The Describer's Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations (25 page)

What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the con- tinuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except for the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.

These grass islands are a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush pastures adrift. Some of them are so large it is difficult to believe they are really afloat till they come alongside. Then, if the river is at all broken by a breeze, the meadow plainly undulates.

Mombasa has all the look of a picture of Paradise painted by a small child. The deep Sea-arm round the island forms an ideal harbour; the land is made out of whitish coral-cliff grown with broad green mango trees and fantastic bald grey Baobab trees. The Sea at Mombasa is as blue as a cornflower, and, outside the inlet to the harbour, the long breakers of the Indian Ocean draw a thin crooked white line, and give out a low thunder even in the calmest weather.

There is no trail up this gray valley, only dim paths that lose themselves in bogs and willow flats and gravel streams. Several hours pass before we come to the rock outwash of a chasm in the northern walls where the torrent comes down from the ice fields of Kang La. Even at midday the ravine is dark, and so steep and narrow that on the ascent under hanging rocks the torrent must be crossed over and over.

In the bright September light and mountain shadow—steep foothills are closing in as the valley narrows, and the snow peaks to the north are no longer seen—the path follows a dike between the reedy canal and the green terraces of rice that descend in steps to the margins of the river. Across the canal, more terraces ascend to the crests of the high hills, and a blue sky.

This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth, the great Salinas Valley stretching south for nearly a hundred miles, the town of Salinas where I was born now spreading like crab grass toward the foothills. Mount Toro, on the brother range to the west, was a rounded benign mountain, and to the north Monterey Bay shone like a blue platter.

No sooner had we left the northern end of Missisquoi Bay that morning than we entered a spruce bog. The water was a foot deep, and in places even deeper, where the current had hollowed out channels like running brooks, into which we sometimes stumbled and sometimes fell full length.