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The field glasses should not be more than six power; and if possible you should get the sort with detachable prisms. The prisms are apt to cloud in a tropical climate, and the non-detachable sort are almost impossible for a layman to clean. Hang these glasses around your neck by a strap only just long enough to permit you to raise them to your eyes. The best notebook is the "loose-leaf" sort.
For an hour and a half they toiled forward in this fashion, laughing, joking, commenting on the tropical strangeness of their surroundings, and wondering if there was a Spaniard nearer to them than Santiago. At length a halt was called, and the wearied men, suffering greatly from the sweltering heat, gladly flung themselves to the ground.
Why was it, I wonder, as I stood there watching the throng which saluted this queenly woman of the world, in an hour of supreme social triumph, while the notes of the distant orchestra came softly on the air, and the overpowering perfume of banks of flowers and tropical plants why was it that I thought of a fair, simple girl, stirred with noble ideals, eager for the intellectual life, tender, sympathetic, courageous?
They passed one winter yachting among the islands in the eastern Mediterranean; a part of another sailing from one tropical paradise to another in the West Indies. If there was anything that money could not obtain, it seemed to be a place where they could rest in serene peace with themselves. I used to wonder whether Margaret was satisfied with her husband's reputation.
All human arts base themselves ultimately upon the human hand; and even the apes approach nearest to humanity in virtue of their ever-active and busy little fingers. The elephant, again, has his flexible trunk, which, as we have all heard over and over again, usque ad nauseam, is equally well adapted to pick up a pin or to break the great boughs of tropical forest trees.
Far behind us we heard a wolf howl, and it was the last sound of life. With the dawn we went on. We passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose the sulphurous fogs. In many places the water we touched with our hands was hot; in other places the forests we paddled through were so dense they were almost tropical. And lifeless.
So heavy was that tropical fall of water that the horses were bothered by the beating of the big drops, and shook their heads and stamped fretfully under the ceaseless bombardment. Indeed, when one stretched out his hand the drops stung him as if with lashes of tiny whips.
We can fancy the two standing on the barren hills by Bethel, from one of which, as travellers tell us, there is precisely the view which Lot saw. He lifted up his greedy eyes, and there, at his feet, lay that strange Jordan valley with its almost tropical richness, its dark lines of foliage telling of abundant water, the palm-trees of Jericho perhaps, and the glittering cities.
We never saw a lion in what is called his natural state, certainly; that is to say, we have never met a lion out walking in a forest, or crouching in his lair under a tropical sun, waiting till his dinner should happen to come by, hot from the baker's.
There were the most varied perfumes in tropical profusion. The almost impenetrable forests were made up of pomegranates, orange, citron, fig, olive, and apricot trees, bananas, huge vines, the blossoms and fruit of which rivalled each other in colour and perfume.
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