When inside the Cocal, the air is full of this amber light.  Gradually the eye analyses the cause of it, and finds it to be the resultant of many other hues, from bright vermilion to bright green.  Above, the latticed light which breaks between and over the innumerable leaflets of the fruit fronds comes down in warmest green.  It passes not over merely, but through, the semi-transparent straw and amber of the older leaves.  It falls on yellow spadices and flowers, and rich brown spathes, and on great bunches of green nuts, to acquire from them more yellow yet; for each fruit-stalk and each flower-scale at the base of the nut is veined and tipped with bright orange.  It pours down the stems, semi-gray on one side, then yellow, and then, on the opposite side, covered with a powdery lichen varying in colour from orange up to clear vermilion, and spreads itself over a floor of yellow sand and brown fallen nuts, and the only vegetation of which, in general, is a long crawling Echites, with pairs of large cream-white flowers.  Thus the transparent shade is flooded with gold.  One looks out through it at the chequer-work of blue sky, all the more intense from its contrast; or at a long whirl of white surf and gray spray; or, turning the eyes inland toward the lagoon, at dark masses of mangrove, above which rise, black and awful, the dying balatas, stag-headed, blasted, tottering to their fall; and all as through an atmosphere of Rhine wine, or from the inside of a topaz.

We rode along, mile after mile, wondering at many things.  First, the innumerable dry fruits of Timit palm, which lay everywhere; mostly single, some double, a few treble, from coalition, I suppose, of the three carpels which every female palm flower ought to have, but of which it usually develops only one.  They may have been brought down the lagoon from inland by floods; but the common belief is, that most of them come from the Orinoco itself, as do also the mighty logs which lie about the beach in every stage of wear and tear; and which, as fast as they are cut up and carried away, are replaced by fresh ones.  Some of these trees may actually come from the mainland, and, drifting into this curving bay, be driven on shore by the incessant trade wind.  But I suspect that many of them are the produce of the island itself; and more, that they have grown, some of them, on the very spot where they now lie.  For there are, I think, evidences of subsidence going on along this coast.  Inside the Cocal, two hundred yards to the westward, stretches inland a labyrinth of lagoons and mangrove swamps, impassable to most creatures save alligators and boa-constrictors.  But amid this labyrinth grow everywhere mighty trees—­balatas in plenty among them, in every stage of decay; dying, seemingly, by gradual submergence of their roots, and giving a ghastly and ragged appearance to the forest.  At the mouth of the little river Nariva, a few miles down, is proof positive, unless I am much mistaken, of similar subsidence.  For there I found trees of all sizes—­roseau scrub among them—­standing rooted below high-tide mark; and killed where they grew.