Florestan

“ When the old priests had this broad valley tilled and irrigated by the convert Indians it must indeed have been a scene of luxurious growth, and they, no doubt, lived in great comfort, if isolation. Still the place is inland, and indolence there as everywhere in Mexico reigns supreme. So fell Rio Florida.
June 17th. From Rio Florida to El Valle, ten leagues, our road in places has been most beautiful; undulating plains like those of Texas, and we saw the first streaks of iron mixed with the limestone which for weeks we have been traveling through. ”

“ The oasis, as I now for the first time discovered, was a valley, a broad shallow depression in the desert falling in a gentle slope from the foot of the Cordillera to the sea, whereby its irrigation was greatly facilitated.
“How beautiful Quipai looks, and how like a river!” said Angela. “That is what I always think when I come here—how like a river!”
“Who knows that long ago the valley was not the bed of a river!”
“It must be very long ago, then, before there was any Cordillera. Rain-clouds never cross the Andes, and for untold ages there can have been no rain here on the coast.” ”

“ But in the dense Florida forests sunlight cannot enter. It falls on the evergreen roof and rebounds in long silvery lances and flashy spray. In many places there is not light sufficient to feed a single green leaf on these dark forest floors. All that the eye can reach is just a maze of tree stems and crooked leafless vine strings. All the flowers, all the verdure, all the glory is up in the light.
The streams of Florida are still young, and in many places are untraceable. ”

“ So we bore in that direction and came to the edge of a vast prairie stretching before us as a sea of lifeless grass.
Except for a gray line on its horizon, marking, I afterward learned, the boundary of the Great Cypress Swamp, there was but a single break on this expansive waste. That was a rich growth of trees about two miles out, to the southeast of us; an oasis, it would have been called in the Sahara, but in the Florida prairies known as an "island." ”

“ Although disafforested, Flores still remains the island of " Flowers," with a great variety of vegetable species and wonderfully fertile slopes and dells. All the slopes of the hills in both islands are scored by deep valleys radiating regularly from the centre to the periphery. This formation is due to the great age of the lavas, which during the course of countless centuries have been cut up into broad valleys, formerly densely covered with forest growths, now occupied by rich cultivated tracts. ”

“ Everything grows with a spontaneity that is surprising—fruits and flowers everywhere in the woods and wildernesses in wild luxuriance. The very nature of things seems to be reversed; pears grow on graceful vines, peas on stately trees, and some things (as witness the air plant) grow on nothing at all. But in spite of the richness of the soil, the geniality of the climate, Florida is not exactly a paradise; here as elsewhere man must carry out the great law, and labour for his daily bread. Nature is prolific, and yields her treasures ungrudgingly, but she demands something in return. ”

“ The Rio Florida, which is soon crossed, is alive with trout, and along its upper course is excellent shooting. The whole region is undulating, green-carpeted, and covered with large yellow-boled pines, through which we catch magnificent mountain-views northward. Near Carboneria, the track describes two tremendous loops, in getting down from the table lands to the valley, and presently, rounding the mountain spur, reaches the Rio de las Animas, which it parallels into Durango, along a cutting through gravel and rock some distance above the bed of the stream. ”

“ There are many such traces of former cultivation in Florida: we come suddenly upon old tracks, furrows, and drains in what we thought primeval forest; rose-bushes run wild, and distorted old fig-trees meet us in a jungle where we supposed no white man's foot had ever before penetrated; the ruins of a chimney gleam whitely through a waste of thorny chaparral. ”

“ A garland of dark green wood, resembling myrtle, surrounds the great lake, for at this distance we cannot distinguish between groves of orange and palmetto and forests of cypress. The whole shore is low, and the lake as clear as a mirror, and everything profoundly still around it. No cities and towns, no steamboats, no boats of any kind, no human beings, excepting ourselves, the Florida travellers. Here is infant land, nay, almost wild land still. But how glad I am to be now in the poetical wilderness of Florida, to have seen something of its marvellous, natural poetry! ”

