It first takes definite form as a prolonged, undulating, pale
gray mountain chain,--the outline of a sierra. Approaching
nearer, we discern other hill summits rounding up and shouldering
away behind the chain itself. Then the nearest heights begin to
turn faint green--very slowly. Right before the outermost spur
of cliff, fantastic shapes of rock are rising sheer from the
water: partly green, partly reddish-gray where the surface
remains unclothed by creepers and shrubs. Between them the sea
leaps and whitens.

... And we begin to steam along a magnificent tropical coast,--
before a billowing of hills wrapped in forest from sea to
summit,--astonishing forest, dense, sombre, impervious to sun--
every gap a blackness as of ink. Giant palms here and there
overtop the denser foliage; and queer monster trees rise above
the forest-level against the blue,--spreading out huge flat
crests from which masses of lianas stream down. This forest-
front has the apparent solidity of a wall, and forty-five miles
of it undulate uninterruptedly by us-rising by terraces, or
projecting like turret-lines, or shooting up into semblance of
cathedral forms or suggestions of castellated architecture....
But the secrets of these woods have not been unexplored;--one of
the noblest writers of our time has so beautifully and fully
written of them as to leave little for anyone else to say. He
who knows Charles Kingsley's "At Last" probably knows the woods
of Trinidad far better than many who pass them daily.

Even as observed from the steamer's deck, the mountains and
forests of Trinidad have an aspect very different from those of
the other Antilles. The heights are less lofty,--less jagged and