DANGEEOUS SITUATION. 
429 
mountain. We there had great difficulties to overcome, 
occasioned by the force of the vegetation. A botanist would 
not readily guess that the thick wood covering this valley is 
formed by the assemblage of a plant of the musaceous 
family.* " It is probablv a maranta, or a keliconia ; its 
leaves are large and shining ; it reaches the height of 
fourteen or fifteen feet, and its succulent stalks grow near 
one another like the stems of the reeds found in the humid 
regions of the south of Europe.! We were obliged to cut 
our way through this forest. The negroes walked before 
with their cutlasses or machetes. The people confound this 
alpine scitamineous plant with the arborescent gramina, 
under the name of carice, "We saw neither its fruit nor 
flowers. We are surprised to meet with a monocotyledonous 
family, believed to be exclusively found in the hot and low 
reoions of the tropics, at eleven hundred toises of elevation ; 
much higher than the andromedas, the thibaudias, and the 
rhododendron of the Cordilleras.^ In a chain of mountains 
no less elevated, and more northern (the Blue Mountains of 
Jamaica), the Keliconia of the 'parrots and the bihai, rather 
grow in the alpine shaded situations.§ 
Wandering in this thick wood of musaceae or arborescent 
plants, we constantly directed our course towards the eastern 
peak, which we perceived from time to time through an 
opening. On a sudden we found ourselves enveloped in a 
thick mist; the compass alone could guide us; but in ad- 
vancing northward we were in danger at every step of find- 
ing ourselves on the brink of that enormous wall of rocks, 
which descends almost perpendicularly to the depth of six 
thousand feet towards the sea. We were obliged to halt. 
Surrounded by clouds sweeping the ground, we began to 
doubt whether we should reach the eastern peak before 
night. Happily, the negroes who carried our water and 
provisions, rejoined us, and we resolved to take some refresh- 
ment. Our repast did not last long. Possibly the Capuchin 
father had not thought of the great number of persons who 
* Scitamineous plants, or family of the plantains. 
+ Arundo donax. 
t Befaria. . 
§ Heliconia psittacorum, and H. bihai. These two helicomas are verf 
common in the plains of Terra Firma. 
