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On the right, too, in a hollow, was a whole wood of Groo-groo palms, gray stemmed, gray leaved; and here and there a patch of white or black Roseau rose gracefully eight or ten feet high among the reeds. The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch.
Ten feet farther, thrust all awry by the huge palm leaves, grows a young tree, unknown to me, looking like a walnut. Next to it an orange, covered with long prickles and small green fruit, its roots propped up by a semi-cylindrical balk of timber, furry inside, which would puzzle a Hampshire woodsman; for it is, plainly, a groo-groo or a coco-palm, split down the middle.
There were stately turkeys with long necks and great fan-like tails. There were ducks with long fat bodies and big flat feet. Hurry, scurry! Scurry, hurry! "Cluck, cluck." "Peep-peep." "Groo-groo." "Gobble-gobble." "Quack, quack." Such noise and excitement you never heard! Such table manners you never saw! All were talking at once. Everyone was pecking and pushing and grabbing!
There were stately turkeys with long necks and great fan-like tails. There were ducks with long fat bodies and big flat feet. Hurry, scurry! Scurry, hurry! "Cluck, cluck." "Peep-peep." "Groo-groo." "Gobble-gobble." "Quack, quack." Such noise and excitement you never heard! Such table manners you never saw! All were talking at once. Everyone was pecking and pushing and grabbing!
Steep slopes are gray with groo-groo palms, or yellow with unknown flowering trees. High against the sky-line, tiny knots and lumps are found to be gigantic trees. Each glen has buried its streamlet a hundred feet in vegetation, above which, here and there, the gray stem and dark crown of some palmiste towers up like the mast of some great admiral.
We sat and rested by the roadside under a great cotton-wood tree, and looked down on gorges of richest green, on negro gardens, and groo-groo palms, and here and there a cabbage-palm, or a huge tree at whose name we could not guess; then turned through an arch cut in the rock into the interior of the fort, which now holds neither guns nor soldiers, to see at our feet the triple harbour, the steep town, and a very paradise of garden and orchard; and then down again, with the regretful thought, which haunted me throughout the islands What might the West Indies not have been by now, had it not been for slavery, rum, and sugar?
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