Here, too, we saw a beautiful object, which was seen again more than once about the high woods; a large flower, {162b} spreading its five flat orange-scarlet lobes round yellow bells.  It grows in little bunches, in the axils of pairs of fleshy leaves, on a climbing vine.  When plucked, a milky sap exudes from it.  It is a cousin of our periwinkles, and cousin, too, of the Thevetia, which we saw at St. Thomas’s, and of the yellow Allamandas which ornament hothouses at home, as this, and others of its family, especially the yellow Odontadenia, surely ought to do.  There are many species of the family about, and all beautiful.

We passed too, in the path, an object curious enough, if not beautiful.  Up a smooth stem ran a little rib, seemingly of earth and dead wood, almost straight, and about half an inch across, leading to a great brown lump among the branches, as big as a bushel basket.  We broke it open, and found it a covered gallery, swarming with life.  Brown ant-like creatures, white maggot-like creatures, of several shapes and sizes, were hurrying up and down, as busy as human beings in Cheapside.  They were Termites, ’white ants’—­of which of the many species I know not—­and the lump above was their nest.  But why they should find it wisest to perch their nest aloft is as difficult to guess, as to guess why they take the trouble to build this gallery up to it, instead of walking up the stem in the open air.  It may be that they are afraid of birds.  It may be, too, that they actually dislike the light.  At all events, the majority of them—­the workers and soldiers, I believe, without exception—­are blind, and do all their work by an intensely developed sense of touch, and it may be of smell and hearing also.  Be that as it may, we should have seen them, had we had time to wait, repair the breach in their gallery, with as much discipline and division of labour as average human workers in a manufactory, before the business of food-getting was resumed.

We hurried on along the trace, which now sloped rapidly downhill.  Suddenly, a loathsome smell defiled the air.  Was there a gas-house in the wilderness?  Or had the pales of Paradise been just smeared with bad coal-tar?  Not exactly:  but across the path crept, festering in the sun, a black runnel of petroleum and water; and twenty yards to our left stood, under a fast-crumbling trunk, what was a year or two ago a little engine-house.  Now roof, beams, machinery, were all tumbled and tangled in hideous and somewhat dangerous ruin, over a shaft, in the midst of which a rusty pump-cylinder gurgled, and clicked, and bubbled, and spued, with black oil and nasty gas; a foul ulcer in Dame Nature’s side, which happily was healing fast beneath the tropic rain and sun.  The creepers were climbing over it, the earth crumbling into it, and in a few years more the whole would be engulfed in forest, and the oil-spring, it is to be hoped, choked up with mud.