With the World's Great Travellers Volume Ii Part 10

THE HIGH WOODS OF TRINIDAD.

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

[The skilled and popular novelist to whom we owe our present selection seems to have entertained for years a vivid wish to see the glory of the tropics, the achievement of which desire is put upon record in "At Last," the work from which we quote.

In his "Westward Ho" he had years before given a warmly-delineated imaginary picture of the tropics, but waited for years afterwards to see these scenes in their picturesque reality. He tells well the story of the tropical "High Woods."]

And now we set ourselves to walk 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 hot-house 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, 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 was brown with fallen leaves, or green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem, and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem, and there, again, on a bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the cacao-pods, full of what are called at home cacao-nibs. And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them sat their brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a cloth. I went up and told him that I came from England, and never saw cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at which news he grinned amus.e.m.e.nt till his white teeth and eyeb.a.l.l.s made a light in that dark place, and offered me a fresh broken pod, that I might taste the pink sour sweet pulp in which the rows of the nibs lie packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.

He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps in Paris to the chocolate-makers, who convert them into chocolate, "Menier" or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla--both, possibly, from this very island. This latter fact once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris. And (so goes the story) he succeeded; but the fair Creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and fro from that centre of fashion, Paris. So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat naught but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times as much as home-made chocolate need cost.

As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still unfinished), one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant, which bears in the island the ominous name of the Brinvilliers. It is one of those deadly poisons too common in the bush, and too well known to the negro Obi-men and Obi-women. And as I looked at the insignificant weed, I wondered how the name of that wretched woman should have spread to this remote island, and have become famous enough to be applied to a plant. French negroes may have brought the name with them; but then arose another wonder. How were the terrible properties of the plant discovered? How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the devil's work, and what long practice--considering its usual slowness and dulness--must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool for its jealousy and revenge! It may have taken ages to discover the Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known. Why not?

As the Spaniards say, "The devil knows many things, because he is old."

Surely this is one of the many facts which point towards some immensely ancient civilization in the tropics, and a civilization which may have had its ugly vices and have been destroyed thereby.

Now we left the cacao grove; and I was aware on each side of the trace of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams,--strange colossal shapes towering up a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach, for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling, and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the "rastrajo," which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared,--all utterly impa.s.sable. These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me. I might have spent weeks in botanizing merely at them; but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo towards growing enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the only question for one who for forty years had been longing for one peep at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season, and on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace. I hurried down it like any school-boy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured negroes, who expected the respectable elderly "buccra" to come to grief, struggled perspiring up the other side of the gully, and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short, breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.

In the primeval forest, looking upon that upon which my teachers and masters, Humboldt, Spix, Martius, Schomburgk, Waterton, Bates, Wallace, Gosse, and the rest, had looked already, with far wiser eyes than mine, comprehending somewhat at least of its wonders, while I could only stare in ignorance. There was actually, then, such a sight to be seen on earth, and it was not less, but far more, wonderful than they had said.

My first feeling on entering the high woods was helplessness, confusion, awe, all but terror. One is afraid at first to venture in fifty yards.

Without a compa.s.s, or the landmark of some opening to or from which he can look, a man must be lost in the first ten minutes, such a sameness is there in the infinite variety. That sameness and variety make it impossible to give any general sketch of the forest. Once inside "you cannot see the wood for the trees." You can only wander on as far as you dare, letting each object impress itself on your mind as it may, and carrying away a confused recollection of innumerable perpendicular lines all straining upward, in fierce compet.i.tion, towards the light-food far above; and next of a green cloud, or rather mist, which hovers round your head, and rises thickening to an unknown height. The upward lines are of every possible thickness, and of almost every possible hue; what leaves they bear, being for most part on the tips of the twigs, give a scattered, mist-like appearance to the under foliage.

