From St. Pierre, trips to Pelée can be made by several routes;--the
most popular is that by way of Morne Rouge and the Calebasse; but the
summit can be reached in much less time by making the ascent from
different points along the coast-road to Au Prêcheur,--such as the
Morne St. Martin, or a well-known path further north, passing near the
celebrated hot springs (_Fontaines Chaudes_). You drive towards Au
Prêcheur, and begin the ascent on foot, through cane-plantations....
The road by which you follow the north-west coast round the skirts of
Pelée is very picturesque:--you cross the Roxelane, the Rivière des
Pères, the Rivière Sèche (whose bed is now occupied only by a
motionless torrent of rocks);--passing first by the suburb of
Fond-Corré, with its cocoa groves, and broad beach of iron-gray
sand,--a bathing resort;--then Pointe Prince, and the Fond de
Canonville, somnolent villages that occupy wrinkles in the hem of
Pelée's lava robe. The drive ultimately rises and lowers over the
undulations of the cliff, and is well shadowed along the greater part of
its course: you will admire many huge _fromagers_, or silk-cotton trees,
various heavy lines of tamarinds, and groups of _flamboyants_ with thick
dark feathery foliage, and cassia-trees with long pods pending and
blackening from every branch, and hedges of campêche, or logwood, and
calabash-trees, and multitudes of the pretty shrubs bearing the fruit
called in creole _raisins-bò-lanmè_, or "sea-side grapes." Then you
reach Au Prêcheur: a very antiquated village, which boasts a stone
church and a little public square with a fountain in it. If you have
time to cross the Rivière du Prêcheur, a little further on, you can
obtain a fine view of the coast, which, rising suddenly to a grand
altitude, sweeps round in a semicircle over the Village of the Abysses
(_Aux Abymes_),--whose name was doubtless suggested by the immense depth
of the sea at that point.... It was under the shadow of those cliffs
that the Confederate cruiser _Alabama_ once, hid herself, as a fish
hides in the shadow of a rock, and escaped from her pursuer, the
Iroquois. She had long been blockaded in the harbor of St. Pierre by the
Northern man-of-war,--anxiously awaiting a chance to pounce upon her the
instant she should leave French waters;--and various Yankee vessels in
port were to send up rocket-signals should the _Alabama_ attempt to
escape under cover of darkness. But one night the privateer took a
creole pilot on board, and steamed out southward, with all her lights
masked, and her chimneys so arranged that neither smoke nor sparks could
betray her to the enemy in the offing. However, some Yankee vessels near
enough to discern her movements through the darkness at once shot
rockets south; and the Iroquois gave chase. The _Alabama_ hugged the
high shore as far as Carbet, remaining quite invisible in the shadow of
it: then she suddenly turned and recrossed the harbor. Again Yankee
rockets betrayed her manœuvre to the _Iroquois_; but she gained Aux
Abymes, laid herself dose to the enormous black cliff, and there
remained indistinguishable; the _Iroquois_ steamed by north without
seeing her. Once the Confederate cruiser found her enemy well out of
sight, she put her pilot ashore and escaped into the Dominica channel.
The pilot was a poor mulatto, who thought himself well paid with five
hundred francs!
... The more popular route to Pelée by way of Morne Rouge is otherwise
interesting.... Anybody not too much afraid of the tropic sun must find
it a delightful experience to follow the mountain roads leading to the
interior from the city, as all the mornes traversed by them command
landscapes of extraordinary beauty. According to the zigzags of the way,
the scenery shifts panoramically. At one moment you are looking down
into valleys a thousand feet below, at another, over luminous leagues of
meadow or cane-field, you see some far crowding of cones and cratered
shapes--sharp as the teeth of a saw, and blue as sapphire,--with further
eminences ranging away through pearline color to high-peaked
remotenesses of vapory gold. As you follow the windings of such a way as
the road of the Morne Labelle, or the Morne d'Orange, the city
disappears and reappears many times,--always diminishing, till at last
it looks no bigger than a chess-board. Simultaneously distant mountain
shapes appear to unfold and lengthen;--and always, always the sea rises
with your rising. Viewed at first from the bulwark (boulevard)
commanding the roofs of the town, its horizon-line seemed straight and
keen as a knife-edge;--but as you mount higher, it elongates, begins to
curve; and gradually the whole azure expanse of water broadens out
roundly like a disk. From certain very lofty summits further inland you
behold the immense blue circle touching the sky all round you,--except
where a still greater altitude, like that of Pelée or the Pitons,
breaks the ring; and this high vision of the sea has a phantasmal effect
hard to describe, and due to vapory conditions of the atmosphere. There
are bright cloudless days when, even as seen from the city, the
ocean-verge has a spectral vagueness; but on any day, in any season,
that you ascend to a point dominating the sea by a thousand feet, the
rim of the visible world takes a ghostliness that startles,--because the
prodigious light gives to all near shapes such intense sharpness of
outline and vividness of color.
