... A beautiful fantastic shape floats to us through the morning light;
first cloudy gold like the horizon, then pearly gray, then varying blue,
with growing green lights;--Saint Lucia. Most strangely formed of all
this volcanic family;--everywhere mountainings sharp as broken crystals.
Far off the Pitons--twin peaks of the high coast--show softer contours,
like two black breasts pointing against the sky....
... As we enter the harbor of Castries, the lines of the land seem no
less exquisitely odd, in spite of their rich verdure, than when viewed
afar off;--they have a particular pitch of angle.... Other of these
islands show more or less family resemblance;--you might readily mistake
one silhouette for another as seen at a distance, even after several
West Indian journeys. But Saint Lucia at once impresses you by its
eccentricity.
Castries, drowsing under palm leaves at the edge of its curving
harbor,--perhaps an ancient crater,--seems more of a village than a
town: streets of low cottages and little tropic gardens. It has a
handsome half-breed population: the old French colonial manners have
been less changed here by English influence than in Saint Kitt's and
elsewhere;--the creole _patois_ is still spoken, though the costumes
have changed.... A more beautiful situation could scarcely be
imagined,--even in this tropic world. In the massing of green heights
about the little town are gaps showing groves of palm beyond; but the
peak summits catch the clouds. Behind us the harbor mouth seems spanned
by steel-blue bars: these are lines of currents. Away, on either hand,
volcanic hills are billowing to vapory distance; and in their nearer
hollows are beautiful deepenings of color: ponded shades of diaphanous
blue or purplish tone.... I first remarked this extraordinary coloring
of shadows in Martinique, where it exists to a degree that tempts one to
believe the island has a special atmosphere of its own.... A friend
tells me the phenomenon is probably due to inorganic substances floating
in the air,--each substance in diffusion having its own index of
refraction. Substances so held in suspension by vapors would vary
according to the nature of soil in different islands, and might thus
produce special local effects of atmospheric tinting.
... We remain but half an hour at Castries; then steam along the coast
to take in freight at another port. Always the same delicious
color-effects as we proceed, with new and surprising visions of hills.
The near slopes descending to the sea are a radiant green, with streaks
and specklings of darker verdure;--the farther-rising hills faint blue,
with green saliencies catching the sun;--and beyond these are upheavals
of luminous gray--pearl-gray--sharpened in the silver glow of the
horizon.... The general impression of the whole landscape is one of
motion suddenly petrified,--of an earthquake surging and tossing
suddenly arrested and fixed: a raging of cones and peaks and monstrous
truncated shapes.... We approach the Pitons.
Seen afar off, they first appeared twin mammiform peaks,--naked and dark
against the sky; but now they begin to brighten a little and show
color,--also to change form. They take a lilaceous hue, broken by gray
and green fights; and as we draw yet nearer they prove dissimilar in
both shape and tint.... Now they separate before us, throwing long
pyramidal shadows across the steamer's path. Then, as they open to our
coming, between them a sea bay is revealed--a very lovely curving bay,
bounded by hollow cliffs of fiery green. At either side of the gap the
Pitons rise like monster pylônes. And a charming little settlement, a
beautiful sugar-plantation, is nestling there between them, on the very
edge of the bay.
Out of a bright sea of verdure, speckled with oases of darker foliage,
these Pitons from the land side tower in sombre vegetation. Very high
up, on the nearer one, amid the wooded slopes, you can see houses
perched; and there are bright breaks in the color there--tiny mountain
pastures that look like patches of green silk velvet.
... We pass the Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to
cast anchor before the village of Choiseul. It lies on a ledge above the
beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat
high up on soft yellowish sand. A delicious saline scent of sea-weed.
It is disappointing, the village: it is merely one cross of brief
streets, lined with blackening wooden dwellings; there are no buildings
worth looking at, except the queer old French church, steep-roofed and
bristling with points that look like extinguishers. Over broad reaches
of lava rock a shallow river flows by the village to the sea, gurgling
under shadows of tamarind foliage. It passes beside the market-place--a
market-place without stalls, benches, sheds, or pavements: meats,
fruits, and vegetables are simply fastened to the trees. Women are
washing and naked children bathing in the stream; they are
bronze-skinned, a fine dark color with a faint tint of red in it....
There is little else to look at: steep wooded hills cut off the view
towards the interior.
But over the verge of the sea there is something strange growing
visible, looming up like a beautiful yellow cloud. It is an island, so
lofty, so luminous, so phantom-like, that it seems a vision of the
Island of the Seven Cities. It is only the form of St. Vincent, bathed
in vapory gold by the sun.
... Evening at La Soufrière: still another semicircular bay in a hollow
of green hills. Glens hold bluish shadows. The color of the heights is
very tender; but there are long streaks and patches of dark green,
marking watercourses and very abrupt surfaces. From the western side
immense shadows are pitched brokenly across the valley and over half the
roofs of the palmy town. There is a little river flowing down to the bay
on the left; and west of it a walled cemetery's visible, out of which
one monumental palm rises to a sublime height: its crest still bathes in
the sun, above the invading shadow. Night approaches; the shade of the
bills inundates all the landscape, rises even over the palm-crest. Then,
black-towering into the golden glow of sunset, the land loses all its
color, all its charm; forms of frondage, variations of tint, become
invisible. Saint Lucia is only a monstrous silhouette; all its billowing
hills, its volcanic bays, its amphitheatrical valleys, turn black as
ebony.
And you behold before you a geological dream, a vision of the primeval
sea: the apparition of the land as first brought forth, all peak-tossed
and fissured and naked and grim, in the tremendous birth of an
archipelago.