United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
What is still better, it is surrounded by bluffs and mountains that will shelter a big fleet against even the fury of a typhoon. Most of the islands are covered with a dense vegetation, tropical and richly colored. There is an abundance of hardwood trees, but the breadfruit, banana, and cocoa-palm are the most useful. The breadfruit-tree grows wild, but it is also cultivated.
Her form was singularly svelt, curving, suggestive of the rounded stalk of a young cocoa-palm, her bosom molded in a voluptuous reserve. Her father, a clergyman, had cornered the vanilla-bean market in Tahiti, and she was bringing an automobile and a phonograph to her home, a village in the middle of Tahiti. One night when a Hawaiian hula was played on the phonograph, she danced alone for us.
And there, many a time, in the evening, after a day spent in teaching the natives how to plant their fields and build their houses, he would gather them round him in the twilight, and, while the cool wind wandered over his hair and brow, and shook overhead the graceful plumes of the cocoa-palm, he would talk to them in low sweet tones, until the fireflies were twinkling in the thicket and the stars stole out one after another in their silent myriads, of One Who came from the highest Heaven to redeem them from savagery and degradation, and to make them holy as He was holy, and pure as He was pure.
In the hot districts, chiefly bordered by the sea, cotton, indigo, cacao, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cocoa-nuts come to perfection. The cocoa-palm, enjoying the advantage of the sea-breeze, here grows to a height of seven hundred feet above the ocean. No tobacco surpasses that of the well-known Varina.
From the bruised woods, like an incense offered to heaven, rose a perfume of blossoms gathered and scattered, of rain-wet leaves, of lianas twisted and broken and oozing their sap; the perfume of newly-wrecked and ruined trees the essence and soul of the artu, the banyan and cocoa-palm cast upon the wind.
Coffee also is almost wild, and large quantities of rice are exported to China. The cocoa-palm and the bamboo, as well as cacao, beans, indigo, silk, and cotton are produced. We were shown a species of banana, called abaca, the finer filaments of which, mixed with silk, are manufactured into native cloth.
Our wretched little launch, moored to a cocoa-palm, flies a blue ensign, and the Malay policemen wear an imperial crown upon their caps, both representing somewhat touchingly in this equatorial jungle the might of the small island lying far off amidst the fogs of the northern seas, and in this instance at least not her might only, but the security and justice of her rule.
He was splicing the two pieces together with a strip of the brown cloth-like stuff which is wrapped round the stalks of the cocoa-palm fronds. The thing seemed to have been hurled here out of the blue by some unseen hand.
It rises seventy or eighty feet, and has a hundred curves. It is the wily creature of the winds, but outwits them in all but their worst moods. To the tropical man the cocoa-palm is life and luxury.
The high estimation in which many of their fruit-trees are held by the Tahitians and Imeeose their beauty in the landscape their manifold uses, and the facility with which they are propagated, are considerations which render the remissness alluded to still more unaccountable. The cocoa-palm is as an example; a tree by far the most important production of Nature in the Tropics.
Word Of The Day