Ah, stupid savages.  Yes:  but also—­ah, stupid civilised people.

CHAPTER X:  NAPARIMA AND MONTSERRAT

I had a few days of pleasant wandering in the centre of the island, about the districts which bear the names of Naparima and Montserrat; a country of such extraordinary fertility, as well as beauty, that it must surely hereafter become the seat of a high civilisation.  The soil seems inexhaustibly rich.  I say inexhaustibly; for as fast as the upper layer is impoverished, it will be swept over by the tropic rains, to mingle with the vegas, or alluvial flats below, and thus enriched again, while a fresh layer of virgin soil is exposed above.  I have seen, cresting the highest ridges of Montserrat, ten feet at least of fat earth, falling clod by clod right and left upon the gardens below.  There are, doubtless, comparatively barren tracts of gravel toward the northern mountains; there are poor sandy lands, likewise, at the southern part of the island, which are said, nevertheless, to be specially fitted for the growth of cotton:  but from San Fernando on the west coast to Manzanilla on the east, stretches a band of soil which seems to be capable of yielding any conceivable return to labour and capital, not omitting common sense.

How long it has taken to prepare this natural garden for man is one of those questions of geological time which have been well called of late ‘appalling.’  How long was it since the ‘older Parian’ rocks (said to belong to the Neocomian, or green-sand, era) of Point a Pierre were laid down at the bottom of the sea?  How long since a still unknown thickness of tertiary strata in the Nariva district laid down on them?  How long since not less than six thousand feet of still later tertiary strata laid down on them again?  What vast, though probably slow, processes changed that sea-bottom from one salt enough to carry corals and limestones, to one brackish enough to carry abundant remains of plants, deposited probably by the Orinoco, or by some river which then did duty for it?  Three such periods of disturbance have been distinguished, the net result of which is, that the strata (comparatively recent in geological time) have been fractured, tilted, even set upright on end, over the whole lowland.  Trinidad seems to have had its full share of those later disturbances of the earth-crust, which carried tertiary strata up along the shoulders of the Alps; which upheaved the chalk of the Isle of Wight, setting the tertiary beds of Alum Bay upright against it; which even, after the Age of Ice, thrust up the Isle of Moen in Denmark and the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, entangling the boulder clay among the chalk—­how long ago?  Long enough ago, in Trinidad at least, to allow water—­probably the estuary waters of the Orinoco—­to saw all the upheaved layers off at the top into one flat sea-bottom once