“What can they know of England who only England know,” seems at present the favourite tag of imperially minded journalists. It might be more truly said that only they who know the world know how much England has to be thankful for in the climate we are so ready to abuse. Their eyes are opened to see how Nature in our island has all the loveliest tints on her palette, to paint ever-changing pictures that owe their chief charm to the supposed defect of uncertainty, even as your Didos and Cleopatras—varium et mutabile—would less surely enchant in the form of stereotyped models of the most admired virtues.
WILD FLOWERS IN THE BEECH WOODS
Then a drawback to tropical scenes on which travellers are emphatically in one tale, is the innumerable plagues bred in such hot air as we imitate at Kew—here filtered from its hostile engenderings—the maddening mosquitoes that swarm in equatorial forests as on Arctic tundras; the legions of ants, white, red, and black, that prey upon the traveller’s kit and torture his skin like a shirt of Nessus; harpy moths that have to be driven from one’s food; swarms of earwigs which some African adventurers have found the hatefulest enemy of their march. Kew breeds no serpent or vampire like those haunting natural paradises where the blaze that scares away lions or leopards only attracts darting spiders and scurrying scorpions to a couch already made restless by buzzing and biting pests; where the ground hides flesh-burrowing ticks and fleas, and the air is thick with invisible stings, and the trees bear venomous caterpillars; where one durst not smell a flower for fear of inhaling some noxious parasite, and our loathsomest bugs would seem hardly worth noticing among bloated cockroaches and hideous centipedes; where countless flies lay seeds of death in man and beast, not to speak of clouds of locusts that sometimes darken the sky like a snow-storm, and if they could cross the Channel, might fall on this Thames-side garden to eat up its greenery in an hour.
And the noises of those sweltering thickets, which at night a new-comer in South America compares to some factory worked by whirling, whistling and hissing demons! Even the gloomy stillness of noon, broken by the fall of some big fruit thudding to the ground like a cannon-ball, or by some seed-capsule exploding with a report like a shot, even this heavy siesta of Nature is not altogether voiceless, for beneath it, as Humboldt says, one can catch a faint stifled undertone, a buzz and hum of insects that crowd the earth and the lowest strata of air, a confused vibrating murmur, which from every bush, from the cracked bark of trees, from the soil burrowed by creeping things, proclaims life audibly manifest to him who listens. But it is the evening, our emblem of peace, the welcome twilight through which the ploughboy goes whistling home, that wakes tropical shades to an untuned concert of croaking, screaming, chattering, wailing, howling, and humming, when the darkness seems alive with invisible cracklings, patterings, scratchings, skippings and rustlings, silenced for the moment by the blood-curdling growl and crashing spring of some beast of prey, and the piercing death-screech of its victim echoing far where every foot of ground is scene for nightly tragedies. One need be no Macbeth to have one’s sleep murdered by alarms and excursions for which heated imagination acts as a megaphone. “The clamour of the jackals over a carcass suggests a band of hungry wolves. A mongoose having it out with a rat beneath the floor is like an animal Armageddon. Does your faithful dog growl in the verandah, you make sure a leopard is about to pounce upon him. A restless horse seems to be trampling like a must elephant. And perhaps over all comes the roar of the tiger, nothing indeed to be afraid of, as he would go silent enough if attending to his bad business. Such are the torments of a sweltering Indian night, that give an Englishman cause to thank the goodness and the grace that made his birthplace in a land where a caterwauling puss or a scratching mouse would be the worst of nocturnal bugbears.”
We Britons, lulled to sleep by the tramp of the policeman and the watch-dog’s honest bark, have some reason for calling “sour grapes” to the products of those giant greenhouse regions, East and South, where Nature appears to exhaust herself in labyrinths of swelling beauty and grandeur. But if the tropical trees had tongues, they might tell us that we do not judge them fairly in this cramped setting, fettered beneath roofs of glass, condemned to unnatural silence and restraint; imprisoned along with strange companions; stinted from full meals of equatorial storm to the trickling of a rubber hose that can no longer clasp their trunks in creeping embraces; robbed of the sunshine that floods their native air with fiery gold, and given in exchange the dull comfort of hot-water pipes; deserted by the radiant birds, the shining insects, and the glittering reptiles that should people their drooping branches, among which the stir of missing monkey-troops seems feebly aped by the murmurs and movements of workmen hidden in the galleries.
For another kind of more or less unfamiliar vegetation we must seek the Temperate House, further up the central walks towards the Pagoda. In this, boasting itself the largest winter garden in the world, are collected specimens of sun-loving plants, from the acacias of Australia to the cacti of Mexico. The most venerable growth here seems a shoot of that now crumbled dragon-tree at Orotava, which Humboldt renowned as the oldest tree in the world. The most imposing are the araucarias in the central aisles, one of them the famous Norfolk Island pine, that in its own home will reach a height of two hundred feet. Some of these Antipodean strangers can be won to grow in British soil; some would flourish under its sky, but for their rooted habit of being most active in our nipping winter. For to their native soil, the seasons, of course, come reversed from ours, where colonial children must be puzzled by our poets’ view of January and of July, as we are by allusions seasonable at the other end of the world:—
Perspiring round our Christmas fare,
In vain we long for snow:
Midsummer day, we fain would sit