VII.
SUCH travel in such a country would be impossible but for the
excellent national roads,—limestone highways, solid, broad,
faultlessly graded,—that wind from town to town, from hamlet to
hamlet, over mountains, over ravines; ascending by zigzags to
heights of twenty-five hundred feet; traversing the primeval
forests of the interior; now skirting the dizziest precipices,
now descending into the loveliest valleys. There are thirty-one
of these magnificent routes, with a total length of 488,052
metres (more than 303 miles), whereof the construction required
engineering talent of the highest order,—the building of
bridges beyond counting, and devices the most ingenious to
provide against dangers of storms, floods, and land-slips. Most
have drinking-fountains along their course at almost regular
intervals,—generally made by the negroes, who have a simple but
excellent plan for turning the water of a spring
through bamboo
pipes to the road-way. Each road is also furnished with mile-stones,
or rather kilometre-stones; and the drainage is perfect
enough to assure of the highway becoming dry within fifteen
minutes after the heaviest rain, so long as the surface is
maintained in tolerably good condition. Well-kept embankments of
earth (usually covered with a rich growth of mosses, vines, and
ferns), or even solid walls of masonry, line the side that
overhangs a dangerous depth. And all these highways pass through
landscapes of amazing beauty,—visions of mountains so many-tinted
and so singular of outline that they would almost seem to
have been created for the express purpose of compelling
astonishment. This tropic Nature appears to call into being
nothing ordinary: the shapes which she evokes are always either
gracious or odd,—and her eccentricities, her extravagances, have
a fantastic charm, a grotesqueness as of artistic whim. Even
where the landscape-view is cut off by high woods the forms of
ancient trees—the infinite interwreathing of vine growths all on
fire with violence of blossom-color,—the enormous green
outbursts of balisiers, with leaves ten to thirteen feet long,—
the columnar solemnity of great palmistes,—the pliant quivering
exqisiteness of bamboo,—the furious splendor of roses run mad
—more than atone for the loss of the horizon. Sometimes you
approach a steep covered with a growth of what, at first glance,
looks precisely like fine green fur: it is a first-growth of
young bamboo. Or you see a hill-side covered with huge green
feathers, all shelving down and overlapping as in the tail of
some unutterable bird: these are baby ferns. And where the road
leaps some deep ravine with a double or triple bridge of white
stone, note well what delicious shapes spring up into sunshine
from the black profundity on either hand! Palmiform you might
hastily term them,—but no palm was ever so gracile; no
palm ever bore so dainty a head of green plumes light as lace!
These likewise are ferns (rare survivors, maybe, of that period
of monstrous vegetation which preceded the apparition of man),
beautiful tree-ferns, whose every young plume, unrolling in a
spiral from the bud, at first assumes the shape of a crozier,—a
crozier of emerald! Therefore are some of this species called
"archbishop-trees," no doubt. … But one might write for a
hundred years of the sights to be seen upon such a mountain road.