For the first moment, therefore, the forest seems more open than an English wood. But try to walk through it, and ten steps undeceive you. Around your knees are probably Mamures, with creeping stems and fan-shaped leaves, something like those of a young cocoa-nut-palm. You try to brush through them, and are caught up instantly by a string or wire belonging to some other plant. You look up and round, and then you find that the air is full of wires,--that you are hung up in a net-work of fine branches belonging to half a dozen different sorts of young trees, and intertwined with as many different species of slender creepers. You thought at your first glance among the tree-stems that you were looking through open air; you find that you are looking through a labyrinth of wire rigging, and must use the cutla.s.s right and left at every five steps.

You push on into a bed of strong sedge-like Sclerias, with cutting edges to their leaves. It is well for you they are only three and not six feet high. In the midst of them you run against a horizontal stick, triangular, rounded, smooth, green. You take a glance along it right and left, and see no end to it either way, but gradually discover that it is the leaf-stalk of a young Cocorite palm. The leaf is five-and-twenty feet long, and springs from a huge ostrich plume, which is sprawling out of the ground and up above your head a few yards off. You cut the leaf-stalk through right and left and walk on, to be stopped suddenly (for you get so confused by the mult.i.tude of objects that you never see anything till you run against it) by a gray lichen-covered bar as thick as your ankle. You follow it up with your eye, and find it entwine itself with three or four other bars, and roll over with them in great knots, and festoons, and loops twenty feet high, and then go up with them into the green cloud over your head, and vanish, as if a giant had thrown a ship's cable into the tree-tops.

One of them, so grand that its form strikes even the negro and the Indian, is a Lianta.s.se. You see that at once by the form of its cable,--six or eight inches across in one direction, and three or four in another, furbelowed all down the middle into regular knots, and looking like a chain cable between two flexible bars. At another of the loops, about as thick as your arm, your companion, if you have a forester with you, will spring joyfully. With a few blows of his cutla.s.s he will sever it as high up as he can reach, and again below, some three feet down; and, while you are wondering at this seemingly wanton destruction, he lifts the bar on high, throws his head back, and pours down his thirsty throat a pint or more of pure cold water. This hidden treasure is, strange as it may seem, the ascending sap, or rather the ascending pure rain-water which has been taken up by the roots, and is hurrying aloft, to be elaborated into sap, and leaf, and flower, and fruit, and fresh tissue for the very stem up which it originally climbed, and therefore it is that the woodman cuts the water-vine through first at the top of the piece which he wants, and not at the bottom; for so rapid is the ascent of the sap, that if he cut the stem below, the water would have all fled upward before he could cut it off above.

Meanwhile, the old story of Jack and the Bean-stalk comes into your mind. In such a forest was the old dame's hut, and up such a bean-stalk Jack climbed, to fight a giant and a castle high above. Why not? What may not be up there? You look up into the green cloud, and long for a moment to be a monkey. There may be monkeys up there over your head,--burly red Howler, or tiny peevish Sapajou, peering down at you, but you cannot peer up at them. The monkeys, and the parrots, and the humming-birds, and the flowers, and all the beauty, are upstairs--up above the green cloud. You are in "the empty nave of the cathedral," and the service is being celebrated aloft in the blazing roof.

We will hope that, as you look up, you have not been careless enough to walk on, for if you have you will be tripped up at once; nor to put your hand out incautiously to rest it against a tree, or what not, for fear of sharp thorns, ants, and wasp-nests. If you are all safe, your next steps, probably, as you struggle through the bush between tree-trunks of every possible size, will bring you face to face with huge upright walls of seeming boards, whose rounded edges slope upward till, as your eye follows them, you find them enter an enormous stem, perhaps round, like one of the Norman pillars of Durham nave, and just as huge; perhaps fluted, like one of William of Wykeham's columns at Winchester.

There is the stem, but where is the tree? Above the green cloud. You struggle up to it between two of the board walls, but find it not so easy to reach. Between you and it are half a dozen tough strings which you had not noticed at first,--the eye cannot focus itself rapidly enough in this confusion of distances,--which have to be cut through ere you can pa.s.s. Some of them are rooted in the ground, straight and tense; some of them dangle and wave in the wind at every height. What are they?

