NIGHT IN JAMAICA. 27 



amusing themselves, my ear was struck from time to 

 time by an abrupt and indistinct sound from the upper 

 parts of the mountain ; probably caused by the crumbling 

 rock, or the fall of rubbish brought down by the cascades. 

 An equally dubious and sudden sound would occasionally 

 rise from the deep valley beneath ; but else nothing fell 

 upon the ear, but the monotonous murmur of the mountain 

 torrent working its way over stock and rock in the depth 

 of the ravine. The moon barely lighted up the wide 

 pastures sufficiently to distinguish their extent or the 

 objects sprinkled upon them. Here and there a taU bark- 

 less pine stood conspicuously forward on the verge of the 

 dark belt of forest, with its bleached trunk and fantastic 

 branches glistening in the moonshine." * 



I have noticed the peculiar silence of a mountain 

 summit by night in the tropics, and this far more absolute 

 and striking than that alluded to by Latrobe. I was 

 spending a night in a lonely house on one of the Liguanea 

 mountains in Jamaica, and was impressed with the very 

 peculiar stillness ; such a total absence of sounds as I had 

 never experienced before : no running water was near ; 

 there was not a breath of wind ; no bird or reptile moved ; 

 no insect hummed ; it was an oppressive stillness, as if 

 tlie silence could be felt. 



But at lower levels in tropical countries night is not 



characterised by silence. Strange and almost unearthly 



sounds strike the ear of one benighted in the forests of 



Jamaica. Some of these are the voices of nocturnal 



• Latrobe's Alpenstock, p. 135. 



