CHAPTER I. -- LES PORTEUSES.

Produced by Richard Farris

TWO YEARS IN THE FRENCH WEST INDIES

By Lafcadio Hearn

Author Of "Chita" Etc.

Illustrated

"_La façon d'être du pays est si agréable, la température si bonne,

et l'on y vit dans une liberté si honnête, que je n'aye pas vu un seul

homme, ny une seule femme, qui en soient revenues, en qui je n'aye

remarqué une grande passion d'y retourner._"-LE PÈRE DUTERTRE (1667)

À MON CHER AMI LEOPOLD ARNOUX

NOTAIRE À SAINT PIERRE, MARTINIQUE

_Souvenir de nos promenades,--de nos voyages,--de nos causeries,--des

sympathies échangées,--de tout le charme d'une amitié inaltérable et

inoubliable,--de tout ce qui parle à l'âme au doux Pay des Revenants._

PREFACE

During a trip to the Lesser Antilles in the summer of 1887, the writer

of the following pages, landing at Martinique, fell under the influence

of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon

strangers, and by which it has earned its poetic name,--_Le Pays des

Revenants_. Even as many another before him, he left its charmed shores

only to know himself haunted by that irresistible regret,--unlike any

other,--which is the enchantment of the land upon all who wander away

from it. So he returned, intending to remain some months; but the

bewitchment prevailed, and he remained two years.

Some of the literary results of that sojourn form the bulk of the

present volume. Several, or portions of several, papers have been

published in HARPER'S MAGAZINE; but the majority of the sketches now

appear in print for the first time.

The introductory paper, entitled "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics,"

consists for the most part of notes taken upon a voyage of nearly three

thousand miles, accomplished in less than two months. During such hasty

journeying it is scarcely possible for a writer to attempt anything more

serious than a mere reflection of the personal experiences undergone;

and, in spite of sundry justifiable departures from simple note-making,

this paper is offered only as an effort to record the visual and

emotional impressions of the moment.

My thanks are due to Mr. William Lawless, British Consul at St. Pierre,

for several beautiful photographs, taken by himself, which have been

used in the preparation of the illustrations.

L. H.

_Philadelphia, 1889._

LIST OF CONTENTS

PART ONE--A MIDSUMMER TRIP TO THE TROPICS

PART TWO--MARTINIQUE SKETCHES:--

I. LES PORTEUSES

II. LA GRANDE ANSE

III. UN REVENANT

IV. LA GUIABLESSE

V. LA VÉRETTE

VI. LES BLANCHISSEUSES

VII. LA PELÉE

VIII. 'TI CANOTIÉ

IX. LA FILLE DE COULEUR

X. BÊTE-NI-PIÉ

XI. MA BONNE

XII. "PA COMBINÉ, CHÈ"

XIII. YÉ

XIV. LYS

XV. APPENDIX:--SOME CREOLE MELODIES

ILLUSTRATIONS.

A Martinique Métisse (Frontispiece)

La Place Bertin, St. Pierre, Martinique

Itinerant Pastry-seller

In the Cimetière du Mouillage, St. Pierre

In the Jardin des Plantes, St. Pierre

Cascade in the Jardin des Plantes

Departure of Steamer for Fort-de-France

Statue of Josephine

Inner Basin, Bridgetown, Barbadoes

Trafalgar Square, Bridgetown, Barbadoes

Street in Georgetown, Demerara

Avenue in Georgetown, Demerara

Victoria Regia in the Canal at Georgetown

Demerara Coolie Girl

St. James Avenue, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

Coolies of Trinidad

Coolie Servant

Coolie Merchant

Church Street, St. George, Grenada

Castries, St. Lucia

'Ti Marie

Fort-de-France, Martinique

Capre in Working Garb

A Confirmation Procession

Manner of Playing the Ka

A Wayside Shrine, or Chapelle

Rue Victor Hugo, St. Pierre

Quarter of the Fort, St. Pierre

Rivière des Blanchisseuses

Foot of La Pellé, behind the Quarter of the Fort

Village of Morne Rouge

Pellé as seen from Grande Anse

Arborescent Ferns on a Mountain Road

'Ti Canot

The Martinique Turban

The Guadeloupe Head-dress

Young Mulattress

Coolie Woman in Martinique Costume

Country Girl-pure Negro Race

Coolie Half-breed

Capresse

The Old Market-place of the Fort, St. Pierre

Bread-fruit Tree

Basse-terre, St. Kitt's

A TRIP TO THE TROPICS.

PART ONE--A MIDSUMMER TRIP TO THE TROPICS.

I.

... A long, narrow, graceful steel steamer, with two masts and an

orange-yellow chimney,--taking on cargo at Pier 49 East River. Through

her yawning hatchways a mountainous piling up of barrels is visible

below;--there is much rumbling and rattling of steam-winches, creaking

of derrick-booms, groaning of pulleys as the freight is being lowered

in. A breezeless July morning, and a dead heat,--87° already.

The saloon-deck gives one suggestion of past and of coming voyages.

Under the white awnings long lounge-chairs sprawl here and there,--each

with an occupant, smoking in silence, or dozing with head drooping to

one side. A young man, awaking as I pass to my cabin, turns upon me a

pair of peculiarly luminous black eyes,--creole eyes. