shapes, with prickly spurs and board-walls
of roots, high enough to make a house among them simply by roofing
them in; and a flat crown of boughs, some seventy or eighty feet
above the ground, each bough as big as an average English tree, from
which dangles a whole world, of lianes, matapalos, orchids, wild
pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least,
that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you
mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's
hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate
kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment,
that it is an abnormal form of Cactus--a family which it resembles,
save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the
Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough,
it has been discovered in Angola--the only species of the Cactus
tribe in the Old World.

And now we set ourselves to walk up to the Depot, where the
Government timber was being felled, and the real 'High Woods' to be
seen at last. Our path lay, along the half-finished tramway,
through the first Cacao plantation I had ever seen, though, I am
happy to say, not the last by many a one.

Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large long leaves. Each
tree is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the
path, grow plants of the common hothouse Datura, its long white
flowers perfuming all the air. They have been planted as landmarks,
to prevent the young Cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are
cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems
of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to
throw out broad spurs, like a Ceiba. You look up, and see that they
are Bois immortelles, {126} fifty or sixty feet high, one blaze of
vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood under a
Lombardy poplar in early spring, and looked up at its buds and
twigs, showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt
the beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly--but only faintly--the
beauty of these Madres de Cacao (Cacao-mothers), as they call them
here, because their shade is supposed to shelter the Cacao-trees,
while the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below
always damp.

I turned my dazzled eyes down again, and looked into the delicious
darkness under the bushes. The ground wa