Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the white shell roads; the gardens are full of hybiscus and other splendid flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.
A wonderful piece of engineering is the railway over the Florida Keys—the low margin of islands, like those of the upper Adriatic, in which the peninsula tails off. By this time it may be completed all the way from Miami to Key West; but when I was there it had a half-way terminus at Knight’s Key.
For an hour after leaving Miami the railway runs through an almost unbroken pine forest. Here and there a rude cabin is visible, occupied, no doubt by platelayers; but there is not a single clearing or attempt at cultivation. Then, all of a sudden, the forest ceases, and we emerge upon open swamp prairies, dotted with clumps of low green scrub. To the north we can see the edge of the pine forest running off, like a black wall, into the dim distance. For another hour or thereabouts we trail through the coarse grass of the swamp prairies or salt marshes, broken only by occasional channels of water. Of habitation or cultivation there is no sign. Then we run out upon vast lagoons dotted with occasional scrub-covered islands. The railroad is built on a piled-up causeway of a sort of white shell-limestone—or is it, perhaps, coral?
On the whole, the outlook is rather monotonous; but there are patches of beauty. I remember vividly a huge green lagoon, with a low green shore beyond; in the foreground some sort of heron lazily flapping its way over the surface; and in the distance the white sails of a fore-and-aft schooner shining in the sun.
Then we pass through many miles of amazing and fantastic jungle. No tree, perhaps, is over thirty feet high; but all are strangely contorted and interwoven with vines and creepers—like the forest round the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A few clearings are burnt away in this jungle, and things like banana trees are growing in them. But for an hour and a half after leaving Homestead (the station at the edge of the pine forest) I saw not a single human habitation.