IX

... Two crosses are planted nearly at the verge of the precipice; a

small one of iron; and a large one of wood--probably the same put up by

the Abbé Lespinasse during the panic of 1851, after the eruption. This

has been splintered to pieces by a flash of lightning; and the fragments

are clumsily united with cord. There is also a little tin plate let into

a slit in a black post: it bears a date,--_8 Avril, 1867_.... The

volcanic vents, which were active in 1851, are not visible from the

peak: they are in the gorge descending from it, at a point nearly on a

level with the Étang Sec.

The ground gives out a peculiar hollow sound when tapped, and is covered

with a singular lichen,--all composed of round overlapping leaves about

one-eighth of an inch in diameter, pale green, and tough as fish-scales.

Here and there one sees a beautiful branching growth, like a mass of

green coral: it is a gigantic moss. _Cabane-Jésus_ ("bed-of-Jesus") the

patois name is: at Christmas-time, in all the churches, those decorated

cribs in which the image of the Child-Saviour is laid are filled with

it. The creeping crimson violet is also here. Fire-flies with

bronze-green bodies are crawling about;--I notice also small frogs,

large gray crickets, and a species of snail with a black shell. A

solitary humming-bird passes, with a beautiful blue head, flaming like

sapphire.

All at once the peak vibrates to a tremendous sound from somewhere

below.... It is only a peal of thunder; but it startled at first,

because the mountain rumbles and grumbles occasionally.... From the

wilderness of ferns about the lake a sweet long low whistle

comes--three times;--a _siffleur-de-montagne_ has its nest there.

There is a rain-storm over the woods beneath us: clouds now hide

everything but the point on which we rest; the crater of the Palmistes

becomes invisible. But it is only for a little while that we are thus

befogged: a wind conies, blows the clouds over us, lifts them up and

folds them like a drapery, and slowly whirls them away northward. And

for the first time the view is clear over the intervening gorge,--now

spanned by the rocket-leap of a perfect rainbow.

... Valleys and mornes, peaks and ravines,--succeeding each other

swiftly as surge succeeds surge in a storm,--a weirdly tossed world, but

beautiful as it is weird: all green the foreground, with all tints of

green, shadowing off to billowy distances of purest blue. The sea-line

remains invisible as ever: you know where it is only by the zone of pale

light ringing the double sphericity of sky and ocean. And in this double

blue void the island seems to hang suspended: far peaks seem to come up

from nowhere, to rest on nothing--like forms of mirage. Useless to

attempt photography;--distances take the same color as the sea.

Vauclin's truncated mass is recognizable only by the shape of its indigo

shadows. All is vague, vertiginous;--the land still seems to quiver with

the prodigious forces that upheaved it.

High over all this billowing and peaking tower the Pitons of Carbet,

gem-violet through the vapored miles,--the tallest one filleted with a

single soft white band of cloud. Through all the wonderful chain of the

Antilles you might seek in vain for other peaks exquisite of form as

these. Their beauty no less surprises the traveller to-day than it did

Columbus three hundred and eighty-six years ago, when--on the thirteenth

day of June, 1502--his caravel first sailed into sight of them, and he

asked his Indian guide the name of the unknown land, and the names of

those marvellous shapes. Then, according to Pedro Martyr de Anghiera,

the Indian answered that the name of the island was Madiana; that those

peaks had been venerated from immemorial time by the ancient peoples of

the archipelago as the birthplace of the human race; and that the first

brown habitants of Madiana, having been driven from their natural

heritage by the man-eating pirates of the south--the cannibal

Caribs,--remembered and mourned for their sacred mountains, and gave the

names of them, for a memory, to the loftiest summits of their new

home,--Hayti.... Surely never was fairer spot hallowed by the legend of

man's nursing-place than the valley blue-shadowed by those

peaks,--worthy, for their gracious femininity of shape, to seem the

visible breasts of the All-nourishing Mother,--dreaming under this

tropic sun.

