I
Night in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which
terrify certain imaginations;--but in the tropics it produces effects
peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that
startle even while the sun shines upon them assume, after his setting, a
grimness,--a grotesquery,--a suggestiveness for which there is no
name.... In the North a tree is simply a tree;--here it is a personality
that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable Me:
it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital
B).
From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend
into the roads,--black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,--an endless
procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the
various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;--yet these take
the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a
black crawling of unutterable spiders....
Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco:
the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful
signification for him,--do not appeal to his imagination;--if he
suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes,
but because he has perceived two specks of orange light, and is not yet
sure whether they are only fire-flies, or the eyes of a trigonocephalus.
The spectres of his fancy have nothing in common with those indistinct
and monstrous umbrages: what he most fears, next to the deadly serpent,
are human witchcrafts. A white rag, an old bone lying in the path, might
be a maléfice which, if trodden upon, would cause his leg to blacken
and swell up to the size of the limb of an elephant;--an unopened bundle
of plantain leaves or of bamboo strippings, dropped by the way-side,
might contain the skin of a _Soucouyan._ But the ghastly being who doffs
or dons his skin at will--and the Zombi--and the _Moun-Mò_--may be
quelled or exorcised by prayer; and the lights of shrines, the white
gleaming of crosses, continually remind the traveller of his duty to the
Powers that save. All along the way there are shrines at intervals, not
very far apart: while standing in the radiance of one niche-lamp, you
may perhaps discern the glow of the next, if the road be level and
straight. They are almost everywhere,--shining along the skirts of the
woods, at the entrance of ravines, by the verges of precipices;--there
is a cross even upon the summit of the loftiest peak in the island. And
the night-walker removes his hat each time his bare feet touch the soft
stream of yellow light outpoured from the illuminated shrine of a white
Virgin or a white Christ. These are good ghostly company for him;--he
salutes them, talks to them, tells them his pains or fears: their
blanched faces seem to him full of sympathy;--they appear to cheer him
voicelessly as he strides from gloom to gloom, under the goblinry of
those woods which tower black as ebony under the stars.... And he has
other companionship. One of the greatest terrors of darkness in other
lands does not exist here after the setting of the sun,--the terror of
Silence.... Tropical night is full of voices;--extraordinary
populations of crickets are trilling; nations of tree-frogs are
chanting; the _Cabri-des-bois_,[15] or _cra-cra_, almost deafens you
with the wheezy bleating sound by which it earned its creole name; birds
pipe: everything that bells, ululates, drones, clacks, guggles, joins
the enormous chorus; and you fancy you see all the shadows vibrating to
the force of this vocal storm. The true life of Nature in the tropics
begins with the darkness, ends with the light.
And it is partly, perhaps, because of these conditions that the coming
of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. _I ni pè
zombi mênm gran'-jou_ (he is afraid of ghosts even in broad daylight)
is a phrase which does not sound exaggerated in these latitudes,--not,
at least, to any one knowing something of the conditions that nourish or
inspire weird beliefs. In the awful peace of tropical day, in the hush
of the woods, the solemn silence of the hills (broken only by torrent
voices that cannot make themselves heard at night), even in the amazing
luminosity, there is a something apparitional and weird,--something that
seems to weigh upon the world like a measureless haunting. So still all
Nature's chambers are that a loud utterance jars upon the ear brutally,
like a burst of laughter in a sanctuary. With all its luxuriance of
color, with all its violence of light, this tropical day has its
ghostliness and its ghosts. Among the people of color there are many who
believe that even at noon--when the boulevards behind the city are most
deserted--the zombis will show themselves to solitary loiterers.
[Footnote 15: In creole, _cabritt-bois_--("the Wood-Kid")--a colossal
cricket. Precisely at half-past four in the morning it becomes silent;
and for thousands of early risers too poor to own a dock, the cessation
of its song is the signal to get up.]