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And on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace.
Among it, in the cracks, upright Cerei, like candelabra twenty and thirty feet high, thrust themselves aloft into the brushwood. Tufts of Karatas, top, spread their long prickly leaves among the bush of 'rastrajo, or second growth after the primeval forest has been cleared, which dips suddenly right and left to the beach.
Without doubt, also, a mere clearing, after a few years, is a more beautiful place than the forest; because by it distance is given, and you are enabled to see the sky, and the forest itself beside; because new plants, and some of them very handsome ones, are introduced by cultivation, or spring up in the rastrajo; and lastly, but not least, because the forest on the edge of the clearing is able to feather down to the ground, and change what is at first a bare tangle of stems and boughs into a softly rounded bank of verdure and flowers.
We had plenty of quinine with us; and cheerily we went up the valley of Caura, first over the great boulder and pebble ridges, not bare like those of the Moor of Dinnet, or other Deeside stone heap, but clothed with cane-pieces and richest rastrajo copses; and then entered the narrow gorge, which we had to follow into the heart of the hills, as our leader, taking one parting look at the broad green lowland behind us, reminded us of Shelley's lines about the plains of Lombardy seen from the Euganean hills:
One knew what that meant; and, with a sigh, resigned oneself to a four or five miles' mountain walk at the end of a long day, and started up the steep zigzag, through cacao groves, past the loveliest gardens I recollect in one an agave in flower, nigh thirty feet high, its spike all primrose and golden yellow in the fading sunlight then up into rastrajo; and then into high wood, and a world of ferns tree ferns, climbing ferns, and all other ferns which ever delighted the eye in an English hothouse.
The lower land, right and left, was, I believe, cultivated for sugar, till the disastrous epoch of 1846: but it is now furred over with rastrajo woods. We ran, on our first visit, past the pitch point of La Brea, south- westward to Trois, where an industrial farm for convicts had been established by my host the Governor.
Now we left the Cacao grove: and I was aware, on each side of the trace, of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams; strange colossal shapes towering up, a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach; for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half- cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling; and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the 'rastrajo, which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared all utterly impassable.
These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me. I might have spent weeks in botanising merely at them: but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo toward growing enormous rounded leaves.
On the right when shall we see it again? rose a young 'Bois flot, of which boys make their fishing floats, with long, straight, upright shoots, and huge crumpled, rounded leaves, pale rusty underneath a noble rastrajo plant, already, in its six months' growth, some twenty feet high.
As I enter the choir, and look upward toward the left, I cannot help seeing, in the tabernacle work of the stalls, the slender and aspiring forms of the "rastrajo;" the delicate second growth which, as it were, rushes upward from the earth wherever the forest is cleared; and above it, in the tall lines of the north-west pier of the tower even though defaced, along the inner face of the western arch, by ugly and needless perpendicular panelling I seem to see the stems of huge cedars, or balatas, or ceibas, curving over, as they would do, into the great beams of the transept roof, some seventy feet above the ground.
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