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Updated: May 25, 2025
Beyond it rose a noble forest of Moriche fan-palms; and to the right of them high wood with giant Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite a paradise on the other side of the Stygian pool. We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it perfectly hard.
I myself cut palisades from the mountain, and brought leaves of Fan-Palms from the seashore, in order to construct those two cottages, of which you can now discern neither the entrance nor the roof. Yet, alas! there still remain but too many traces for my remembrance!
It was situated on the borders of a small gulf, I will call it, or the mouth of a stream near the lake, surrounded by a belt of elegant fan-palms and a number of gigantic wild fruit trees.
It wriggles up and along a ridge, with the glaucous spathes of grass trees standing like spears on each hand, and where wattle and tough she-oaks grow leanly out of hard soil, thickly strewn with buckshot gravel, rust-coloured. Soon it descends into a low valley and through a belt of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich loam.
Wild horses fled from us, and we heard the grunt of boar in the fern thickets. The fan-palms, dwarfs, but graceful, intermingled with magnificent tree-ferns, while above them curved the huetu, the immense mountain plantain, called fei in Tahiti, where they are the bread of the people; they have ribbed, emerald leaves, as big as a man.
A creek which had its source in a ravine of the huge mountain which intercepted the rising sun and caused accustomed shadow an hour after the illumination of the western hills, ran past the lonely little house, which stood in a clearing the upright walls of which were on the sky-line scalloped with fan-palms.
The shades of darkness seemed to live and move, to struggle against the bright beams that fell amongst them and broke their masses, forcing them down the wooded heights, tearing them asunder and dispersing them like tissues of cobwebs; so that successively, and as if by a stroke of enchantment, there appeared, first the deep indigo blue of the tamarinds and chicozapotes, then the bright green of the sugar-canes, lower down the darker green of the nopal-trees, lower still the white and green and gold and bright yellow of the orange and citron groves, and lowest of all, the stately fan-palms, and date-palms, and bananas; all glittering with millions of dewdrops, that covered them like a ganze veil embroidered with diamonds and rubies.
Near Tamarida we saw just a few fan-palms, and one I remember looked very odd, as it still retained every leaf it had ever had, and looked like a yellow tower, with the green leaves at the top. All the rest were bristling, withered down to the ground.
Some of the palms were of stupendous size and height, while there appeared to be a spirit of emulation between talipots, palmyras, date-palms and fan-palms, as to which should develop into the finest specimen of its class.
One includes the higher part of this enclosure, from, the peak of that rock buried in clouds, whence springs the rapid river of Fan-Palms, to that wide cleft which you see on the summit of the mountain, and which is called the Cannon's Mouth, from the resemblance in its form.
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