“ In the plains the pasture affords a plentiful supply of cattle and horses already there. The soil is so fertile that the products of both the torrid and temperate zones may be produced, from chocolate to the wheat and sugar crops. On the river Agua Caliente Mr. Oliden, in the year 1836, established a town, and called it Florida, over the ruins of the old settlement of Santiago, where the Jesuits first established themselves in this wilderness. 175 The Indians built large wooden houses, cleared the land, and raised an abundant crop of rice, superior to that of Bengal. ”

“ The road down Indian River winds sandily along the bluff always southward toward the sun. On your left hand you glimpse the blue river with the island a haze of deep blue on the horizon. It{209} is a dreamy world to the eastward, full of wild life. In the shallows schools of fishes flash their silvery sides to the sun. Herons wait, patient in the knowledge that the river will serve their dinner. The Florida great blue in all his six-foot magnificence flies with a croak of disapprobation only when you come too near. Here are the smaller blue herons, in family groups. ”

“ The characteristic of the forest is its deadly stillness. Thanks to the riverless nature of Yucatan there is little animal life. The swamps afford a haunt for the black duck, for wild geese, spoonbills, ibis and flamingo; and now and again you hear the hoarse cry of a parakeet, or a wild pig bustles through the undergrowth. But practically the forest is dead, flowerless, dark; matted, tangled underfoot, matted, tangled overhead; the long snake-like lianas hanging like fairy ropes from the highest, or weaving a network, like the web of some monster spider, between the shorter, trees. ”

“ Florida is so watery and vine-tied that pathless wanderings are not easily possible in any direction. I started to cross the State by a gap hewn for the locomotive, walking sometimes between the rails, stepping from tie to tie, or walking on the strip of sand at the sides, gazing into the mysterious forest, Nature’s own. It is impossible to write the dimmest picture of plant grandeur so redundant, unfathomable. ”

“ Despite the multitudes of fish on the coast, the Spaniards who colonise this ill-named Florida must have had a trying life of it between the Indians, now hunted to death or exiled by rigorous Uncle Sam, the mosquitoes, and the numberless plagues which abound along these shores.
Hour after hour passed watching the play of large fish and the surf on the beach; one by one the cigar-lights died out; and muffling ourselves up on deck, or creeping into the little cabin, the party slumbered. ”

“ By and by we passed extensive hillside plantations, on which little groups of negroes, men and women, were at work. I seemed to see the old South of which I had read and dreamed, a South not in the least like anything to be found in the wilds of southern and eastern Florida; a land of cotton, and, better still, a land of Southern people, instead of Northern tourists and settlers. And when we stopped at a thrifty-looking village, with neat, homelike houses, open grounds, and lordly shade-trees, I found myself saying under my breath, "Now, then, we are getting back into God's country." ”

“ Thirsty, and perhaps perishing, the traveller, Tantalus like, looks down on the shining silvery threads of water in the cañons, hundreds and even thousands of feet below, but separated from them by impassable barriers. To the south the plateaus descend to the desolate valleys of southern Arizona, where strange gigantic cactus-plants and scattered clumps of thorny shrubs alone break the dreary monotony of the hot gravelly deserts. Agriculture is there impossible without irrigation, but where the life-giving waters can be utilized, as in the Gila Valley, marvellous productiveness follows. ”

“ Before them, toward the east, rose tier upon tier of magnificent mountains, stretching north and south. Down their sloping sides tumbled sparkling cascades and here and there patches of bright green showed where there were tea plantations. Farther down were stretches of grass and groves of lovely feathery bamboo. And between these groves stretched what seemed to be little silvery lakes, with the reflection of the great mountains in them. They were really the famous rice-fields of Formosa, at this time of the year all under water. ”

