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

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The vegetation is of the most luxuriant description, as numerous waterfalls descend from both the mountain sides, here crossing the path in a broad stream, and there trickling down in a slender thread, which loses itself in thick ferns and grasses. Each turn in the road presents some new combination of rock, tree, and falling water. You emerge from an avenue of bamboos, to enter another arched over by the fronds of magnificent tree-ferns. The latter grow everywhere; you look up at their rough fibrous stems, and you look down into their very hearts. The banks are covered with begonias and primulas; above these rise the dark green blades of plantains, or dark green heliconias, with their red and yellow flowers. Then come the great forest trees, such as the locust, the angelim, the bois violon (fiddle wood), the bois immortelle, &c. Of begonias I counted four varieties, one of which was sweet-scented. For some time I searched, wondering whence the delicious fragrance—very like that of the lily of the valley—came.