You have undulating wide expanses of sugar-cane--a fine, fresh green and very pleasant to the eye; and everywhere else you have a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of vivid greens of varying shades, a wild tangle of underbrush, with graceful tall palms lifting their crippled plumes high above it; and you have stretches of shady dense forest with limpid streams frolicking through them, continually glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again in the pleasantest hide-and-seek fashion; and you have some tiny mountains, some quaint and picturesque groups of toy peaks, and a dainty little vest-pocket Matterhorn; and here and there and now and then a strip of sea with a white ruffle of surf breaks into the view.
That is Mauritius; and pretty enough.

The details are few, the massed result is charming, but not imposing; not riotous, not exciting; it is a Sunday landscape.

Perspective, and the enchantments wrought by distance, are wanting.

There are no distances; there is no perspective, so to speak.

Fifteen miles as the crow flies is the usual limit of vision.
Mauritius is a garden and a park combined.