Note 6 — Chapter II · TRINIDAD AND THE ORINOCO

If we drive over the broad and well-kept roads along the western coast, we pass under shady avenues of cocoa palms bending under their burden of fruit. If we go to the cacao groves—and they are large and numerous here—our eyes are gladdened by the vermilion bloom that covers the protecting Erythrina umbrosa.6 In a glen hard by is a giant ceiba, transformed, by the countless number of creepers and epiphytes to which it has given hospitality, into a vast air-garden. Along the streams and mountain torrents are lovely canopies formed by the plume-like foliage of bamboos—seventy to eighty feet high—affording retreats of rarest sylvan beauty. Again it is in the Rosa del Monte, with its crimson bloom, the purple dracona, the yellow croton, the night-blooming cereus, the angelim, covered with purple tassels, the carmine poinsettia, the sweet-scented vanilla, festoons of purple flowered lianas, and gray candelabra of a giant cereus. Beyond it all, as a felicitous background to this gorgeous display and at the same time an adequate enclosure for Flora’s fairy palace, there is such a profusion of vegetable tracery and arabesques “as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican.”