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 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 coco-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 amusement till his white teeth and eyeballs 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 nibs lie packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.