As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still unfinished), one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant, which bears in the island the ominous name of the Brinvilliers. It is one of those deadly poisons too common in the bush, and too well known to the negro Obi-men and Obi-women. And as I looked at the insignificant weed, I wondered how the name of that wretched woman should have spread to this remote island, and have become famous enough to be applied to a plant. French negroes may have brought the name with them; but then arose another wonder. How were the terrible properties of the plant discovered? How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the devil's work, and what long practice--considering its usual slowness and dulness--must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool for its jealousy and revenge! It may have taken ages to discover the Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known. Why not? As the Spaniards say, "The devil knows many things, because he is old." Surely this is one of the many facts which point towards some immensely ancient civilization in the tropics, and a civilization which may have had its ugly vices and have been destroyed thereby. Now we left the cacao grove; and I was aware on each side of the trace of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams,--strange colossal shapes towering up a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach, for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling, and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the "rastrajo," which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared,--all utterly impassable. These rastrajo forms, of course, were all new to me. I might have spent weeks in botanizing merely at them; but all I could remark, or cared to remark, there as in other places, was the tendency in the rastrajo towards growing enormous rounded leaves. How to get at the giants behind was the only question for one who for forty years had been longing for one peep at Flora's fairy palace, and saw its portals open at last. There was a deep gully before us, where a gang of convicts was working at a wooden bridge for the tramway, amid the usual abysmal mud of the tropic wet season, and on the other side of it there was no rastrajo right and left of the trace. I hurried down it like any school-boy, dashing through mud and water, hopping from log to log, regardless of warnings and offers of help from good-natured negroes, who expected the respectable elderly "buccra" to come to grief, struggled perspiring up the other side of the gully, and then dashed away to the left, and stopped short, breathless with awe, in the primeval forest at last.