At Georgetown, steamers entering the river can lie close to the
wharf;--we can enter the Government warehouses without getting wet. In
fifteen minutes the shower ceases; and we leave the warehouses to find
ourselves in a broad, palm-bordered street illuminated by the most
prodigious day that yet shone upon our voyage. The rain has cleared the
air and dissolved the mists; and the light is wondrous.
My own memory of Demerara will always be a memory of enormous light. The
radiance has an indescribable dazzling force that conveys the idea of
electric fire;--the horizon blinds like a motionless sheet of lightning;
and you dare not look at the zenith.... The brightest summer-day in the
North is a gloaming to this. Men walk only under umbrellas, or with
their eyes down; and the pavements, already dry, flare almost
unbearably.
... Georgetown has an exotic aspect peculiar to itself,--different from
that of any West Indian city we have seen; and this is chiefly due to
the presence of palm-trees. For the edifices, the plan, the general idea
of the town are modern; the white streets, laid out very broad to the
sweep of the sea-breeze, and drained by canals running through their
centres, with bridges at cross-streets, display the value of
nineteenth-century knowledge regarding house-building with a view to
coolness as well as to beauty. The architecture might be described as a
tropicalized Swiss style--Swiss eaves are developed into veranda roofs,
and Swiss porches prolonged and lengthened into beautiful piazzas and
balconies. The men who devised these large cool halls, these admirably
ventilated rooms, these latticed windows opening to the ceiling, may
have lived in India; but the physiognomy of the town also reveals a fine
sense of beauty in the designers: all that is strange and beautiful in
the vegetation of the tropics has had a place contrived for it, a home
prepared for it. Each dwelling has its garden; each garden blazes with
singular and lovely color; but everywhere and always tower the palms.
There are colonnades of palms, clumps of palms, groves of palms--sago
and cabbage and cocoa and fan palms. You can see that the palm is
cherished here, is loved for its beauty, like a woman. Everywhere you
find palms, in all stages of development, from the first sheaf of tender
green plumes rising above the soil to the wonderful colossus that holds
its head a hundred feet above the roofs; palms border the garden walks
in colonnades; they are grouped in exquisite poise about the basins of
fountains; they stand like magnificent pillars at either side of gates;
they look into the highest windows of public buildings and hotels.
... For miles and miles and miles we drive along avenues of
palms--avenues leading to opulent cane-fields, traversing queer coolie
villages. Rising on either side of the road to the same level, the palms
present the vista of a long unbroken double colonnade of dead-silver
trunks, shining tall pillars with deep green plume-tufted summits,
almost touching, almost forming something like the dream of an
interminable Moresque arcade. Sometimes for a full mile the trees are
only about thirty or forty feet high; then, turning into an older alley,
we drive for half a league between giants nearly a hundred feet in
altitude. The double perspective lines of their crests, meeting before
us and behind us in a bronze-green darkness, betray only at long
intervals any variation of color, where some dead leaf droops like an
immense yellow feather.