In a hundred yards more we were on dry ground, and the vegetation changed at once.  The Mauritias stopped short at the edge of the swamp; and around us towered the smooth stems of giant Mombins, which the English West Indians call hog-plums, according to the unfortunate habit of the early settlers of discarding the sonorous and graceful Indian and Spanish names of plants, and replacing them by names English, or corruptions of the original, always ugly, and often silly and vulgar.  So the English call yon noble tree a hog-plum; the botanist (who must, of course, use his world-wide Latin designation), Spondias lutea; I shall, with the reader’s leave, call it a Mombin, by which name it is, happily, known here, as it was in the French West Indies in the days of good Pere Labat.  Under the Mombins the undergrowth is, for the most part, huge fans of Cocorite palm, thirty or forty feet high, their short rugged trunks, as usual, loaded with creepers, orchids, birds’-nests, and huge round black lumps, which are the nests of ants; all lodged among the butts of old leaves and the spathes of old flowers.  Here, as at Chaguanas, grand Cerimans and Seguines scrambled twenty feet up the Cocorite trunks, delighting us by the luscious life in the fat stem and fat leaves, and the brilliant, yet tender green, which literally shone in the darkness of the Cocorite bower; and all, it may be, the growth of the last six months; for, as was plain from the charred stems of many Cocorites and Moriches, the fire had swept through the wood last summer, destroying all that would burn.  And at the foot of the Cocorites, weltering up among and over their roots, was pitch again; and here and there along the side of the path were pitch springs, round bosses a yard or two across and a foot or two high, each with a crater atop a few inches across, filled either with water or with liquid and oozing pitch; and yet not interfering, as far as could be seen, with the health of the vegetation which springs out of it.

We followed the trace which led downhill, to the shore of the peninsula farthest from the village.  As we proceeded we entered forest still unburnt, and a tangle of beauty such as we saw at Chaguanas.  There rose, once more, the tall cane-like Manacque palms, which we christened the forest nymphs.  The path was lined, as there, with the great leaves of the Melastomas, throwing russet and golden light down from their undersides.  Here, as there, Mimosa leaflets, as fine as fern or sea-weed, shiver in the breeze.  A species of Balisier, which we did not see there, carried crimson and black parrot beaks with blue seed-vessels; a Canne de Riviere, {161a} with a stem eight feet high, wreathed round with pale green leaves in spiral twists, unfolded hooded flowers of thinnest transparent white wax, with each a blush of pink inside.  Bunches of bright yellow Cassia blossoms dangled close to our heads; white Ipomoeas scrambled over them again;