abrupt,--with rounded summits; the peaks of Martinique or
Dominica rise fully two thousand feet higher. The land itself is
a totally different formation,--anciently being a portion of the
continent; and its flora and fauna are of South America.

... There comes a great cool whiff of wind,--another and
another;--then a mighty breath begins to blow steadily upon us,--
the breath of the Orinoco.... It grows dark before we pass
through the Ape's Mouth, to anchor in one of the calmest harbors
in the world,--never disturbed by hurricanes. Over unruffled
water the lights of Port-of-Spain shoot long still yellow beams.
The night grows chill;--the air is made frigid by the breath of
the enormous river and the vapors of the great woods.



XXIX.


... Sunrise: a morning of supernal beauty,--the sky of a fairy
tale,--the sea of a love-poem.

Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea
has a perfect luminous dove-color,--the horizon being filled to a
great height with greenish-golden haze,--a mist of unspeakably
sweet tint, a hue that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried
out against as an impossiblity. As yet the hills are nearly all
gray, the forests also inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for
the sun has but just risen above them, and vapors hang like a
veil between. Then, over the glassy level of the flood, winds of