244 Celebes. 



ers, and even forest-trees are mingled in an evergreen network, 

 through the interstices of which appears the white Umestone 

 rock, or the dark holes and chasms with which it abounds. 

 These precipices are enabled to sustain such an amount of 

 vegetation by their peculiar structure. Their surfaces are 

 very irregular, broken into holes and fissures, with ledges 

 overhanging the mouths of gloomy caverns ; but from each 

 projecting part have descended stalactites, often forming a 

 wild Gothic tracery over the caves and receding hollows, and 

 affording an admirable support to the roots of the shrubs, 

 trees, and creepers, which luxuriate in the warm pure atmos- 

 phere and the gentle moisture which constantly exudes from 

 the rocks. In places where the precipice offers smooth sur- 

 faces of solid rock, it remains quite bare, or only stained with 

 lichens and dotted with clumps of ferns that grow on the 

 small ledges and in the minutest crevices. 



The reader who is familiar with tropical nature only through 

 the medium of books and botanical gardens, will picture to 

 himself in such a sjjot many other natural beauties. He will 

 think that I have unaccountably forgotten to mention the 

 brilliant flowers, which, in gorgeous masses of crimson gold 

 or azure, must spangle these verdant precipices, hang over the 

 cascade, and adorn the margin of the mountain stream. But 

 what is the reality ? In vain did I gaze over these vast walls 

 of verdure, among the pendent creepers and busy shrubs, all 

 around the cascade, on the river's bank, or in the deep caverns 

 and gloomy fissures — not one single sj^ot of bright color could 

 be seen, not one single tree or bush or creeper bore a flower 

 sufficiently conspicuous to foi'm an object in the landscape. 

 In every direction the eye rested on green foliage and mottled 

 rock. Thei'e was infinite variety in the color and aspect of 

 the foliage, there was grandeur in the rocky masses and in the 

 exuberant luxuriance of the vegetation, but there was no bril- 

 liancy of color, none of those bright flowers and gorgeous 

 masses of blossom, so generally considered to be everywhere 

 present in the tropics. I have liere given an accurate sketch 

 of p, luxuriant tropical scene as noted down on the sjDot, and 

 its general characteristics as regards color have been so often 

 repeated, both in South America and over many thousand 

 miles in the Eastern tropics, that I am driven to conclude that 



