88 ASPECTS OF TROPICAL NATURE 



senses are not now oppressed by the sultry heats and intoxicat- 

 ing perfume of the lowlands. The aspect of Nature, too, has 

 changed, and his eye no longer rests on the 

 gay variety of colours with which the land- 

 scape was painted there. The vanilla, the 

 indigo, the chocolate-tree, disappear as he 

 advances, but the sugar-cane and the glossy- 

 leaved banana still remain ; and when he has 

 ascended about four thousand feet, he sees, 

 in the unchanging green and the rich foliage 

 Mockin^-Bird. of the liquidam bar-tree, that he has reached 

 the height where clouds and mists settle in 

 their passage from the Mexican gulf, and keep up a perpetual 

 moisture. 



He is now beyond the influence of the deadly vomito on the 

 confines of the tlevra teniplada, or temperate region, where 

 evergreen oaks begin to remind him of the forests of central 

 Europe. The features of the scenery become grand, and even 

 terrible. His road sweeps along the base of mighty mountains, 

 once gleaming with volcanic fires, and still glistening in their 

 mantles of snow, which serve as beacons to the mariner for 

 many a league at sea. All along he beholds traces of their 

 ancient combustion as his road passes over vast tracts of lava, 

 bristling in the fantastic forms into which the fiery torrent has 

 been thrown by obstacles in its career. Perhaps at the same 

 moment, as he casts his eyes down one of those unfathomable 

 ravines or barrancas, which often, to a depth of more than 

 1200 feet, rend £he mountain-side, he sees its sheltered and 

 sultry recesses glowing with the rich vegetation of the tropics : 

 as if these wonderful regions were anxious to exhibit, at one 

 glance, the boundless variety of their flora. Cactuses, euphor- 

 bias, and dracsenae, with a multitude of minor plants, cling to 

 the rocky walls ; while in the depth of the gorge stand huge 

 laurels, fig-trees, and bombacese, whose blossoms exhale almost 

 overpowering odours, and whose trunks are covered with mag- 

 nificent creepers, expanding their gay petals in the torpid air. 

 Still pressing upwards, he mounts into regions favourable to other 

 kinds of cultivation. He has traced the yellow maize growing 

 from the lowest level ; but he now first sees fields of wheat and 

 the other European cereals, brought into the country by the 



