Читать книгу Roraima and British Guiana, With a Glance at Bermuda, the West Indies, and the Spanish Main онлайн

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Towards the north, the waves beat against a rock-bound shore, above which rise wooded hills, increasing in size until they join the seamed and contorted mountains. Here, in a retired village, dwell the Carib Indians, once the owners of the island. Reduced to a few score in numbers, these relics of a great tribe live peacefully under their own king, intermarry, hold but little intercourse with strangers, and seldom appear in the capital, Roseau, except now and then to sell their beautifully woven basket-work. On the western side, along which we coast, the sea-board extends further back; there is not much cultivation, but in the bush clearings are a few cane-fields, and beyond, out of the green sloping lawns, spring many hills, some bare and craggy, others cultivated to the summit. Behind, rise the great mountains in a thousand fantastic shapes, here buried in forest, there frowning black and barren over some tree-filled gorge. Everywhere there is a romantic mingling of hill and valley, mountain and gorge. Lifting clouds reveal wooded eminences crowning steep precipices, from whose feet the green sward stretches down in waves to the white beach, and, as the silver veil floats higher and higher, still loftier ridges are unbared, where the pale green of the sugar-cane is plainly distinguished against the dark setting of the forest background. So high and steep are the hills on which many of these cane-fields are perched that the crop, when cut, has to be let down in bundles by ropes.