“ Southern Florida is really the tropical region, the Egypt of the United States, where frosts are{116} unknown, and every fruit or flower, or forest product, which grows in the most tropical quarters of the world, is or may be cultivated with complete success. Pine-apples, bananas, cocoanut, guava, almonds, olives and figs, with a long list of other tropical fruits, are produced in luxuriant abundance, but we no longer wander through groves of orange or lemon trees. Of scenery in these parts there is nothing to speak of; in the interior it is made up of sunshine, fruits and flowers. ”

“ It is a late, backward spring for Florida; and so these forests are behindhand with their foliage: yet so largely do they consist of bright polished evergreen trees, that the eye scarcely feels the need of the deciduous foliage on which the bright misty green of spring lies like an uncertain vapor. There is a large admixture in the picture of the cool tints of the gray moss, which drapes every tree, and hangs in long pendent streamers waving in the wind. The shores of the creek now begin to be lined on either side with tracts of a water-lily which the natives call bonnets. ”

“ And as they penetrated deeper into the jungle, vegetation became more dense. Great clusters of bright-colored flowers lined the banks, tall trees showed themselves above the other growth, parasitic vines wound themselves around forest giants. Ferns, high grass, small bushes, oddly shaped stalks—all these caught the eyes of the explorers. ”

“ Crossing the Sierra Nevada the party struck the Spanish trail, which was then followed by all wagon-trains or mounted parties travelling to and fro between Los 229 Angeles and Santa Fé. The region over which they passed was desolate in the extreme, the road rough and rocky, grass scanty and poor, while water was found only in holes and at long distances, In pointing to it, Frémont’s Spanish guide well states: “There are the great plains; there is found neither water nor grass—nothing; every animal which goes upon them dies.” ”

“ From the Port de Spiritu Santo, where they landed when they entered into Florida, to the Province of Ocute, which may be 400 leagues, little more or less, is a very plain country, and has many lakes and thick woods, and in some places they are of wild pine-trees; and is a weak soil. There is in it neither mountain nor hill. ”

“ On our way thither, we traversed a succession of beautiful prairies, bound by rings of magnificent forest trees, and watered by numerous creeks and lagoons filled with water fowl. Unlike the dreary wastes we had already crossed, which, “like the ocean, fill the imagination with the idea of infinity,” the plains stretching between the Portuguesa and Apure rivers are characterized by the rankness and luxuriance of the vegetation. Owing to the periodical inundation, the landscape wears here the green mantle of spring even during the hottest months. ”

“ MANY writers who come to Florida copy an abstract of the most interesting portions contained in the guide-books, besides what they can hear, afterward filling up the interstices from their imaginations. We look to the old Spaniards for information, but, alas! they are like the swamp cypress which the gray moss has gathered over until its vitality has been absorbed—age has taken away their vigor. ”

“ In that case, and if our water-supply were to fail, Quipai, as you see it now, would cease to exist. The desert, which we are always fighting and have so far conquered, would regain the mastery, and the mission become what I found it, a little oasis at the foot of the Cordillera, supporting with difficulty a few score families of naked Indians. One of these days, if you are so disposed, you shall follow the course of the azequia and see for yourself with what a marvellous reservoir, fed by Andean snows, Nature has provided us. ”

“ With the Yutas, Killbuck and La Bonté remained during the winter; and when the spring sun had opened the ice-bound creeks, and melted the snow on the mountains, and its genial warmth had expanded the earth and permitted the roots of the grass to “live” once more, and throw out green and tender shoots, the two trappers bade adieu to the hospitable Indians, who broke up their village in order to start for the valleys of the Del Norte. ”

“ In time, coral sand-spit and mangrove swamp were cleared for a wonderland playground, of divine climate whither winter tourists throng by the hundred thousand. In time, too, these sand-spits and swamps and older formations of the sunny peninsula furnished homes and sources of livelihood or of wealth to many thousands more, people, these, to whom Florida is a Career, not a Resort. ”