The flowers of this bean are pink, and the pods are as large as broad beans. These the doctor at once pronounced to be edible, for, as he explained to me, none of these Leguminosae are poisonous. This was a good thing to know, for they grow so thickly on these shores that we could have collected any quantity we pleased during our stay on Trinidad; and with these, the fish, the turtle, the birds and their eggs, all of which are procurable here without any difficulty, it would be possible for men left on this island to ward off starvation for any length of time.
When I speak of the slopes we were now on as downs, the reader must not conjure up a picture of the grassy downs of the English coast, pleasant under foot and easy to travel on. To drag one’s feet over the downs of Trinidad is a very weary business. There are large rocks and deep pits everywhere. One’s progress is impeded by the extreme softness of the soil, into which one’s feet sink deeply, and this is made still worse by the burrows of the land-crabs, while the roots of the tall grasses and the trailing tendrils of the beans try to trip one up at every step.
Here, to our relief, we found water again. At the foot of the landslip a deep gully opened out which clove the down to the edge of the shore. At the bottom of this a little stream flowed for a short distance, being absorbed by the thirsty soil long before it could reach the sands below.
In order to avoid the entangling vegetation we walked down this gully, and an exceedingly unpleasant place we found it. For here an incredible number of large fluffy white birds, a sort of gannet, were sitting on their nests with their young. They covered the rocks and the branches of the dead trees. They attacked us savagely whenever we came within reach of them, and the whole of the hot narrow gorge stank most offensively of the rotten fish they had strewed about. The different species of birds occupy different portions of this island, and this ravine is the chief haunt of this particular disagreeable tribe.
The whole scene now seemed strangely familiar to me—the ravine, the black rocks, the crowds of brooding white birds—and when at last we came to what appeared to be an old road of piled-up stones crossing the gully I stood still and cried in astonishment: “Why, doctor, this is my ravine after all! I remember this place well!”
Then I looked behind me at the mountain we had descended, and I began to understand how it was that I had been unable to find out my old route. As I have explained, the ravine I had travelled down nine years before extended from the plateau of tree-ferns to the shore. But since then a gigantic landslip had evidently taken place. The mountainside had fallen away, and millions and millions of tons of rocks had rolled below, entirely filling up the ravine and destroying all traces of it, until far down, where it appeared again on the downs beyond the limit of the landslip.
This was one among other instances I can mention showing that enormous changes have taken place on this island even in the course of the last nine years. When this terrific fall of rocks occurred, it would have been a wonderful sight to one gazing at it in safety from the sea, and the noise of it must have made itself heard for many leagues around. It has certainly converted what was once a comparatively easy and perfectly safe road from the mountain-tops to the windward shore into an extremely difficult and dangerous one. So much so that the doctor and myself saw at once that it would be useless to establish a depot of stores at the pier, as it would be out of the question to lead the members of the expedition up such a perilous place as this. It was absolutely certain that lives would be lost if this pass were often attempted. No skilful mountaineering would avail against the treacherous rottenness of the precipitous step which surmounts the landslip, and which did not exist of old. There is no certain foothold anywhere upon its face, and we looked forward with no pleasurable anticipation to our enforced return by this way on the morrow.
The birds’ eggs lay on every stone in this valley. We tasted some of them, but the flavour bore too much resemblance to the stench of rotten fish around us to be altogether pleasing.
The bank of stones which I had recognised in the ravine was of far too regular formation to be otherwise than the work of men’s hands.
Some hundreds of years ago, the Portuguese had a penal settlement on this side of Trinidad, and this, no doubt, was what remained of one of their roads. Some weeks later, I explored the ruins of this settlement, which is a short distance to the north of this gully. I will describe it when I come to that portion of my narrative.
Before we came to the spot where the stream soaks into the earth we filled our bottle with water; then we walked down to the sandy beach, reaching it just before it became too dark to see our way. We were not long in selecting our camp. There was a large rock on the sands above high-water mark, whose hollow side afforded good shelter from wind and rain. In front of this, we lit a fire of the wreckwood,
