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The pitcher-plants and the rare scarlet amherstia looked lovely, as did also the great groups of yellow and green stemmed bamboos. There were magnolias, shaddocks, hibiscus, the almost too fragrant yellow-flowered champac, sacred to Hindoo mythology; nutmeg and cinnamon trees, tea and coffee, and every other conceivable plant and tree, growing in the wildest luxuriance.
And now, as to that blossomy peach-scent even while some floes were yet around me I was just like some fantastic mariner, who, having set out to search for Eden and the Blessed Islands, finds them, and balmy gales from their gardens come out, while he is yet afar, to meet him with their perfumes of almond and champac, cornel and jasmin and lotus.
Short as is the eastern twilight, it has its own peculiar forms, and the naturalist marks with interest the small, but strong, Hesperidæ , hurrying, by abrupt and jerking flights, to the scented blossoms of the champac or the sweet night-blowing moon-flower; and, when darkness gathers around, we can hear, though hardly distinguish amid the gloom, the humming of the powerful wings of innumerable hawk moths, which hover with their long proboscides inserted into the starry petals of the periwinkle.
And the persistent jungle, ever encroaching on space, had out-posts of champac and wild mango, their giant roots, like the arms of an octopus, holding anchorage in clefts of the rock. And from the limbs above floated down the scolding voices of lungoor, the black-faced grey-whiskered monkeys, who rebuked the intrusion of the earth-dwellers below.
Occasionally the senses are charmed by the fragrant, yellow-flowered champac, held sacred by the Hindus, from the wood of which the small images of Buddha are carved for the temples. Here, too, we have the odorous frangipane, the flower which Columbus found in such abundance on first landing in Cuba. Was it indigenous, one would like to know, in both of these tropical islands so very far apart?
I presently reached a glade in a thicket, about eight yards across, that had a scent of lime and orange, where the just-sufficient twilight enabled me to see some old bones, three skulls, and the edge of a tam-tam peeping from a tuft of wild corn with corn-flowers, and here and there some golden champac, and all about a profusion of musk-roses.
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