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, 
126 