Air-roots of wild pines, or of Matapalos, or of figs, or of Seguines, or of some other parasite? Probably; but you cannot see. All you can see is, as you put your chin close against the trunk of the tree and look up, as if you were looking up against the side of a great ship set on end, that some sixty or eighty feet up in the green cloud arms as big as English forest-trees branch off, and that out of their forks a whole green garden of vegetation has tumbled down twenty or thirty feet, and half climbed up again.

You scramble round the tree to find whence this aerial garden has sprung: you cannot tell. The tree-trunk is smooth and free from climbers, and that ma.s.s of verdure may belong possibly to the very cables which you met ascending into the green cloud twenty or thirty yards back, or to that impenetrable tangle a dozen yards on, which has climbed a small tree, and then a taller one again, and then a taller still, till it has climbed out of sight, and possibly into the lower branches of the big tree. And what are their species? What are their families? Who knows? Not even the most experienced woodman or botanist can tell you the names of plants of which he only sees the stems. The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, can only be examined by felling the tree; and not even always then, for sometimes the tree, when cut, refuses to fall, linked as it is by chains of liane to all the trees around. Even that wonderful water-vine which we cut through just now may be one of three or even four different plants....

And where are the famous Orchids? They perch on every bough and stem; but they are not, with three or four exceptions, in flower in the winter; and if they were, I know nothing about them; at least I know enough to know how little I know. Whosoever has read Darwin's "Fertilization of Orchids," and finds in his own reason that the book is true, had best say nothing about the beautiful monsters till he has seen with his own eyes more than his master.

And yet even the three or four that are in flower are worth going many a mile to see. In the hot-house they seem almost artificial from their strangeness; but to see them "natural," on natural boughs, gives a sense of their reality which no unnatural situation can give. Even to look up at them perched on bough and stem, as one rides by, and to guess what exquisite and fantastic form may issue, in a few months or weeks, out of those fleshy, often unsightly, leaves, is a strange pleasure,--a spur to the fancy which is surely wholesome, if we will but believe that all these things were invented by a Fancy, which desires to call out in us, by contemplating them, such small fancy as we possess, and to make us poets, each according to his power, by showing a world in which, if rightly looked at, all is poetry.

Another fact will soon force itself on your attention, unless you wish to tumble down and get wet up to your knees. The soil is furrowed everywhere by holes, by graves some two or three feet wide and deep, and of uncertain length and shape, often wandering about for thirty or forty feet, and running confusedly into each other. They are not the work of man, nor of an animal, for no earth seems to have been thrown out of them. In the bottom of the dry graves you sometimes see a decaying root; but most of them just now are full of water, and of tiny fish also, which burrow in the mud, and sleep during the dry season, to come out and swim during the wet. These graves are, some of them, plainly quite new. Some, again, are very old, for trees of all sizes are growing in them and over them.

What makes them? A question not easily answered. But the shrewdest foresters say that they have held the roots of trees now dead. Either the tree has fallen, and torn its roots out of the ground, or the roots and stumps have rotted in their place, and the soil above them has fallen in.

But they must decay very quickly, these roots, to leave their quiet fresh graves thus empty; and--now one thinks of it--how few fallen trees, or even dead sticks, there are about. An English wood, if left to itself, would be c.u.mbered with fallen timber; and one has heard of forests in North America through which it is all but impossible to make way, so high are piled up, among the still growing trees, dead logs in every stage of decay. Such a sight may be seen in Europe among the high silver-fir forests of the Pyrenees. How is it not so here? How, indeed?

And how comes it--if you will look again--that there are few or no fallen leaves, and actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood there would be a foot--perhaps two feet--of black soil, renewed by every autumn leaf-fall. Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty feet of leaf- and timber-mould. And here, in a forest equally ancient, every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam as it might in a well-hoed garden-bed. Is it not strange?

