Early morning: the eighth day. Moored in another blue harbor,--a great
semicircular basin, bounded by a high billowing of hills all green from
the fringe of yellow beach up to their loftiest clouded summit. The land
has that up-tossed look which tells a volcanic origin. There are
curiously scalloped heights, which, though emerald from base to crest,
still retain all the physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must
be lava under that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of
bright green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray--stretches a
long chain of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these
elevations are interunited by their curving hollows of land or by
filaments,--very low valleys. And as they grade away in varying color
through distance, these hill-chains take a curious segmented, jointed
appearance, like insect forms, enormous ant-bodies.... This is St.
Kitt's.
We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long
wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the town
of Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people.
It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted. There
are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many bread-fruit
trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes, and unfamiliar
things the negroes call by incomprehensible names,--"sapsaps,
dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less reflection of light than in
Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness; no Spanish buildings, no
canary-colored arcades. All the narrow streets are gray or
neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen tone. Most of the dwellings
are timber, resting on brick props, or elevated upon blocks of lava
rock. It seems almost as if some breath from the enormous and always
clouded mountain overlooking the town had begrimed everything, darkening
even the colors of vegetation.
The population is not picturesque. The costumes are commonplace; the
tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and sombre blues and grays
are commoner than pinks, yellows, and violets. Occasionally you observe
a fine half-breed type--some tall brown girl walking by with a swaying
grace like that of a sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not
frequent. Most of those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many
stores are kept by yellowmen with intensely black hair and eyes,--men
who do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine
buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer the
visitors is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and its palms,
its monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees, and its beautiful
little fountains. From some of these trees a peculiar tillandsia streams
down, much like our Spanish moss,--but it is black!
... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the island
look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones, all very green,
and connected by strips of valley-land so low that the edge of the
sea-circle on the other side of the island can be seen through the gaps.
We steam past truncated hills, past heights that have the look of the
stumps of peaks cut half down,--ancient fire-mouths choked by tropical
verdure.
Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other volcanic
forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like clouds. Those
are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the subterranean fires.
It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great mountain
flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest, with clouds
packed high upon it, still seems to smoke;--the second highest displays
the most symmetrical crater-form I have yet seen. All are still
grayish-blue or gray. Gradually through the blues break long high gleams
of green.
As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky;
the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On
the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red, and
brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are
distinguishable;--cane-plantations unfold gold-green surfaces.
[Illustration: OLD SUGAR MILL, ST. KITTS
_As the steamer threads its way among the islands one
sees these old mills dotting the cane fields like abandoned
watchtowers._]
We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to become
a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it continues
green;--but it is a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor. The sea
to-day looks almost black: the south-west wind has filled the day with
luminous mist; and the phantom of Nevis melts in the vast glow,
dissolves utterly.... Once more we are out of sight of land,--in the
centre of a blue-black circle of sea. The water-line cuts blackly
against the immense light of the horizon,--a huge white glory that
flames up very high before it fades and melts into the eternal blue.
X
Then a high white shape like a cloud appears before us,--on the
purplish-dark edge of the sea. The cloud-shape enlarges, heightens
without changing contour. It is not a cloud, but an island! Its outlines
begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings of color. Shadowy valleys
appear, spectral hollows, phantom slopes of pallid blue or green. The
apparition is so like a mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself
one is looking at real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have
shaped itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many miles
beyond it; and it vanishes into mist again.
... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it until it
materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness to the islands we
have already passed--one dominant height, with massing of bright crater
shapes about it, and ranges of green hills linked together by low
valleys. About its highest summit also hovers a flock of clouds. At the
foot of the vast hill nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth.
The single salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of
echoes.
Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that fringes the
wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their base;--it has a curtain
of palms before it. Approaching, you discern only one or two façades
above the sea-wall, and the long wharf projecting through an opening in
the masonry, over which young palms stand thick as canes on a sugar
plantation. But on reaching the street that descends towards the heavily
bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy little
burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,--steep,
irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise of tiny courts
everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or displaying above their
stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes of cacti. All is old-fashioned
and quiet and queer and small. Even the palms are diminutive,--slim and
delicate; there is a something in their poise and slenderness like the
charm of young girls who have not yet ceased to be children, though soon
to become women....
There is a glorious sunset,--a fervid orange splendor, shading starward
into delicate roses and greens. Then black boatmen come astern and
quarrel furiously for the privilege of carrying one passenger ashore;
and as they scream and gesticulate, half naked, their silhouettes
against the sunset seem forms of great black apes.
... Under steam and sail we are making south again, with a warm wind
blowing south-east,--a wind very moist, very powerful, and soporific.
Facing it, one feels almost cool; but the moment one is sheltered from
it profuse perspiration bursts out. The ship rocks over immense swells;
night falls very blackly; and there are surprising displays of
phosphorescence.