densest description, a burst of true tropical jungle. I could not
have imagined anything so perfectly beautiful, nature seemed to riot
in the production of wonderful forms, as if the moist hot-house air
encouraged her in lavish excesses. Such endless variety, such
depths of green, such an impassable and altogether inextricable maze
of forest trees, ferns, and lianas! There were palms, breadfruit
trees, ohias, eugenias, candle-nuts of immense size, Koa (acacia),
bananas, noni, bamboos, papayas (Carica papaya), guavas, ti trees
(Cordyline terminalis), treeferns, climbing ferns, parasitic ferns,
and ferns themselves the prey of parasites of their own species.
The lianas were there in profusion climbing over the highest trees,
and entangling them, with stems varying in size from those as thick
as a man's arm to those as slender as whipcord, binding all in an
impassable network, and hanging over our heads in rich festoons or
tendrils swaying in the breeze. There were trailers, i.e.,
(Freycinetia scandens) with heavy knotted stems, as thick as a
frigate's stoutest hawser, coiling up to the tops of tall ohias with
tufted leaves like yuccas, and crimson spikes of gaudy blossom. The
shining festoons of the yam and the graceful trailers of the maile
(Alyxia Olivaeformis), a sweet scented vine, from which the natives
make garlands, and glossy leaved climbers hung from tree to tree,
and to brighten all, huge morning glories of a heavenly blue opened
a thousand blossoms to the sun as if to give a tenderer loveliness
to the forest. Here trees grow and fall, and nature covers them
where they lie with a new vegetation which altogether obliterates
their hasty decay. It is four miles of beautiful and inextricable
confusion, untrodden by human feet except on the narrow track. "Of
every tree in this garden thou mayest freely eat," and no serpent or
noxious thing trails its hideous form through this Eden.