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A steady pull of about a quarter of an hour's duration took the boats to the beach of the island, which was a low and parched-looking place clothed with guinea-grass with a few clumps of palms and palmetto, and the inevitable coconut trees close down by the water.
But our eyes were drawn off, at almost the second glance, from mountain-peaks and glens to the slopes of cultivated lowland, sheeted with bright green cane, and guinea-grass, and pigeon pea; and that not for their own sakes, but for the sake of objects so utterly unlike anything which we had ever seen, that it was not easy, at first, to discover what they were.
Broad pasture-lands replace the tropical house at Kew; rolling, well-kept fields of guinea-grass, surrounded with neat, dry-stone walls and with trim gates, give an impression of a long-settled land. We were amongst the "pen-keepers," or stock-raisers here.
Winding hither and thither along the hillside, in order to secure an even and easy gradient, the road presently left the tobacco fields and passed between broad spaces of lawn luxuriantly clad with guinea-grass, and having large parterres of flowers scattered about it here and there; while in other places it was picturesquely broken up by clumps of feathery bamboo, or gigantic wild cotton and other trees.
But on this cliff we could see, even with the naked eye, tall Aloes, gray-blue Cerei like huge branching candelabra, and bushes the foliage of which was utterly unlike anything in Northern Europe; while above the bright deep green of a patch of Guinea-grass marked cultivation, and a few fruit trees round a cottage told, by their dark baylike foliage, of fruits whose names alone were known to us.
The beach on which they stood was of no great width, some sixty or seventy feet wide, perhaps, from the water's edge to the spot where it abruptly met the luxuriant growth of thick guinea-grass that seemed to form the turf of the island.
The great earthquake of 1842 did much toward their destruction; the orgy of loot and plunder which followed, did more; but the chiefest of all agents of demolition was the black man's rule. The spacious residences were never rebuilt, the fallen aqueducts were left in ruins, the boulevards fell into disrepair and guinea-grass rioted through the cracked pavements.
Strangely enough, for some unknown reason, the ground between the narrow fringe of coconut trees bounding the shore-line and the base of the hills, was bare of trees, the soil being covered with a dense growth of guinea-grass, with a few bushes and flowering shrubs sparsely dotted about here and there it therefore offered ideal facilities for camping.
It was a rich, deep soil, covered with a rank tropic growth, the guinea-grass being higher than the head of a man on horseback. It was a perfect hotbed of malaria, and there was no dry ground whatever in which to camp. To have sent the troops there would have been simple butchery.
On the level ground vast cornfields appeared spread out, already yellow with ripeness, and here and there patches of tall guinea-grass of deepest green, the fields being intersected by low copses, and occasionally rows of trees of greater height, while to the west appeared numerous hills of graceful form covered by waving woods. Far in the south could be seen the blue outline of the Balkan range.
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