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All day long a careful watch was kept among the branches of the mighty ceiba-tree. And what a tree that was! The hugest English oak would have seemed a stunted bush beside it.
Meanwhile the young man's ears became attuned to the jungle noises, his eyes observant of the many kinds of life about him. The wood was crowded with plant-life utterly strange to him. On the hill above towered a giant ceiba-tree, its trunk as smooth as if polished by hand and bare of branches except at the very top, where, instead of tapering, it ended abruptly in a tuft of foliage.
The work done, Amyas scrambled up into the boughs of the enormous ceiba-tree, and there sat inspecting his own handiwork, looking out far and wide over the forest-covered plains and the blue sea beyond, and thinking, in his simple straightforward way, of what was to be done next.
So underneath that giant ceiba-tree, those valiant men, reduced by battle and sickness to some eighty, swore a great oath, and kept that oath like men.
But here, as in Demerara, the trees are left standing about in cane-pieces and pastures to decay into awful and fantastic shapes, with prickly spurs and board-walls of roots, high enough to make a house among them simply by roofing them in; and a flat crown of boughs, some seventy or eighty feet above the ground, each bough as big as an average English tree, from which dangles a whole world, of lianes, matapalos, orchids, wild pines with long air-roots or gray beards; and last, but not least, that strange and lovely parasite, the Rhipsalis cassytha, which you mistake first for a plume of green sea-weed, or a tress of Mermaid's hair which has got up there by mischance, and then for some delicate kind of pendent mistletoe; till you are told, to your astonishment, that it is an abnormal form of Cactus a family which it resembles, save in its tiny flowers and fruit, no more than it resembles the Ceiba-tree on which it grows; and told, too, that, strangely enough, it has been discovered in Angola the only species of the Cactus tribe in the Old World.
A clump of banana plants interposed their broad shields between him and the sun. The gentle slope from the consulate to the sea was covered with the dark-green foliage of lemon-trees and orange-trees just bursting into bloom. A lagoon pierced the land like a dark, jagged crystal, and above it a pale ceiba-tree rose almost to the clouds.
Half way between the American camp and the city there was a beautiful ceiba-tree, or silk-cotton tree, so called from the large seed-pods, full of soft, cotton-like stuff. Under this tall, shady tree many important councils were held between the Spanish and American officers. And under this tree, one morning, our officers gave up eight Spanish prisoners in return for Lieutenant Hobson and his men.
Sometimes it was the tumbling waters of a cataract; sometimes, high in the topmost branches of a ceiba-tree, a gorgeous orchid; sometimes a shaft of sunshine as rigid as a search-light, piercing the shadow of the jungle.
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