IV

... Slowly the knowledge comes.... For months the vitality of a strong

European (the American constitution bears the test even better) may

resist the debilitating climate: perhaps the stranger will flatter

himself that, like men habituated to heavy labor in stifling

warmth,--those toiling in mines, in founderies in engine-rooms of ships,

at iron-furnaces,--so he too may become accustomed, without losing his

strength to the continuous draining of the pores, to the exhausting

force of this strange motionless heat which compels change of clothing

many times a day. But gradually he finds that it is not heat alone which

is debilitating him, but the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere

charged with vapor, with electricity, with unknown agents not less

inimical to human existence than propitious to vegetal luxuriance. If

he has learned those rules of careful living which served him well in a

temperate climate, he will not be likely to abandon them among his new

surroundings; and they will help him; no doubt,--particularly if he be

prudent enough to avoid the sea-coast at night, and all exposure to dews

or early morning mists, and all severe physical strain. Nevertheless,

he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within

him,--in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily

growing, and compelling frequent repose;--also a curious heightening

of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to

pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the

local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him

to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into the

food-consumption of northern races. He becomes abstemious, eats

sparingly, and discovers his palate to have become oddly exacting--finds

that certain fruits and drinks are indeed, as the creoles assert,

appropriate only to particular physical conditions corresponding with

particular hours of the day. Corossole is only to be eaten in the

morning, after black coffee;--vermouth is good to drink only between the

hours of nine and half-past ten;--rum or other strong liquor only before

meals or after fatigue;--claret or wine only during a repast, and then

very sparingly,--for, strangely enough, wine is found to be injurious

in a country where stronger liquors are considered among the prime

necessaries of existence.

And he expected, at the worst, to feel lazy, to lose some physical

energy! But this is no mere languor which now begins to oppress him;--it

is a sense of vital exhaustion painful as the misery of convalescence:

the least effort provokes a perspiration profuse enough to saturate

clothing, and the limbs ache as from muscular overstrain;--the lightest

attire feels almost insupportable;--the idea of sleeping even under a

sheet is torture, for the weight of a silken handkerchief is discomfort.

One wishes one could live as a savage,--naked in the heat. One burns

with a thirst impossible to assuage--feels a desire for stimulants, a

sense of difficulty in breathing, occasional quickenings of the heart's

action so violent as to alarm. Then comes at last the absolute dread of

physical exertion. Some slight relief might be obtained, no doubt, by

resigning oneself forthwith to adopt the gentle indolent manners of the

white creoles, who do not walk when it is possible to ride, and never

ride if it is equally convenient to drive;--but the northern nature

generally refuses to accept this ultimate necessity without a protracted

and painful struggle.

... Not even then has the stranger fully divined the evil power of this

tropical climate, which remodels the characters of races within a couple

of generations,--changing the shape of the skeleton,--deepening

the cavities of the orbits to protect the eye from the flood of

light,--transforming the blood,--darkening the skin. Following upon the

nervous modifications of the first few months come modifications and

changes of a yet graver kind;--with the loss of bodily energy ensues a

more than corresponding loss of mental activity and strength. The whole

range of thought diminishes, contracts,--shrinks to that narrowest of

circles which surrounds the physical sell, the inner ring of merely

material sensation: the memory weakens appallingly;--the mind operates

faintly, slowly, incoherently,--almost as in dreams. Serious reading,

vigorous thinking, become impossible. You doze over the most important

project;--you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books.

Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this

occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against

the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of

unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of

the brain; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing

heavier: then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the

effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma,

will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental

work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the

afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish

by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by

a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole

body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and

slumber comes,--a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and

perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such

a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you

keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation

that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden

rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will

had ebbed away,--all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the

night....

V

It might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of

invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,--a

tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed

time,--but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After

a certain number of months, your first enthusiasm with your new

surroundings dies out;--even Nature ceases to affect the senses in the

same way: the _frisson_ ceases to come to you. Meanwhile you may have

striven to become as much as possible a part of the exotic life into

which you have entered,--may have adopted its customs, learned its

language. But you cannot mix with it mentally;--You circulate only as an

oil-drop in its current. You still feel yourself alone.

The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six

minutes;--perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity

of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with

sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of

snakes;--club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;--there

is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone

prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time

for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself

to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European

or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,--at least some

interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the

suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of

offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time

for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to

restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began.

Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness,

the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those

solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,--reading,

study,--he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of

all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter,

means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to

obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this

mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less

inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment,

which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,--the

delight of being alone with tropical Nature,--becomes more difficult to

indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you

must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber,

or at best from a carriage window,--then, indeed, the want of all

literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to

discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,--from climate as

well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls

passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under

burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;--the same

journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what

flesh and blood can these people be made,--what wonderful vitality

lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and

despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight

and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage

strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how

mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race

habits in accordance with environment.

... Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer

from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of

nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood,

soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead

brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be

persisted in only at risk of life;--that in this part of the world

there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, and make rum,

and cultivate tobacco,--or open a magazine for the sale of Madras

handkerchiefs and _foulards_,--and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You

will understand why the tropics settled by European races produce no

sciences, arts, or literature,--why the habits and the thoughts of

other centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though

enfeebled by the heat.

And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation

of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,--the first

weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever less

lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous

beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at

last. The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their

violence;--the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will

reveal dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself how

much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the furnace heat

of blinding blue days, and the void misery of sleepless nights, and the

curse of insects, and the sound of the mandibles of enormous roaches

devouring the few books in your possession. You will grow weary of the

grace of the palms, of the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of

the sight of the high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and

serpents. You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a

swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air is

still chill and heavy with miasma;--you will weary, above all, of tropic

fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred francs for the

momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy Northern apple.