A few days later I started for Hog Harbour, for the plantation of the Messrs. Th., near which I meant to attend a great feast, or "sing-sing." This meant a march of several hours through the bush. My boys had all put on their best finery,--trousers, shirts, gay handkerchiefs,--and had painted their hair with fresh lime.
"Well, boys, are you ready?" "Yes, Masta," they answer, with conviction, though they are far from ready, as they are still tying their bundles. After waiting a while, I say, "Well, me, me go." They answer, "All right, you go." I take a few steps and wait again. One of them appears in front of the hut to look for a stick to hang his bundle on, another cannot find his pipe; still, after a quarter of an hour, we can really start. The boys sing and laugh, but as we enter the forest darkness they suddenly become quiet, as if the sternness of the bush oppressed their souls. We talk but little, and only in undertones. These woods have none of the happy, sensuous luxuriance which fancy lends to every tropical forest; there is a harshness, a selfish struggle for the first place among the different plants, a deadly battling for air and light. Giant trees with spreading crowns suppress everything around, kill every rival and leave only small and insignificant shrubs alive. Between them, smaller trees strive for light; on tall, straight, thin stems they have secured a place and developed a crown. Others look for light in roundabout ways, making use of every gap their neighbours leave, and rise upward in soft coils. All these form a high roof, under which younger and weaker plants lead a skimped life--hardwood trees on thin trunks, with small, unassuming leaves, and vulgar softwood with large, flabby foliage. Around and across all this wind the parasites, lianas, rotang, some stretched like ropes from one trunk to another, some rising in elegant curves from the ground, some attached to other trunks and sucking out their life with a thousand roots, others interlaced in the air in distorted curves. All these grow and thrive on the bodies of former generations on the damp, mouldy ground, where leaves rot and trunks decay, and where it is always wet, as never a sunbeam can strike in so far.