Page:Travels in Uruguay.pdf/36

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

21 blacks, merely to have ascertained what was the amount of the labour in such heat: but I was satisfied when I saw the two blacks suffering apparently as intensely from the primeval curse, as Englishmen would do; mopping their faces after their exertions. Only, unlike Englishmen in like circumstances, they took a glass of clear water, at the top of the hill; and seemed satisfied. TRAVELS IN ERUGUAY.

On the quay the heat was like a furnace, and I should think 140° in the sun. We slowly ascended the steep street of the city that runs up obliquely, and parallel with the harbour, for three miles to the public gardens, which are on an elevated spot, with terraces from which we looked down on the whole harbour and shipping. The entire slope of the bill was covered with every sort of wild herbage and tropical trees. There were avenues of tamarind trees and bread-fruit trees, widely extending, the bread-fruit of the latter hanging under the branches, as big as a man's head. At the gates, as we went out, the avenue terminated in splendid palm trees, the trunks of which swelled out just above the ground, and then ascended narrower up to the heads, which were flattened out into a fan-like union of the stalks of the leaves, which were two yards long. The flowers that had burst from the pods were hanging in a long white cluster, over which the pods remained expanded, as if to give shelter.

Such trees as these it was clear could not possibly exist, with their gigantic luxuriance, except in uninterrupted heat. There were light scarlet and yellow butterflies that shot, past us with the speed of birds, which were four inches wide across the wings; though there are some moths double that size in this country. Then there .