The marshy lands and thatched houses of the type to be found on the plains, enclosed by fences of matting hung upon bamboo poles, with mud-puddles for public bathing—all these began to disappear. There were fewer clumps of tall grasses twenty feet in height with tufted heads, and of plume like pampas; the mighty bamboo, and the giant cactus ever grotesque, always on the defensive, even while bearing down vegetation mightier than itself—these were left below. Soon there were less fruits, wild mulberries, pomegranates, dates, figs, lady-finger bananas of delicious strawberry flavor. These became less and less frequent, although there were still to be seen some of the five varieties of figs and twelve varieties of bamboos. These continued with them to an elevation of one thousand feet. What they now began to admire was the profusion of roses and the luxuriant boughanvillia with rich dark-red blossoms, much richer and darker even than in Florida, more akin to that in the Bermudas, or at Hong Kong. But even these souvenirs of the South passed from view as the panorama continued to move; semi-tropical luxuriance constantly giving place to stronger growths. Wild orange, also peaches and lemons, were seen among the bananas. Banyans with pendant branch roots spreading the parent growth through the forest; cotton-wood trees built with buttress-roots, as the Doctor remembered seeing them at Nassau; and wormwood twelve feet high. Ferns in profusion, graceful as ever, some of them old friends of the Alleghanies; for the ferns are the most inveterate gad-abouts, constantly visiting poor relations in almost every zone and climate.
Here and there were now to be seen terrestrial orchids, vigorous specimens, holding their own amid the foliage of their adopted parents, pines, oaks and other hardwood trees—a curious combination. Persistent bamboos of hardier varieties still obtained; they flourished along the water courses at the foot-hills, and swept their graceful curves over adjacent knolls. Such slender growths, although tough and strong, became too attenuated to support themselves in an upright position; their immense copious fountains of foliage took not only curves of ascent like the cocoanut, palmetto, and superb talipot, but also the return curves of leafy spray ruffling the surface of the little streams.
Then there were glens and shady hollows decorated with lichens and pendulous mosses; trailing growths of verdure of countless kinds, carpets of tiny ferns—some mysterious growths of sombre reds with vitreous lustre, as well as greens so delicate that they hid themselves from the direct rays of the sun; not to mention horrible nettles and poison vines; terrors to thin-skinned visitors, but as little regarded by the natives as were the leeches in the swamps, and the pestiferous insects in the jungles. Bad plants, which the natives said had been bad people in some previous incarnation; hence had been incarnated backwards and downwards, not forwards and upwards.
Adele much appreciated these flights of fancy among the natives; they seemed so much like nursery stories when she was in the nursery herself. She was on the lookout to kodak each new scene, and at times almost in despair.
“I might as well acknowledge that the Himalayas, like Niagara, cannot be crowded into a small picture, but some of those crazy cacti I really must catch; there now is something already posing to be taken—let me catch him;” and she balanced herself on the top of the trunk to photograph a large tree festooned with vines suggesting the doleful tree decorations in some of the cemeteries at home, only more luxuriant.
“How artistically tearful! How festive-funereal!” exclaimed Miss Winchester, now with them, having changed places with the Professor who had gone to Mrs. Cultus.
“That’s where you’re a little off,” said the civil engineer quizzer. “The botanists would probably call it ‘leguminosa’—have some?”
“Thanks, awfully,” said Miss Winchester with English style and intonation. “Himalaya vegetables may prove more inviting than that one looks, but please don’t risk your precious neck to pick them off the vines.”
The English engineer said that he did not propose to die before reaching the Sanitarium, which remark seemed to strike the Doctor as “not bad, for a colonial living in a warm climate.” So Adele settled the matter by kodaking the whole party overshadowed by the artistically-tearful funereal-festive vegetable-vine.
Near this locality the track indulged in numerous twists and turns, squirming like a huge snake encircling the mountain spur. The train slid out to the verge of a precipice, and then backed off, just before the crash came.