[Illustration: LA PELÉE
"_Over luminous leagues of meadow or cane field, you
see far crowding of cones and cratered shapes--sharp
as the teeth of a saw, and blue as a sapphire._"]
Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain routes
from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to Morne Rouge
surpasses them, notwithstanding that it almost immediately leaves the
city behind, and out of sight. Excepting only _La Trace_,--the long
routs winding over mountain ridges and between primitive forests south
to Fort-de-France,--there is probably no section of national highway in
the island more remarkable than the Morne Rouge road. Leaving the Grande
Rue by the public conveyance, you drive out through the Savane du Fort,
with its immense mango and tamarind trees, skirting the Roxelane. Then
reaching the boulevard, you pass high Morne Labelle,--and then the
Jardin des Plantes on the right, where white-stemmed palms are lifting
their heads two hundred feet,--and beautiful Parnasse, heavily timbered
to the top;--while on your left the valley of the Roxelane shallows up,
and Pelée shows less and less of its tremendous base. Then you pass
through the sleepy, palmy, pretty Village of the Three Bridges (_Trois
Ponts_),--where a Fahrenheit thermometer shows already three degrees of
temperature lower than at St. Pierre;--and the national road, making a
sharp turn to the right, becomes all at once very steep--so steep that
the horses can mount only at a walk. Around and between the wooded hills
it ascends by zigzags,--occasionally overlooking the sea,--sometimes
following the verges of ravines. Now and then you catch glimpses of the
road over which you passed half an hour before undulating far below,
looking narrow as a tape-line,--and of the gorge of the Roxelane,--and
of Pelée always higher, now thrusting out long spurs of green and
purple land into the sea. You drive under cool shadowing of mountain
woods--under waving bamboos like enormous ostrich feathers dyed
green,--and exquisite tree-ferns thirty to forty feet high,--and
imposing ceibas, with strangely buttressed trunks,--and all sorts of
broadleaved forms: cachibous, balisiers, bananiers.... Then you reach a
plateau covered with cane, whose yellow expanse is bounded on the right
by a demilune of hills sharply angled as crystals;--on the left it dips
seaward; and before you Pelée's head towers over the shoulders of
intervening monies. A strong cool wind is blowing; and the horses can
trot a while. Twenty minutes, and the road, leaving the plateau, becomes
steep again;--you are approaching the volcano over the ridge of a
colossal spur. The way turns in a semicircle,--zigzags,--once more
touches the edge of a valley,--where the clear fall might be nearly
fifteen hundred feet. But narrowing more and more, the valley becomes an
ascending gorge; and across its chasm, upon the brow of the opposite
cliff, you catch sight of houses and a spire seemingly perched on the
verge, like so many birds'-nests,--the village of Morne Rouge. It is two
thousand feet above the sea; and Pelée, although looming high over it,
looks a trifle less lofty now.
One's first impression of Morne Rouge is that of a single straggling
street of gray-painted cottages and shops (or rather booths), dominated
by a plain church, with four pursy-bodied palmistes facing the main
porch. Nevertheless, Morne Rouge is not a small place, considering its
situation;--there are nearly five thousand inhabitants; but in order to
find out where they live, you must leave the public road, which is on a
ridge, and explore the high-hedged lanes leading down from it on either
side. Then you will find a veritable city of little wooden
cottages,--each screened about with banana-trees, Indian-reeds, and
_pommiers-roses._ You will also see a number of handsome private
residences--country-houses of wealthy merchants; and you will find that
the church, though uninteresting exteriorly, is rich and impressive
within: it is a famous shrine, where miracles are alleged to have been
wrought. Immense processions periodically wend their way to it from St.
Pierre,--starting at three or four o'clock in the morning, so as to
arrive before the sun is well up.... But there are no woods here,--only
fields. An odd tone is given to the lanes by a local custom of planting
hedges of what are termed _roseaux d'Inde_, having a dark-red foliage;
and there is a visible fondness for ornamental plants with crimson
leaves. Otherwise the mountain summit is somewhat bare; trees have a
scrubby aspect. You must have noticed while ascending that the palmistes
became smaller as they were situated higher: at Morne Rouge they are
dwarfed,--having a short stature, and very thick trunks.
In spite of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the
valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat
bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray
tint of the buildings,--very melancholy by comparison with the apricot
and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless
gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne Rouge,
where people are literally dwelling in the clouds. Rolling down like
white smoke from Pelée, these often create a dismal fog; and Morne
Rouge is certainly one of the rainiest places in the world. When it is
dry everywhere else, it rains at Morne Rouge. It rains at least three
hundred and sixty days and three hundred and sixty nights of the year.
It rains almost invariably once in every twenty-four hours; but oftener
five or six times. The dampness is phenomenal. All mirrors become
patchy; linen moulds in one day; leather turns white; woollen goods feel
as if saturated with moisture; new brass becomes green; steel crumbles
into red powder: wood-work rots with astonishing rapidity; salt is
quickly transformed into brine; and matches, unless kept in a very warm
place, refuse to light. Everything moulders and peels and decomposes;
even the frescos of the church-interior lump out in immense blisters;
and a microscopic vegetation, green or brown, attacks all exposed
surfaces of timber or stone. At night it is often really cold;--and it
is hard to understand how, with all this dampness and coolness and
mouldiness, Morne Rouge can be a healthy place. But it is so, beyond any
question: it is the great Martinique resort for invalids; strangers
debilitated by the climate of Trinidad or Cayenne come to it for
recuperation.
Leaving the village by the still uprising road, you will be surprised,
after a walk of twenty minutes northward, by a magnificent view,--the
vast valley of the Champ-Flore, watered by many torrents, and bounded
south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of
mountains,--mountains broken, peaked, tormented-looking, and tinted
(_irisées_, as the creoles say) with all those gem-tones distance gives
in a West Indian atmosphere. Particularly impressive is the beauty of
one purple cone in the midst of this many-colored chain: the Piton
Gélé. All the valley-expanse of rich land is checkered with
alternations of meadow and cane and cacao,--except northwestwardly,
where woods billow out of sight beyond a curve. Facing this landscape,
on your left, are mornes of various heights,--among which you will
notice La Calebasse, overtopping everything but Pelée shadowing behind
it;--and a grass-grown road leads up westward from the national highway
towards the volcano. This is the Calebasse route to Pelée.