Most strange, till you remember where you are,--in one of Nature's hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable sun force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates again as swiftly as it destroys. Here, when the forest giant falls, as some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side; then

"Nothing in him that doth fade, But doth suffer an _air_-change Into something rich and strange."

Under the genial rain and genial heat, the timber-tree itself, all its tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves, snapped off not only by the blow, but by the very wind of the falling tree, all melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months--say almost a few days--into the water, and carbonic acid, and sunlight out of which they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green leaves around, and, trans.m.u.ted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not a wrack behind. Explained thus,--and this I believe to be the true explanation,--the absence of leaf-mould is one of the grandest, as it is one of the most startling, phenomena of the forest.

[And thus the writer rambles on, telling fresh marvels of the tropic woods, from which a knowledge is attained that "defies all a.n.a.lysis."]

[It is that of] the causes and effects of their beauty; that "aesthetic"

of plants, of which Schleiden has spoken so well in that charming book of his, "The Plant," which all should read who wish to know somewhat of "The Open Secret." But when they read it let them read with open hearts.

For that same "Open Secret" is, I suspect, one of those which G.o.d may hide from the wise and prudent, and yet reveal to babes.

At least, so it seemed to me, the first day that I went, awe-struck, into the High Woods; and so it seemed to me, the last day that I came, even more awe-struck, out of them.

ANIMALS OF BRITISH GUIANA.

C. BARRINGTON BROWN.

[British Guiana, the land which seems so strongly inclined to extend its borders at the expense of Venezuela, is as yet very far from being the active and well-developed settlement which might be imagined from the aggressiveness of its rulers. Mr.

Brown's story of it indicates a land of which nature is still largely the lord, and which is so little known that he, as late as twenty years ago, was able to discover a river and a cataract not previously heard of. The selection we append, descriptive of the wild animals of the country, is significant of an undeveloped land. Mr. Brown, in his "Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana," describes a number of unsuccessful efforts to shoot jaguars, and continues:]

One of the men happened to go a few yards behind one of our camping-places, when he heard a movement behind him; turning round he saw a jaguar leisurely surveying him. He fled to the camp with his story, and I went in search of the animal accompanied by one man armed with a cutla.s.s. We did not go far before we saw its tracks in the sandy bed of a dry water-course, and concluded that it had gone off. We gave up all hopes of seeing it, and, turning round, were on the point of making our way back to camp, when my companion suddenly exclaimed, "Look! look! the tiger!" Glancing at the spot indicated I saw it crouching in a thicket with its head bent down, its body swaying from side to side, glaring at us with eyes of a greenish metallic hue. The brute had evidently been following us whilst we were searching for it, and was working itself into a rage. I took as good aim at its head as I could, and fired; but instead of seeing it lying dead, I heard it bounding and crashing through the forest at a fearful pace.

One of my men got a shot at a jaguar on a sand-beach, where it pa.s.sed within twenty feet of him, as he crouched on some rocks. The only effect the shot had on the animal was to make it gallop away a few yards, then turn for an instant and look at him. The men whom I left in charge on the New River cut open a hollow log containing young accouries, and took them out. Their squeals on being seized attracted a puma, which ran close up to the men, apparently wishing to get the accouries, when one of them fired at it and it made off.

One evening, whilst returning to camp along the portage path that we were cutting at Won.o.bobo Falls, I walked faster than the men, and got some two hundred yards in advance. As I rose the slope of an uneven piece of ground, I saw a large puma (_Felis concolor_) advancing along the other side of the rise towards me, with its nose down on the ground.

