promontories, was rimmed with beaches of yellow sand. The steep sides of
the mountain, broken with precipices, and shaggy with vegetation,
ascended from a multitude of spurs and buttresses, resembling billows of
verdure, and towered into the clouds.

I have used the word verdure, but it is really a misnomer, for although
the prevailing tint of the foliage was a dark green, the entire forest
was streaked like a rainbow with innumerable flowers, and the breeze
which blew from it was laden with the most delightful perfume, Evidently
it was all a howling wilderness, for we could not detect the slightest
vestige of human dwellings or cultivation. We did not even observe any
signs of bird or beast. A profound stillness brooded over the solitude,
and was scarcely broken by the drowsy murmur of distant waterfalls.

A forest, like the sea or desert, has a magical power to stimulate the
fancy and touch the primitive chords of the heart. Even a Scotch
hillside, or a Devonshire moor, can throw their wild spells over the
civilised man of letters, and appeal to savage or poetical instincts
underlying all his culture. So now, where everything seen or unseen, was
new and strange, and the imagination was quite free to rove, the charm
was more intense. We stood and gazed upon the moving panorama like
persons in a trance. The trees and plants grew in zones according to
their different levels above the sea, after the manner of those on the
earth, but we were too high to distinguish the various kinds.
Apparently, however, feathery palms and gigantic grasses prevailed in
the lower, and glossy evergreens, resembling the magnolia and
rhododendron, in the middle grounds. All this part of the forest was so
thickly encumbered with flowering creepers and parasites as to seem one
immense bower, dense enough to exclude the sunlight and make a perpetual
twilight underneath. The higher slopes were clad with pine-trees, having