How beautiful the mornes and azure-shadowed hollows in the jewel
clearness of this perfect morning! Even Pelée wears only her very
lightest head-dress of gauze; and all the wrinklings of her green robe
take unfamiliar tenderness of tint from the early sun. All the quaint
peaking of the colored town--sprinkling the sweep of blue bay with red
and yellow and white-of-cream--takes a sharpness in this limpid light as
if seen through a diamond lens; and there above the living green of the
familiar hills I can see even the faces of the statues--the black Christ
on his white cross, and the White Lady of the Morne d'Orange--among
curving palms.... It is all as though the island were donning its utmost
possible loveliness, exerting all its witchery,--seeking by supremest
charm to win back and hold its wandering child,--Violet-Eyes over
there!... She is looking too.
I wonder if she sees the great palms of the Voie du Parnasse,--curving
far away as to bid us adieu, like beautiful bending women. I wonder if
they are not trying to say something to her; and I try myself to fancy
what that something is:--
--"Child, wilt thou indeed abandon all who love thee!... Listen!--'tis
a dim grey land thou goest unto,--a land of bitter winds,--a land of
strange gods,--a land of hardness and barrenness, where even Nature may
not live through half the cycling of the year! Thou wilt never see us
there.... And there, when thou shalt sleep thy long sleep, child--that
land will have no power to lift thee up;--vast weight of stone will
press thee down forever;--until the heavens be no more thou shalt not
awake!... But here, darling, our loving roots would seek for thee, would
find thee: thou shouldst live again!--we lift, like Aztec priests, the
blood of hearts to the Sun."...
V
... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan with a
design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green bamboo, with a
single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a pale blue murky double
streak that means the horizon above a sea. That is all. Trivial to my
Northern friends this design might seem; but to me it causes a pleasure
bordering on pain.... I know so well what the artist means; and they
could not know, unless they had seen bamboos,--and bamboos peculiarly
situated. As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne
Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy heights
behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the blended azure of
sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across it at the level of
my eyes. Nor is this all;--I have the every sensation of the very
moment,--the vegetal odors, the mighty tropic light, the warmth, the
intensity of irreproducible color.... Beyond a doubt, the artist who
dashed the design on this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a
nearly similar experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in
me, but which I cannot communicate to others.
... And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write about
the _Pays des Revenants_ can only be for others, who have never beheld
it,--vague like the design upon this fan.