... As I was saying, the hours of vastest light have their weirdness
here;--and it is of a Something which walketh abroad under the eye of
the sun, even at high noontide, that I desire to speak, while the
impressions of a morning journey to the scene of Its last alleged
apparition yet remains vivid in my recollection.
You follow the mountain road leading from Calebasse over long meadowed
levels two thousand feet above the ocean, into the woods of La Couresse,
where it begins to descend slowly, through deep green shadowing, by
great zigzags. Then, at a turn, you find yourself unexpectedly looking
down upon a planted valley, through plumy fronds of arborescent fern.
The surface below seems almost like a lake of gold-green
water,--especially when long breaths of mountain-wind set the miles of
ripening cane a-ripple from verge to verge: the illusion is marred only
by the road, fringed with young cocoa-palms, which serpentines across
the luminous plain. East, west, and north the horizon is almost wholly
hidden by surging of hills: those nearest are softly shaped and
exquisitely green; above them loftier undulations take hazier verdancy
and darker shadows; farther yet rise silhouettes of blue or violet tone,
with one beautiful breast-shaped peak thrusting up in the midst;--while,
westward, over all, topping even the Piton, is a vapory huddling of
prodigious shapes--wrinkled, fissured, horned, fantastically tall....
Such at least are the tints of the morning.... Here and there, between
gaps in the volcanic chain, the land hollows into gorges, slopes down
into ravines;--and the sea's vast disk of turquoise flames up through
the interval. Southwardly those deep woods, through which the way winds
down, shut in the view.... You do not see the plantation buildings till
you have advanced some distance into the valley;--they are hidden by a
fold of the land, and stand in a little hollow where the road turns: a
great quadrangle of low gray antiquated edifices, heavily walled and
buttressed, and roofed with red tiles. The court they form opens upon
the main route by an immense archway. Farther along ajoupas begin to
line the way,--the dwellings of the field hands,--tiny cottages built
with trunks of the arborescent fern or with stems of bamboo, and
thatched with cane-straw: each in a little garden planted with bananas,
yams, couscous, camanioc, choux-caraibes, or other things,--and hedged
about with roseaux d'Inde and various flowering shrubs.
Thereafter, only the high whispering wildernesses of cane on either
hand,--the white silent road winding between its swaying
cocoa-trees,--and the tips of hills that seem to glide on before you as
you walk, and that take, with the deepening of the afternoon light, such
amethystine color as if they were going to become transparent.