Explore "My Tahiti" by Robert Dean Frisbie on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Tuahu and Tomi left me at the foot of Farué Valley, where the trail began. First there was a river to ford; then a jungle of lemon hibiscus and lantana which rose steeply into plantations of tropic foods, patches of vanilla, and forests of oranges and mummy apples, mangoes, and alligator pears. These thinned out where I crossed a hill, barren save for bracken and a few stunted guava bushes. Three miles away, on a razor-backed ridge, the house of Stonehill was dimly visible; beyond towered the mountains of Farué, their peaks glistening with the light of the sun. The trail dropped downward, then, and I entered the Tahitian jungle.
Tall gray-green trees with wide curtainlike buttresses; lichen-encrusted trunks a hundred feet to the first boughs; monster orchids and ferns clinging to the damp bark, outlandish, reeking moisture: grotesque parasitic things hanging from the limbs like water moccasins; serpentine convolvulus twining everywhere. Above, a canopy of dark green leaves; below, perpetual twilight. There is no underbrush, no grass; only the crawling roots of the island chestnuts, the long lianas hanging from the branches, the strange silences and the strange noises.