CARDINAL.
MOCKING-BIRD.
But, like the genius of evil, the malaria engendered by the decomposition of rank vegetable substances in the hot and humid soil, poisons these enchanting retreats, and from the spring to the autumnal equinox renders them dangerous or fatal to man.
Hastening to escape from its influence, the traveller, after passing some twenty leagues across the dreaded region of the yellow-fever, finds himself rising into a purer atmosphere. His limbs recover their elasticity. He breathes more freely, for his senses are not now oppressed by the sultry heats and intoxicating perfumes of the lowlands. The aspect of nature, too, has changed, and his eye no longer rests on the gay variety of colours with which the landscape was painted there. The vanilla, the indigo, the chocolate-tree disappear as he advances, but the sugar-cane and the glossy-leaved banana still remain; and when he has ascended about four thousand feet, he sees, in the unchanging green and the rich foliage of the liquidambar-tree, that he has reached the height where clouds and mists settle in their passage from the Mexican Gulf, and keep up a perpetual moisture.
He is now beyond the influence of the deadly vomito on the confines of the tierra templada, or temperate region, where evergreen oaks begin to remind him of the forests of central Europe. The features of the scenery become grand, and even terrible. His road sweeps along the base of mighty mountains, once gleaming with volcanic fires, and still glistening in their mantles of snow, which serve as beacons to the mariner for many a league at sea. All along he beholds traces of their ancient combustion as his road passes over vast tracts of lava, bristling in the fantastic forms into which the fiery torrent has been thrown by obstacles in its career. Perhaps at the same moment, as he casts his eyes down one of those unfathomable ravines or barrancas, which often, to a depth of more than 1,200 feet, rend the mountain-side, he sees its sheltered and sultry recesses glowing with the rich vegetation of the tropics: as if these wonderful regions were anxious to exhibit, at one glance, the boundless variety of their flora. Cactuses, euphorbias, and dracænæ, with a multitude of minor plants, cling to the rocky walls; while in the depth of the gorge stand huge laurels, fig-trees, and bombaceæ, whose blossoms exhale almost overpowering odours, and whose trunks are covered with magnificent creepers, expanding their gay petals in the torpid air. Still pressing upwards, he mounts into regions favourable to other kinds of cultivation. He has traced the yellow maize growing from the lowest level; but he now first sees fields of wheat and the other European cereals, brought into the country by the Spanish conquerors, and with these, plantations of the American agave, which, among other uses, provides the Mexican with his favourite beverage. The oaks acquire a sturdier growth; and at an elevation of about eight thousand feet, the dark forests of pine announce that he has entered the tierra fria, or cold region,—the third and last of the great natural terraces into which the country is divided.
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Loaded with vapours, the prevailing southerly sea-winds, after crossing the dead level occupied by the delta of the Ganges and Burrampooter, strike against the mountain-spurs of Sikkim, the dampest region of that stupendous chain, and expending their moisture on their flanks, clothe them with a thick mantle of verdure to an enormous height. The giant peaks of Donkiah, Kinchinghow, and Kinchinginga, the third great mountain of the world (28,178 feet), form the culminating points of this magnificently wooded region, and look down upon the dense forests which, varying as they rise, extend between the plains of Bengal and their own perpetual snows.
Dark green woods, of an exclusively tropical character, cover the valleys and declivities to a height of from 4,000 to 5,000 feet. Mighty palms rise above the mass of the forest, while innumerable shrubs cover the ground. The prevalent timber is gigantic, and scaled by climbing leguminosæ, bauhinias, and robinias, which sometimes sheathe the trunks, or span the forest with huge cables, joining tree to tree. Large bamboos rather crest the hills than court the deeper shade, of which there is abundance, for the torrents cut a straight and steep course down the hill-flanks. The gulleys which they traverse are choked by vegetation, and bridged by fallen trees, whose trunks are clothed with epiphytical orchids, pendulous lycopodia, ferns, pothos, peppers, vines, bignonias, and similar types of the hottest and dampest climates. The beauty of the drapery of the pothos leaves is pre-eminent, whether for the graceful folds of the foliage or for the liveliness of its colour. Of the more conspicuous smaller trees the wild banana is the most abundant, its broad crown contrasting with the smaller-leaved plants amongst which it nestles; next comes a screw-pine, with a straight stem and a tuft of leaves, each eight or ten feet long, waving on all sides.
At an elevation of about four thousand feet many plants of the temperate zone, increasing in numbers as the traveller ascends, begin to mingle with the tropical vegetation, and to impart new charms to the forest; oaks and walnuts are here seen thriving near palms and arborescent ferns; mighty rhododendrons expand over thickets of tropical herbage; parasitical orchids adorn the trunks of the oaks, while thalictrons and geraniums blossom underneath.