56 VOYAGES OF A NATURALIST 



with boulders of all sizes, over which the grass 

 had sprung up in great luxuriance, walking through 

 a forest of these ferns was a tedious business. 



Every now and again I was thrown into a 

 state of excitement on hearing a shrill twit- 

 tering sound just above my head. Visions of 

 a land-bird were always in my mind, but 

 time after time I was disappointed to find 

 that the twitterings were caused by white terns 

 which were nesting on the tops of the decaying 

 trunks of dead tree-ferns. Finally we came to the 

 reluctant conclusion that there is no land-bird 

 of any kind on South Trinidad. We had carefully 

 searched the tallest trees on the summit, and 

 there, as in the tree-ferns, we found no signs of 

 such a bird. 



On the trunk of one of the tree-ferns, Mr. Meade- 

 Waldo found an orchid, which he sent home to 

 England, but apart from this and the bean there 

 was no other plant in this valley which we had 

 not found in that of the " Cascade." 



Instead of taking us down to the shore, as we 

 had fully expected, we found that the valley was 

 a mere cul-de-sac, and ended with a steep 

 precipice of several hundreds of feet in height. 



It was by this time nearly four o'clock in the 

 afternoon, and we had arranged to be at the 

 landing place at five, and here we were nearly 

 two thousand feet above the sea, and the yacht 

 looking a mere speck far below us. It was 



