Page:Life in the Open Air.djvu/384

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dream full of the music of falling water, as he sees it brimming with effulgence. It lies open before us, a lucent shell lined with imprisoned rainbows, — a chalice of dissolved pearl, — a flushed corolla, where the cataract rises like a white cone of vestal leaves just opening, — a pool of newly-troubled water, where weary spirits may find healing and lightness of heart.


We come now to the right-hand foreground. Three specific typical trees project over the basin, — a trio of comrades sustaining each other in their vanguard station, — unmistakable individuals, evidently not brothers. I have no names for these pioneers. Probably no arborist, complacent with offensive armor of Latin nomenclature, has penetrated these solitudes at the Heart of the Andes. But no ungainly polysyllable could identify these trees more completely than do their distinctive qualities as here given. Midmost stands the stalwart masculine tree, oak-like in its muscular ramification, and upholding a compact crown of plentiful leafage. Light flashes everywhere in among its leaves, catches them as they turn and gilds them, slants across them sheenily, pierces athwart their masses into the dim hollows and fills them with gleams, stands at openings of cavernous recesses in the dense umbrage and reveals their mysterious obscurity. Twigs and sprays bare of foliage, and showing that the crumbling away of soil beneath is telling upon the more delicate