’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, transmuted 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.

Look here at a fresh wonder.  Away in front of us a smooth gray pillar glistens on high.  You can see neither the top nor the bottom of it.  But its colour, and its perfectly cylindrical shape, tell you what it is—­a glorious Palmiste; one of those queens of the forest which you saw standing in the fields; with its capital buried in the green cloud and its base buried in that bank of green velvet plumes, which you must skirt carefully round, for they are a prickly dwarf palm, called here black Roseau. {137a} Close to it rises another pillar, as straight and smooth, but one-fourth of the diameter—­a giant’s walking-cane.  Its head, too, is in the green cloud.  But near are two or three younger ones only forty or fifty feet high, and you see their delicate feather heads, and are told that they are Manacques; {137b} the slender nymphs which attend upon the forest queen, as beautiful, though not as grand, as she.

The land slopes down fast now.  You are tramping through stiff mud, and those Roseaux are a sign of water.  There is a stream or gully near:  and now for the first time you can see clear sunshine through the stems; and see, too, something of the bank of foliage on the other side of the brook.  You catch sight, it may be, of the head of a tree aloft, blazing with golden trumpet flowers, which is a Poui; and of another lower one covered with hoar-frost, perhaps a Croton; {137c} and of another, a giant covered with purple tassels.  That is an Angelim.  Another giant overtops even him.  His dark glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light as they flicker in the breeze; for it blows hard aloft outside while you are in stifling calm.  That is a Balata.  And what is that on high?—­Twenty or thirty square yards of rich crimson a hundred feet above the ground.  The flowers may belong to the tree itself.  It may be a Mountain-mangrove, {137d} which I have never seen, in flower:  but take the glasses and decide.  No.  The flowers belong to a liane.  The ‘wonderful’ Prince of Wales’s Feather {137e} has taken possession of the head of a huge Mombin, {137f} and tiled it all over with crimson combs which crawl out to the ends of the branches, and dangle twenty or thirty feet down, waving and leaping in the breeze.  And over all blazes the cloudless blue.