The moment I saw it I stopped; and at the same instant it tossed up its head, and seeing me also came to a stand. With its body half crouched, its head erect, and its eyes round and black, from its pupils having expanded in the dusky light, it looked at once a n.o.ble and appalling sight. I glanced back along our wide path to see if any of my men were coming, as at the moment I felt that it was not well to be alone without some weapon of defence, and I knew that one of them had a gun; but nothing could I see. As long as I did not move the puma remained motionless also, and thus we stood some fifteen yards apart, eying each other curiously. I had heard that the human voice is potent in scaring most wild beasts, and feeling that the time had arrived to do something desperate, I waved my arms in the air and shouted loudly. The effect on the tiger was electrical; it turned quickly on one side, and in two bounds was lost in the forest. I waited until my men came up, however, before pa.s.sing the place at which it disappeared in case it might only be lying in ambush there; but we saw nothing more of it.

When returning down the portage and dragging our boats over, we saw a jaguar sitting on a log near the same spot, watching our movements with evident curiosity, and although the men were singing as they hauled the boats along, it did not seem to mind the noise. As soon as it saw that it was observed, it jumped off the log, and with a low growl made off.

From this I infer that the flight of my puma must have been owing more to the windmill-like motion of my arms than to my voice.

During our journey across from the New River to the Essequebo, we were cooking breakfast one morning, when we heard a tremendous rushing and crashing noise coming towards us through the forest, and then caught a glimpse of an accourie flying for dear life before a black tiger. Just after they pa.s.sed the accourie gave a heart-rending scream as the tiger seized it, but on my men rushing up to the spot, the tiger left its prey and fled. When picked up the accourie was quite dead, but on examination showed no marks whatever of the tiger's teeth. The tiger had evidently killed it by springing upon it with its legs close together, the weight of its body giving such a blow that the accourie's life was fairly knocked out. The men found its dead body just beyond a large log, slightly raised from the ground, under which it had bolted and lost some headway, while the cunning tiger took the log in its stride and so came, as it intended, on the poor accourie's back, with the result we have seen.

On returning to the head of the New River for provisions, we were followed for many miles by a tiger, for on going back we saw its huge tracks in the swampy places on our path.

With good hunting-dogs fine jaguar- and puma-hunting might be obtained on the banks of this river, where without doubt they are exceedingly numerous. Many of the Indian hunting-dogs trained for deer or tapir will hunt tigers. When on the track of either of these animals, should they come across the scent of a tiger, their eager and confident manner of pressing on after the game is immediately changed, and with hair on their backs erect they become cautious and nervous to a degree, jumping at even the snapping of a twig. Abandoning the hunt they take up the tiger's track and follow it. But should the huntsman call them from it, or not cheer them on with his voice from time to time, they exhibit great fear, and keeping close to his heels cannot be induced to hunt any more in that district for the day. On the contrary, if allowed to follow the tiger, they track it up with caution, being fully aware of the cunning dodge practised by that animal, which is, when the dog is close at hand, to spring to one side and lie in ambush till it pa.s.ses, when with one spring the dog is seized.

Ordinary dogs would fall a prey to this trap, but not the self-taught tiger dogs. Their fine powers of scent warn them of their near approach to the quarry, when they advance with great caution, never failing to detect the tiger in time, and when once their eye is upon their enemy it has no chance to escape. In its pride of strength, the jaguar scorns the dogs, and with a rush like a ball from a cannon springs madly at one of them, feeling sure that it cannot escape. It has reckoned, however, without its host, for the dog eludes the spring with ease, and with great quickness flies on the tiger's flank, giving it a severe nip. As the tiger turns with a growl of pain and disappointment, the dog is off to a little distance, yelping l.u.s.tily and never remaining still an instant, but darting first on one side and then on the other. After one or two ineffectual charges the tiger gives it up, and on the approach of the hunter, springs into the nearest suitable tree, which it seldom leaves alive.

[The Indians describe several kinds of tigers and tiger-cats, each of which hunts one kind of animal in particular, whose call it can imitate. The deer-tiger is the puma. The wailah, or tapir-tiger, is pure black and of great size.]

The Corentyne and its branches were literally teeming with fish of various kinds, the greater number being haimara and perai. The latter were so abundant and ferocious that at times it was dangerous, when bathing, to go into the water at a greater depth than up to one's knees.