Chapter 9 No.9

The characteristics of many kinds of palm have been made familiar by pictures and photographs. But the giant palms of the American tropics cannot be adequately represented by the modern methods of pictorial illustration: they must be seen. You cannot draw or photograph a palm two hundred feet high.

The first sight of a group of such forms, in their natural environment of tropical forest, is a magnificent surprise,-a surprise that strikes you dumb. Nothing seen in temperate zones,-not even the huger growths of the Californian slope,-could have prepared your imagination for the weird solemnity of that mighty colonnade. Each stone-grey trunk is a perfect pillar,-but a pillar of which the stupendous grace has no counterpart in the works of man. You must strain your head well back to follow the soaring of the prodigious column, up, up, up through abysses of green twilight, till at last-far beyond a break in that infinite interweaving of limbs and lianas which is the roof of the forest-you catch one dizzy glimpse of the capital: a parasol of emerald feathers outspread in a sky so blinding as tosuggest the notion of azure electricity.

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Now what is the emotion that such a vision excites,-an emotion too powerful to be called wonder, too weird to be called delight? Only when the first shock of it has passed,-when the several elements that were combined in it have begun to set in motion widely different groups of ideas,-can you comprehend how very complex it must have been. Many impressions belonging to personal experience were doubtless revived in it, but also with them a multitude of sensations more shadowy,-accumulations of organic memory; possibly even vague feelings older than man,-for the tropical shapes that aroused the emotion have a history more ancient than our race.

One of the first elements of the emotion to become clearly distinguishable is the ?sthetic; and this, in its general mass, might be termed the sense of terrible beauty. Certainly the spectacle of that unfamiliar life,-silent, tremendous, springing to the sun in colossal aspiration, striving for light against Titans, and heedless of man in the gloom beneath as of a groping beetle,-thrills like the rhythm of some single marvellous verse that is learned in a glance and remembered forever. Yet the delight, even at its vividest, is shadowed by a queer disquiet. The aspect of that monstrous, pale, naked, smooth-stretching column suggests a life as conscious as the serpent's. You stare at the towering lines of the shape,-vaguely fearing to discern some sign of stealthy movement, some beginning of undulation. Then sight and reason combine to correct the suspicion. Yes, motion is there, and life enormous-but a life seeking only sun,-life, rushing like the jet of a geyser, straight to the giant day.

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