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

81 страница из 101

It was dawn when my mule drew up at the hotel door, and we were soon clattering over the rough cobble stones which pave the narrow streets. We passed the Promenade, which was deserted by all save a solitary sentry, who slept in his box under the Palace of the Archbishop, and then the road commenced to wind up the hill under whose shadow the town lay, dark and quiet. Before we reached the top it was broad daylight, the great crimson blossoms of the hybiscus and the fragile bells of the abutilon, which we had left sleeping below, were now unfolded, and the white flowers of the night cereus and of the ipomæa, had already drooped and faded. For some distance beyond the summit the road is walled in with sugar-cane, then bends inwards towards the mountains by a gentle acclivity. Here and there, one passes a little cabaret de ferme, where the market people are drinking coffee, or, more probably, rum.

Down in the valley lie cottages and farms, and the hill-sides are flecked with groups of trees, whose light and dark green foliage is very conspicuous. Fine mango trees are dotted about here and there, and fringing rocky heights, or clustered in hollows, are aloes in various stages of their growth; some fully flowered and rapidly collapsing, others whose tall stalks are covered with fresh blooms, and more still whose rich green expanding heart is suggestive of a thyrsus—“thro’ the blooms of a garland the point of a spear.”