After a failed revolution, Abel is forced to seek refuge in the virgin forests of southwestern Venezuela. There, in his green mansion, Abel meets the wood-nymph Rima, the last of a reclusive aboriginal race. The bird-girl s ethereal presence captivates him completely, but the love that blossoms is soon darkened by cruelty and sorrow. Exploring a love somewhere between reality and imagination, Green Mansions is a poignant meditation on the loss of wilderness, the dream of a return to nature and the bitter reality of the encounter between savage and civilized man. A master of natural history writing, W.H. Hudson forms a link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the twentieth-century ecological movement. First published in 1904, Green Mansions owes much of its success to the mystic, near-religious feelings that pervade the story. Hudson s halting, poetic expressions combined with his descriptions of untouched, natural beauty makes Green Mansions as powerful call back to nature today as it was one hundred years ago. "