Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

Of any dainty there.”[5]

It is, indeed, worth a visit from afar to see and study these marvels of plant and vine, and bush and tree of the Botanic Garden. But the whole island is, at least for the stranger from the North, one vast botanic garden. Go where we will, we are astonished and bewildered by the novelty and the exuberance of the vegetation that surrounds us.

If we drive over the broad and well-kept roads along the western coast, we pass under shady avenues of cocoa palms bending under their burden of fruit. If we go to the cacao groves—and they are large and numerous here—our eyes are gladdened by the vermilion bloom that covers the protecting Erythrina umbrosa.[6] In a glen hard by is a giant ceiba, transformed, by the countless number of creepers and epiphytes to which it has given hospitality, into a vast air-garden. Along the streams and mountain torrents are lovely canopies formed by the plume-like foliage of bamboos—seventy to eighty feet high—affording retreats of rarest sylvan beauty. Again it is in the Rosa del Monte, with its crimson bloom, the purple dracona, the yellow croton, the night-blooming cereus, the angelim, covered with purple tassels, the carmine poinsettia, the sweet-scented vanilla, festoons of purple flowered lianas, and gray candelabra of a giant cereus. Beyond it all, as a felicitous background to this gorgeous display and at the same time an adequate enclosure for Flora’s fairy palace, there is such a profusion of vegetable tracery and arabesques “as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.”

Further on we have the comely bread-fruit tree, with its deeply-lobed leaves and its massive fruit, the many-rooted and many-branched mangrove,[7] and not far distant is a clump of royal palms, with their smooth pearl-gray columns and coronals of verdure. Or there is a group of kindred growth—jagua palms—whose crown of pinnated leaves, each full twenty-five feet long, caused Humboldt to declare that on this truly magnificent tree “Nature had lavished every beauty of form.” While standing by one of the pillar-stems of the jagua palm, beneath its emerald ostrich plumes, we were quite prepared to share Kingsley’s enthusiasm for palm trees in general. “Like a Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room,” he writes, “sharp-cut, cold, virginal; shaming by the grandeur of mere form the voluptuousness of mere color, however rich and harmonious; so stands the palm of the forest; to be worshipped rather than to be loved.”[8]

It would tire the reader to attempt a description of the many pictures of interest of this charming island, of its delightful drives in every direction, of its beauteous cascades and waterfalls, one of which, Maracas Falls, three hundred feet in height, is a reproduction of Bridal Falls in the Yosemite, with the added setting of tropical verdure. No pen can picture the exquisite charm of the Caura or Maraval valleys, of Blue Basin and Macaripe Bay, or of the Five Islands—real gems of the ocean—with their cozy and inviting cottages. When in Egypt years ago we fancied that we should like to spend the rest of our days on the island of Philæ, ever in the presence of its matchless ruins. When we spent a happy day—how fleeting it was—on one of these five islands—it was the largest and fairest—we felt that we had at length found that inland home—far away from noise and strife, from

“Fever and fret and aimless stir”

of which we had so often dreamed, and in which we had so often longed to dwell.

The people of Trinidad think their island the most beautiful of all the West Indian group. Having visited, at one time or other, all the chief islands comprising the Greater and Lesser Antilles, we should hesitate to dispute their claim. It is certainly very beautiful, and possesses many attractions that are either entirely absent from the other islands or are found only in a lesser degree. Puerto Rico and Jamaica equal it in many respects, and in others surpass it, but in some important features the American possession is inferior to those of the British.

I have said nothing of La Brea, the wonderful pitch lake for which Trinidad has been celebrated since the time of Raleigh,[9] and which for some decades past has supplied us with much of the asphalt used in the United States. This curious phenomenon has been described so often that there is no call for further comment. Suffice to say that it, together with the sugar plantations and the cacao groves, constitutes the chief source of the revenue of the island.

Like Curaçao, Trinidad is a favorite resort of Venezuelan revolutionists, expatriated generals and colonels and their sympathizers. As a rule, they are an impecunious set, and rarely interesting. Crespo and Guzman Blanco both started from here on their way to the presidential chair in Caracas. So did the unfortunate Paredes, shortly before our arrival in Venezuela, but he had scarcely set foot on the soil of his native country, which he had promised to liberate from the evils of Castroism, before he, with his followers, was shot down in cold blood.