, and all be as it was once
more. In verity we a