green plume-tufted summits, almost touching, almost forming
something like the dream of an interminable Moresque arcade.
Sometimes for a full mile the trees are only about thirty or
forty feet high; then, turning into an older alley, we drive for
half a league between giants nearly a hundred feet in altitude.
The double perspective lines of their crests, meeting before us
and behind us in a bronze-green darkness, betray only at long
intervals any variation of color, where some dead leaf droops
like an immense yellow feather.



XXVI.


In the marvellous light, which brings out all the rings of their
bark, these palms sometimes produce a singular impression of
subtle, fleshy, sentient life,--seem to move with a slowly
stealthy motion as you ride or drive past them. The longer you
watch them, the stronger this idea becomes,--the more they seem
alive,--the more their long silver-gray articulated bodies seem
to poise, undulate, stretch.... Certainly the palms of a
Demerara country-road evoke no such real emotion as that
produced by the stupendous palms of the Jardin des Plantes in
Martinique. That beautiful, solemn, silent life up-reaching
through tropical forest to the sun for warmth, for color, for
power,--filled me, I remember, with a sensation of awe different
from anything which I had ever experienced.... But even here in
Guiana, standing alone under the sky, the palm still seems a
creature rather than a tree,--gives you the idea of personality;-