Leaving Morne Rouge at about eight in the morning, my friend and I
reached Grande Anse at half-past eleven. Everything had been arranged to
make us comfortable. I was delighted with the airy comer room,
commanding at once a view of the main street and of the sea--a very high
room, all open to the trade-winds--which had been prepared to receive
me. But after a long carriage ride in the heat of a tropical June day,
one always feels the necessity of a little physical exercise. I lingered
only a minute or two in the house, and went out to look at the little
town and its surroundings.
As seen from the high-road, the burgh of Grande Anse makes a long patch
of darkness between the green of the coast and the azure of the water:
it is almost wholly black and gray--suited to inspire an etching. High
slopes of cane and meadow rise behind it and on either side, undulating
up and away to purple and gray tips of mountain ranges. North and south,
to left and right, the land reaches out in two high promontories, mostly
green, and about a mile apart--the Pointe du Rochet and the Pointe de
Séguinau, or Croche-Mort, which latter name preserves the legend of an
insurgent slave, a man of color, shot dead upon the cliff. These
promontories form the semicircular bay of Grande Anse. All this Grande
Anse, or "Great Creek," valley is an immense basin of basalt; and narrow
as it is, no less than five streams water it, including the Rivière de
la Grande Anse.
There are only three short streets in the town. The principal, or Grande
Rue, is simply a continuation of the national road; there is a narrower
one below, which used to be called the Rue de la Paille, because the
cottages lining it were formerly all thatched with cane straw; and there
is one above it, edging the cane-fields that billow away to the meeting
of morne and sky. There is nothing of architectural interest, and all is
sombre,--walls and roofs and pavements. But after you pass through the
city and follow the southern route that ascends the Séguinau
promontory, you can obtain some lovely landscape views--a grand surging
of rounded mornes, with farther violet peaks, truncated or homed,
pushing up their heads in the horizon above the highest flutterings of
cane; and looking back above the town, you may see Pelée all
unclouded,--not as you see it from the other coast, but an enormous
ghostly silhouette, with steep sides and almost square summit, so pale as
to seem transparent. Then if you cross the promontory southward, the
same road will lead you into another very beautiful valley, watered by a
broad rocky torrent,--the Valley of the Rivière du Lorrain. This clear
stream rushes to the sea through a lofty opening in the hills; and
looking westward between them, you will be charmed by the exquisite
vista of green shapes piling and pushing up one behind another to reach
a high blue ridge which forms the background--a vision of tooth-shaped
and fantastical mountains,--part of the great central chain running
south and north through nearly the whole island. It is over those blue
summits that the wonderful road called _La Trace_ winds between primeval
forest walls.
But the more you become familiar with the face of the little town
itself, the more you are impressed by the strange swarthy tone it
preserves in all this splendid expanse of radiant tinting. There are
only two points of visible color in it,--the church and hospital, built
of stone, which have been painted yellow: as a mass in the landscape,
lying between the dead-gold of the cane-clad hills and the delicious
azure of the sea, it remains almost black under the prodigious blaze of
light. The foundations of volcanic rock, three or four feet high, on
which the frames of the wooden dwellings rest, are black; and the
sea-wind appears to have the power of blackening all timber-work here
through any coat of paint. Roofs and façades look as if they had been
long exposed to coal-smoke, although probably no one in Grande Anse ever
saw coal; and the pavements of pebbles and cement are of a deep
ash-color, full of micaceous scintillation, and so hard as to feel
disagreeable even to feet protected by good thick shoes. By-and-by you
notice walls of black stone, bridges of black stone, and perceive that
black forms an element of all the landscape about you. On the roads
leading from the town you note from time to time masses of jagged rock
or great bowlders protruding through the green of the slopes, and dark
as ink. These black surfaces also sparkle. The beds of all the
neighboring rivers are filled with dark gray stones; and many of these,
broken by those violent floods which dash rocks together,--deluging the
valleys, and strewing the soil of the bottom-lands (_fonds_) with dead
serpents,--display black cores. Bare crags projecting from the green
cliffs here and there are soot-colored, and the outlying rocks of the
coast offer a similar aspect. And the sand of the beach is funereally
black--looks almost like powdered charcoal; and as you walk over it,
sinking three or four inches every step, you are amazed by the multitude
and brilliancy of minute flashes in it, like a subtle silver
effervescence.
This extraordinary sand contains ninety per cent, of natural steel, and
efforts have been made to utilize it industrially. Some years ago a
company was formed, and a machine invented to separate the metal from
the pure sand,--an immense revolving magnet, which, being set in motion
under a sand shower, caught the ore upon it. When the covering thus
formed by the adhesion of the steel became of a certain thickness, the
simple interruption of an electric current precipitated the metal into
appropriate receptacles. Fine bars were made from this volcanic steel,
and excellent cutting tools manufactured from it: French metallurgists
pronounced the product of peculiar excellence, and nevertheless the
project of the company was abandoned. Political disorganization
consequent upon the establishment of universal suffrage frightened
capitalists who might have aided the undertaking under a better
condition of affairs; and the lack of large means, coupled with the cost
of freight to remote markets, ultimately baffled this creditable attempt
to found a native industry.
Sometimes after great storms bright brown sand is flung up from the
sea-depths; but the heavy black sand always reappears again to make the
universal color of the beach.