Touching the zone of pale light north-east, appears a beautiful peaked

silhouette,--Dominica. We had hoped to perceive Saint Lucia; but the

atmosphere is too heavily charged with vapor to-day. How magnificent

must be the view on certain extraordinary days, when it reaches from

Antigua to the Grenadines--over a range of three hundred miles! But the

atmospheric conditions which allow of such a spectacle are rare indeed.

As a general rule, even in the most unclouded West Indian weather, the

loftiest peaks fade into the light at a distance of one hundred miles.

A sharp ridge covered with fern cuts off the view of the northern

slopes: one must climb it to look down upon Macouba. Macouba occupies

the steepest slope of Pelée, and the grimmest part of the coast: its

little _chef-lieu_ is industrially famous for the manufacture of native

tobacco, and historically for the ministrations of Père Labat, who

rebuilt its church. Little change has taken place in the parish since

his time. "Do you know Macouba?" asks a native writer;--"it is not

Pelion upon Ossa, but ten or twelve Pelions side by side with ten or

twelve Ossæ, interseparated by prodigious ravines. Men can speak to

each other from places whence, by rapid walking, it would require hours

to meet;--to travel there is to experience on dry land the sensation of

the sea."

With the diminution of the warmth provoked by the exertion of climbing,

you begin to notice how cool it feels;--you could almost doubt the

testimony of your latitude. Directly east is Senegambia: we are well

south of Timbuctoo and the Sahara,--on a line with southern India. The

ocean has cooled the winds; at this altitude the rarity of the air is

northern; but in the valleys below the vegetation is African. The best

alimentary plants, the best forage, the flowers of the gardens, are of

Guinea;--the graceful date-palms are from the Atlas region: those

tamarinds, whose thick shade stifles all other vegetal life beneath it,

are from Senegal. Only, in the touch of the air, the vapory colors of

distance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not of Africa:

that strange fascination which has given to the island its poetic creole

name,--_le Pays des Revenants._ And the charm is as puissant in our own

day as it was more than two hundred years ago, when Père Du Tertre

wrote:--"I have never met one single man, nor one single woman, of all

those who came back therefrom, in whom I have not remarked a most

passionate desire to return thereunto."

Time and familiarity do not weaken the charm, either for those born

among these scenes who never voyaged beyond their native island, or for

those to whom the streets of Paris and the streets of St. Pierre are

equally well known. Even at a time when Martinique had been forsaken by

hundreds of her ruined planters, and the paradise-life of the old days

had become only a memory to embitter exile,--a Creole writes:--

--"Let there suddenly open before you one of those vistas, or anses,

with colonnades of cocoa-palm--at the end of which you see smoking the

chimney of a sugar-mill, and catch a glimpse of the hamlet of negro

cabins (_cases_);--or merely picture to yourself one of the most

ordinary, most trivial scenes: nets being hauled by two ranks of

fishermen; a canot waiting for the embellie to make a dash for the

beach; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and

running along the shore to get to market;--and illuminate that with the

light of our sun! What landscapes!--O Salvator Rosa! O Claude

Lorrain,--if I had your pencil!... Well do I remember the day on which,

after twenty years of absence, I found myself again in presence of these

wonders;--I feel once more the thrill of delight that made all my body

tremble, the tears that came to my eyes. It was my land, my own land,

that appeared so beautiful."...[36]

[Footnote 36: Dr. E. Rufz: "Études historiques," vol. I, p. 180.]

X

At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the

world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new

impressions: every face was radiant.... Now all look serious;--none

speak. The first physical joy of finding oneself on this point in violet

air, exalted above the hills, soon yields to other emotions inspired by

the mighty vision and the colossal peace of the heights. Dominating all,

I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is

looking upon,--such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in

that tremendous question of the Book of Job:--"_Wast thou brought forth

before the hills?_"

[Illustration: RUINS, ST. PIERRE

_Decked out with flowers grayed by the passing years,

these crumbling walls look immeasurably old._]

... And the blue multitude of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of

the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,--telling of

Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us

and beyond us and beneath,--until something like the fulness of a great

grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of

beauty, all this majesty of light and form and color, will surely

endure,--marvellous as now,--after we shall have lain down to sleep

where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to

look upon it.

