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In groves of fragrant lemon-trees, wild figs, flowering myrtles, acacias, and oleanders, which were hung with festoons of various climbing-plants, covered with flowers, a multitude of birds unknown in Europe displayed their bright plumage, glittering with purple and azure, and mingled their warbling in the harmony of a world teeming with life and motion.
The surface, level as a billiard-table, is covered with gramma grass, of a bright, almost emerald verdure. The uniformity of this colour is relieved by cotton-wood copses, whose foliage is but one shade darker. Commingling with these, and again slightly darkening the hue of the frondage, are other trees, with a variety of shrubs or climbing-plants as clematis, wild roses, and willows.
We are sitting on Wanda's little balcony in the mellow fragrant summer night. A twofold roof is above us, first the green ceiling of climbing-plants, and then the vault of heaven sown with innumerable stars. The low wailing love-call of a cat rises from the park. I am sitting on footstool at the feet of my divinity, and am telling her of my childhood.
Some of them hung from the tree-tops like stays from the masts of a ship, and many of them mingled their brilliant flowers so closely with the leaves, that the climbing-plants and their supporters could not be distinguished from each other, and it seemed as though the trees themselves had become gigantic flowering shrubs. Birds, too, were there in myriads, and such birds!
"The place is for sale, uncle, and a very pretty house it is; there's a charming garden running down to the river." "Let us go in," said the doctor, seeing, at the farther end of a small paved courtyard, a house standing between the walls of the two neighbouring houses which were masked by clumps of trees and climbing-plants.
We passed on through forests abounding in climbing-plants, many of which are so extremely tough that a man is required to go in front with a hatchet; and when the burdens of the carriers are caught, they are obliged to cut the climbers with their teeth, for no amount of tugging will make them break.
Here they had some difficulty in forcing their way through the dense under-wood and broad leaves, most of which seemed very strange to Martin and his comrade, being so gigantic. There were also many kinds of ferns, which sometimes arched over their heads and completely shut out the view, while some of them crept up the trees like climbing-plants.
Some of them hung from the tree-tops like stays from the masts of a ship, and many of them mingled their brilliant flowers so closely with the leaves, that the climbing-plants and their supporters could not be distinguished from each other, and it seemed as though the trees themselves had become gigantic flowering shrubs. Birds, too, were there in myriads, and such birds!
It had been constructed by simply felling two tall trees on the edge of it in such a manner that they fell across. They were bound together with the supple vines that grew there in profusion. Nature had soon covered the whole over with climbing-plants and luxuriant verdure; and the bridge had become a broad and solid structure, over which the whole party marched with perfect ease.
It was hemmed in on all sides by wooded mountains, and was so beautifully diversified by scattered clusters of palms, and irregular patches of undulating grassy plains, all covered with a rich profusion of tropical flowers and climbing-plants, that it seemed to Martin more like a magnificent garden than the uncultivated forest only far more rich and lovely and picturesque than any artificial garden could possibly be.
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