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Diverging abruptly from the broad road running on round the hill, it strikes in under a tall cotton tree, a ceiba, this conspicuous from being bent over, as if half-blown down.
We saw between Muitaco and the island of Ceiba a hill entirely composed of balls with concentric layers, in which we perceived a close mixture of hornblende and feldspar, with some traces of pyrites. The grunstein resembles that in the vicinity of Caracas; but it was impossible to ascertain the position of a formation which appeared to me to be of the same age as the granite of Parima.
By and by, when a certain large tent had been erected beneath the shade of a giant ceiba tree, a boat put off from the shore to the ship, and presently returned bearing nine wounded men the result of their fight that morning under the especial care of Philip Stukely.
Till the middle of the last century, the mountains round the valleys of Aragua were covered with forests. Great trees of the families of mimosa, ceiba, and the fig-tree, shaded and spread coolness along the banks of the lake.
It was the dead-wood of a gigantic silk-cotton the bombax ceiba of the tropical forests; and its trunk, being full five feet in diameter, gave them that elevation above the surface of the sand.
Only a small part of the army could see the groups of Spanish and American soldiers under the ceiba tree, but every one of the men who had been fighting and living in our trenches strained his eyes to catch a glimpse, if possible, of the proceedings which put an end to hostilities in this part of Cuba.
The thread was then stretched from tree to tree, and the pods, hanging like a string of candles, were then exposed to the sun for several hours. Next day, they were lightly smeared with an oiled feather, and then wrapped in oiled cotton of the Bombax ceiba, to prevent the valves from opening.
This vortex, moving often a hundred miles an hour, takes hold of the Bombax ceiba like an enormous proboscis, pulls it from the thin soil of the tropics despite the great lateral clutch of its knotty roots, and swallows it up. Houses, cultivated fields, men and animals, are obliterated by its heavy foot. In some years no less than three hurricanes have occurred in the West Indies.
It sends up a massive sinewy trunk for some fifty feet, when it divides into branches covered with a dense canopy of leaves, expanded like an umbrella, and forming a perfect shade against the power of the torrid sun. The ceiba is slow of growth, but attains to great age, specimens thriving when Columbus first landed here being, as we were assured, still extant.
Next to the royal palm, it is the most remarkable of all the trees which loom up beneath the brilliant purple skies of Cuba. The negroes have a superstition that the ceiba is a magic tree haunted by spirits, a singular notion also shared by the colored people of Nassau, though these two islands are so many hundreds of miles apart and have never had any natural connection.
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