24 THROUGH ANGOLA 



u Pcrolas do Occano ;; (Pearls of the Ocean), 

 and they are well named, for their beauty is 

 wonderful and their fertility extraordinary. 



San Thome, an island a li'tle larger than Man, 

 rises from a deep blue sea to a rocky summit 

 several thousand feet above it. Here all but the 

 highest crags are clothed in a dress of glorious 

 green, in which palms and great ferns, creepers, 

 trees, and shrubs, run riot in a soil that is almost 

 pure leaf mould. Blues and greens of every shade, 

 with black rocky hilltops set in drifting clouds 

 that is my memory of San Thome from the 

 sea. If a feast of beauty can content you, there 

 will be no disappointment here. 



Whatever man may do to disfigure Nature, and 

 he does much when he builds on a beauty spot 

 like this. Nature covers the wound with green 

 bandages, leaving only so little of house or hut 

 that from the distance at any rate she seems to 

 have won in her battle for beauty. Where man 

 concentrates his ugly strength and builds long 

 streets of houses or great factories, and plucks off 

 the green bandages, there only is San Thome ugly. 

 And her town and port arc very ugly ! Man has 

 even tried to make the hillsides ugly, by cutting 

 away Nature's home-made green, and bringing in 

 orderly rows of eoeoa and coffee plants, where 

 once were only beautiful forest shrubs. But the 

 cocoa trees he has planted take on all shades of 

 colour in the autumn, both leaf and pod, and 

 there is beauty in the coffee plant, so that if the 

 new garden is more ornamental, it is scarcely less 

 beautiful than the old. 



