TIME AND CHANGE 



scrub than was good for our shoes and garments or 

 for the bodies inside them. It was a long pull of 

 many miles, at first up the valley over a fair high 

 way, then into the woods on the mountain-side 

 along a trail that was muddy and slippery from the 

 recent showers, and most of the time was buried 

 out of sight beneath the high, coarse stag-horn fern 

 and a thick growth of lantana that met above it as 

 high as our shoulders. A more discouraging moun 

 tain climb I never undertook. The vegetation was all 

 novel, but it had that barbaric rankness of all tropi 

 cal woods, with nothing of the sylvan sweetness and 

 simplicity of our home woods. There were no fine, 

 towering trees, but low, gnarled, and tortuous ones, 

 which, with their hanging vines, like the broken 

 ropes of a ship s rigging, and their parasitic growths, 

 presented a riotous, disheveled appearance. 



Nature in the tropics, left to herself, is harsh, 

 aggressive, savage; looks as though she wanted to 

 hang you with her dangling ropes, or impale you 

 on her thorns, or engulf you in her ranks of gigantic 

 ferns. Her mood is never as placid and sane as in 

 the North. There is a tree in the Hawaiian woods 

 that suggests a tree gone mad. It is called the 

 hau-tree. It lies down, squirms, and wriggles all 

 over the ground like a wounded snake; it gets up, 

 and then takes to earth again. Now it wants to be 

 a vine, now it wants to be a tree. It throws somer 

 saults, it makes itself into loops and rings, it rolls, 

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