I passed a fernlike moss, which the locals call pawasol agouti because it is in the shape of a parasol and agoutis often find shelter beneath it. There was zolivyay, the wild olive, and a huge red woody mushroom growing on a karapit tree. The balata trees are called bel bwa, or "beautiful wood," and beautiful furniture is made from its trunk.

There are 203 acres of rain forest at the foot of the mountain in Morne Diablotin National Park, which spreads over 8,000 acres. It was cool even at midday, and on every side as I walked were rare plants and birds. Of the two parrots endemic to the island, the jacquot—a red-necked Amazonian parrot found between one and three thousand feet—is the more common. The sisserou, Dominica's national bird, flies higher—between two and four thousand feet—and lays only one egg per clutch. I stopped at a lookout where two birders were already scanning the opposite hillside. We saw three jacquots, iridescent blue in the sunlight. A flash of red in front of the canopy of green. "Dominica is blessed," rhapsodized the birder.

And then came the moment. First we heard wings beating, then cries, and then we saw them: two sisserous, high in the trees. "When they are apart, you hear them calling and calling," my guide said. "When they are together, they are mostly silent." Much like some human couples I know.

I wanted to go deep into the green soul of the island, and I needed a spirit guide. The travel agency at the Fort Young Hotel set me up with a short, wiry, curly-haired Carib named Kent Auguiste, who had until recently been the chief of Dominica's Caribs. He was a man in amazing shape for fifty-two, with a wise face. I asked Kent to take me to a part of the island where no tourists ever go. I told him about my search for the perfect waterfall.

"I will take you to the Secret Pool," he said.

We walked down a sort of stairway to the sea that ends at a dramatic rock formation jutting about two thousand feet into the ocean. When the tide rushed in, two pools filled with blue seawater. There were three or four holes in each pool, and a couple of Carib men were bathing in them.

Kent told me the legend of the snake. "That's where the snake came out of the ocean," he said, indicating a circle of rocks right where we were standing. Then he pointed up, away from the ocean, to Manginy Mountain, the highest point in Carib territory. "That's where he went into the ground."

Carib priests—the boyez—would go up to the snake's cave for advice and medicine. There they would perform a ritual with a bay leaf, or laurel (the rastas might tell you it was marijuana; the older Caribs say it was tobacco), and they would set it afire. They would go with the oar of a boat, place it at the mouth of the cave, and burn the leaf. When the snake smelled it, he would come out in the shape of a white man. He would advise them, or if they needed something like medicine, he would vomit it out to them. The snake might have come from Africa, said Kent. "Africa is over there," and he pointed across the Atlantic, due east. The snake stopped appearing with the coming of Christianity to the island, in the fifteenth century.