Union County courier. [volume] (Elk Point, Union County, D.T. [S.D.]) 187?-1913, 1878-08-07
THE TROPICS.
Romance and Reality Contrssted

miserable, l suppose everybody more or
less believes. l discovered at later
date that Kingston, compared with Santa
Martha or Savanilla, might be consider
ed clean, thriving and civilized city.
But to my untutored European mind, it
seemed at first sight more frightful than
anything / could have believed of
Coomassie or Timbuctoo. I suppose
those who stay at home have no idea
what an extra European town must ne
cessarily be. At any rate, I could not
before have believed that there existed
on earth place SO wretched, so mean
looking, 30 utterly bankrupt and disre-
putable, as that in which then stood.
But the country, thinks the unsophisti-
Gated Briton, the country must be beauti-
full! There the hand of man cannot mar
the natural charms of green fields and
lovely flowers. There the waving sugar
cane, the graceful bamboo, the spread
ing tree fern, the magnificent palms
(those palms again y must make scene
of fairy loveliness. There the orange
tress, the parrots, the butterfiies-all, my
dear sir, all, all mere fancy! Go and
see for yourself, or trust those who have
seen. Such things you may find if you
will at Kew Gardens or at Sydenham,
but not, assure you, in the tropics.
Behind the town lies plain, occupied
for the most part by grazing farms and
cultivated land. You may drive out on
any side along dusty road and survey
the beauties of nature as they unfold
themselves to your inquiring eye.
Hedges OF cactus shut it in ON either
hand, and of course shut off the prospect
of every object except their own 0btrus-
i've stems. Now, a cactus hedge is a
very pretty thing in the abstract, that is
to say a hedge of such cactus plants as
one may see at Kew or Sydenham afore-
said. But the concrete cactus hedge Of
reality consists of tall, scraggy stalks,
fowerless and spiny, covered half an
inch deep in collected dust, and as thor
oughly unromantic as dirt and neglect
can make them. Here and there a gap
in the hedge or an interval of wire fenc-
ing allows one to glance at the fields
within. And what fields! No soft
green turf, pied with daises and butter.
cups, but great with dusty levels, over
grown with rank and weedy vegetation,
more like rushes than English grass.
The dust lies on its spiky blades, not in
light powder, but thick and deep as in an
uninhabited room. You cannot see the
shape of the leaves for the white layer
that overlies them, always, of course,
under that pelting sunlight which makes
the dullest gray come out in staring
whiteness. The plain is one unbroken
sea of dingy weeds, and the tropical
country has followed the tropical town to
John Milton's limbo of false imaginings,
the Paradise of fools. And the flowersl
Well, there are no flowers. If you wish
to see brilliant blossoms, you must 60
into your own English warren on May
morning, when the primroses cluster by
thousands on every sunny bank, when
the cowslips raise their dappled heads
on every grassy knoll, when the dog
roses sweeten the air on every side with
their perfumed breath. But you will
not find these things in the tropics. A
few rare trees burst once year into
masses of crimson bloom; few stray
plants after the rainy season open their
faint yellow petals in the fields from
which the showers have washed away
the surface dust; but the general aspect
of every tropical plain is one of monoton-
Gus and wearisome greenish-brown. As
to walking in the fields in search of
flowers, you might as well walk through
an acre of furxe. In tropical countries
no man strays far from the dry highway,
or if he strays he repents it afterwards
with many literal thorn in the flesh,
not 10 mention many a creeping thing,
buried deep beneath his tender skin.
The fruits are there, one must allow; but
not the luscious fruits of our imagina-
ton. Good oranges are found only in
temperate climates; those which grow
under vertical sun run more to rind,
pulp and fibre, than to sweet juice or
delicate favor. Pineapples in the West
Indies are mere messes Of sugary string,
unfit to compare with our delicious hot
house fruit. As for the common ruck
of berries - resinous mangoes, mealy
bananas, sloppy custard apples, insipid
cherimoyas, infantile naseberries-they
deserve no place at any decent table,
and, to say the truth, seldom obtain one.
While we at home are talking with lus-
cious lips of the exquisite tropical fruits,
the wiser planter is quietly importing
prunes and raisins, figs and olives for his
own dessert, and would as soon think of
eating crocodile as of putting the COM
mon and tasteless messes Of his native
trees before bis English guests Belyra-
rin