ith vegetation, and
flung together in riotous confusion like the billows of a raging sea.
The stupendous cliffs behind us dropped sheerly down to the level of the
plateau, some ten or twenty thousand feet below, and swept around it as
a curving wall on either hand until they vanished in the distance. It
was evidently the crater of the extinct volcano.

Our journey across that blooming wilderness will never fade from my
recollection, but when I attempt to give the reader an idea of it,
impressions crowd so thick and fast upon me as to choke my utterance; I
am equally in danger of soaring into a wild extravagance of generality
and sinking into a mere catalogue of detail. Yet I find it impossible
to hit a mean that can do any justice to it. The extraordinary way in
which the ancient lavas of the interior had been riven, upheaved, and
piled upon each other by the volcanic forces, the bewildering variety
and exuberance of the tropical plants and trees which battened on the
rich and crumbling soil, completely baffles all description. What the
imagination is unable to conceive, and the eye itself is overpowered in
beholding, the pen can never hope to depict. Let the grandest mountain
scenes of your memory be jumbled together as in a dream and overgrown
with the maddest jungles of the Ganges or the Amazon, and the
phantasmagoria would still be nothing to the living reality.

Most of the highest peaks and ridges, as well as the deepest valleys and
ravines, were covered with the embowering forest; but here and there a
huge boss of granite or porphyry reared its bare scalp out of the
verdure like the head and shoulders of some antediluvian monster. The
gigantic palms and foliage trees, all tufted with air-plants or
strangled with climbers, were literally buried in flowers of every hue,
and the crown of the forest rolled under us like a sea of blossoms.
Every moment one enchanting prospect after another opened to our
wondering eyes. Now it was a waterfall, gleaming like a vein of silver
on the brow of a lofty precipice, and descending into a lakelet bordered
with red, blue, and yellow lilies. Again it was a natural bridge,
spanning a deep chasm or tunnel in the rock, through which a river
boiled and roared in a series of cascades and rapids. Ever and anon we
passed over glades and prairies, carpeted with orchids, and dotted with
clumps of shrubbery, a mass of golden bloom, or tremendous blocks of
basalt hung with crimson creepers.