Sixty feet and more aloft, the short smooth columns of the Moriches {154} towered around us, till, as we looked through the ’pillared shade,’ the eye was lost in the green abysses of the forest.  Overhead, their great fan leaves form a groined roof, compared with which that of St. Mary Redcliff, or even of King’s College, is as clumsy as all man’s works are beside the works of God; and beyond the Moriche wood, ostrich plumes packed close round madder-brown stems, formed a wall to our temple, which bore such tracery, carving, painting, as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.  True, all is ’still-life’ here:  no human forms, hardly even that of a bird, is mixed with the vegetable arabesques.  A higher state of civilisation, ages after we are dead, may introduce them, and complete the scene by peopling it with a race worthy of it.  But the Creator, at least, has done His part toward producing perfect beauty, all the more beautiful from its contrast with the ugliness outside.  For the want of human beings fit for all that beauty, man is alone to blame; and when we saw approach us, as the only priest of such a temple, a wild brown man, who feeds his hogs on Moriche fruit and Mombin plums, and whose only object was to sell us an ant-eater’s skin, we thought to ourselves—­knowing the sad history of the West Indies—­what might this place have become, during the three hundred and fifty years which have elapsed since Columbus first sailed round it, had men—­ calling themselves Christian, calling themselves civilised—­ possessed any tincture of real Christianity, of real civilisation?  What a race, of mingled Spaniard and Indian, might have grown up throughout the West Indies.  What a life, what a society, what an art, what a science it might have developed ere now, equalling, even surpassing, that of Ionia, Athens, and Sicily, till the famed isles and coasts of Greece should have been almost forgotten in the new fame of the isles and coasts of the Caribbean Sea.

What might not have happened, had men but tried to copy their Father in heaven?  What has happened is but too well known, since, in July 1498, Columbus, coming hither, fancied (and not so wrongly) that he had come to the ‘base of the Earthly Paradise.’

What might not have been made, with something of justice and mercy, common sense and humanity, of these gentle Arawaks and Guaraons.  What was made of them, almost ere Columbus was dead, may be judged from this one story, taken from Las Casas:—­{155}

’There was a certain man named Juan Bono, who was employed by the members of the Audiencia of St. Domingo to go and obtain Indians.  He and his men, to the number of fifty or sixty, landed on the Island of Trinidad.  Now the Indians of Trinidad were a mild, loving, credulous race, the enemies of the Caribs, who ate human flesh.  On Juan Bono’s landing, the Indians, armed with bows