factitious equilibrium.

... A gloomy road winds high around one cliff overlooking the
hollow of the bay, Following it, you pass under extraordinarily
dark shadows of foliage, and over a blackish soil strewn with
pretty bright green fruit that has fallen from above. Do not
touch them even with the tip of your finger! Those are manchineel
apples; with their milky juice the old Caribs were wont to poison
the barbs of their parrot-feathered arrows. Over the mould,
swarming among the venomous fruit, innumerable crabs make a sound
almost like the murmuring of water. Some are very large, with
prodigious stalked eyes, and claws white as ivory, and a red
cuirass; others, very small and very swift in their movements,
are raspberry-colored; others, again, are apple-green, with queer
mottlings of black and white. There is an unpleasant odor of
decay in the air--vegetable decay.

Emerging from the shadow of the manchineel-trees, you may follow
the road up, up, up, under beetling cliffs of plutonian rock that
seem about to topple down upon the path-way. The rock is naked
and black near the road; higher, it is veiled by a heavy green
drapery of lianas, curling creepers, unfamiliar vines. All
around you are sounds of crawling, dull echoes of dropping; the
thick growths far up waver in the breathless air as if something
were moving sinuously through them. And always the odor of humid
decomposition. Farther on, the road looks wilder, sloping
between black rocks, through strange vaultings of foliage and
night-black shadows. Its lonesomeness oppresses; one returns
without regret, by rusting gate-ways and tottering walls, back to
the old West Indian city rotting in the sun.