[Illustration]

'TI CANOTIÉ

I

One might almost say that commercial time in St. Pierre is measured by

cannon-shots,--by the signal-guns of steamers. Every such report

announces an event of extreme importance to the whole population. To the

merchant it is a notification that mails, money, and goods have

arrived;--to consuls and Government officials it gives notice of fees

and dues to be collected;--for the host of lightermen, longshoremen,

port laborers of all classes, it promises work and pay;--for all it

signifies the arrival of food. The island does not feed itself: cattle,

salt meats, hams, lard, flour, cheese, dried fish, all come from

abroad,--particularly from America. And in the minds of the colored

population the American steamer is so intimately associated with the

idea of those great tin cans in which food-stuffs are brought from the

United States, that the onomatope applied to the can, because of the

sound outgiven by it when tapped,--_bom!_--is also applied to the ship

itself. The English or French or Belgian steamer, however large,

is only known as _packett-à, batiment-là_; but the American

steamer is always the "bom-ship"--_batiment-bom-à_; or, the

"food-ship"--_batiment-mangé-à._ ... You hear women and men asking

each other, as the shock of the gun flaps through all the town, "_Mil

godé ça qui là, chè?_" And if the answer be, "_Mais c'est bom-là,

chè,--bom-mangé-à ka rivé_" (Why, it is the bom, dear,--the food-bom

that has come), great is the exultation.

Again, because of the sound of her whistle, we find a steamer called in

this same picturesque idiom, _batiment-cône_,--"the horn-ship." There

is even a song, of which the refrain is:--

"Bom-là rivé, chè,--

Batiment-cône-là rivé."

... But of all the various classes of citizens, those most joyously

excited by the coming of a great steamer, whether she be a "bom" or

not,--are the '_ti canotié_, who swarm out immediately in little canoes

of their own manufacture to dive for coins which passengers gladly throw

into the water for the pleasure of witnessing the graceful spectacle. No

sooner does a steamer drop anchor--unless the water be very rough

indeed--than she is surrounded by a fleet of the funniest little boats

imaginable, full of naked urchins screaming creole.

These _'ti canotié_--these little canoe-boys and professional

divers--are, for the most part, sons of boatmen of color, the real

canotiers. I cannot find who first invented the '_ti canot_: the shape

and dimensions of the little canoe are fixed according to a tradition

several generations old; and no improvements upon the original model

seem to have ever been attempted, with the sole exception of a tiny

water-tight box contrived sometimes at one end, in which the _palettes_,

or miniature paddles, and various other trifles may be stowed away. The

actual cost of material for a canoe of this kind seldom exceeds

twenty-five or thirty cents; and, nevertheless, the number of canoes is

not very large--I doubt if there be more than fifteen in the harbor;--as

the families of Martinique boatmen are all so poor that twenty-five sous

are difficult to spare, in spite of the certainty that the little son

can earn fifty times the amount within a month after owning a canoe.

For the manufacture of a canoe an American lard-box or kerosene-oil box

is preferred by reason of its shape; but any well-constructed

shipping-case of small size would serve the purpose. The top is removed;

the sides and the corners of the bottom are sawn out at certain angles;

and the pieces removed are utilized for the sides of the bow and

stern,--sometimes also in making the little box for the paddles, or

palettes, which are simply thin pieces of tough wood about the form and

size of a cigar-box lid. Then the little boat is tarred and varnished:

it cannot sink,--though it is quite easily upset. There are no seats.

The boys (there are usually two to each canot) simply squat down in the

bottom,--facing each other. They can paddle with surprising swiftness

over a smooth sea; and it is a very pretty sight to witness one of their

prize contests in racing,--which take place every 14th of July....