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Updated: June 25, 2025
Among them, especially near the path, grow plants of the common hothouse Datura, its long white flowers perfuming all the air. They have been planted as landmarks, to prevent the young Cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs, like a Ceiba.
One Ceiba, left standing in a cane-piece, was very grand, from the multitude and mass of its parasites and its huge tresses of lianes; and grand also from its form. It seemed as if its length must have snapped it off, years since, where it joined the trunk; or as if the leverage of its weight must have toppled the whole tree over.
Not fifty yards from this camp stood a huge ceiba, a tree that has a habit of growth not unlike that of our English oak, though it is soft wooded and white barked, and will increase more in bulk in twenty years than any oak may in a hundred.
Look at Acolhuacan where the men of Huexotzinco are broken with toil, are trod upon like paving stones, and wander around the mountain Atloyan. There is a ceiba tree, a cypress tree, there stands a mezquite bush, strong as a cavern of stone, known as the Giver of Life.
The growth of plants is so enormous in this hot and constantly humid climate, that the trunks of the Bombax ceiba are sixteen feet in diameter. From the mouth of the Rio Padamo, which is of considerable breadth, the Indians arrive, in a day and a half, at the Rio Mavaca.
Aguara's is on the ground first; and, without waiting for companion or attendant of any kind, he vaults upon the animal's back, and goes off at a gallop along the path, which, after turning around close to the hill, at about a mile's distance, farther on passes the ceiba tree.
These animals pass the day in caverns, and roam around human habitations at night. Being well fed, they grow to the length of six feet. One of them had devoured, in the preceding year, a horse belonging to the farm. He dragged his prey on a fine moonlight night, across the savannah, to the foot of a ceiba* of an enormous size.
Such vast groves, Lee thought, robbed them of the stateliness so impressive in parks and cities. The landscape, tangled with lianas or open about massive and isolated ceiba trees, was without the luxuriance of color he had expected. It was evident that there had been no rain for a long period; and the crowded growths, grey rather than green, were monotonous, oppressive.
The females hugged close the branches, gave one furtive look at the threatening sky, and joined their voices in the deafening chorus that shook the wide-spreading canopy of the tall ceiba tree and penetrated into the innermost recesses of the jungle a distance measured in miles.
Under the noonday sun, sitting in the deep shade of some lofty ceiba, one may watch with curious eyes the myriads of many-hued, broad-winged butterflies, mingling orange, crimson, and steel-blue in dazzling combinations, as they flit through the ambient atmosphere with a background of shining, evergreen foliage, the hum of insects and the carol of birds forming a soft lullaby inviting sleep.
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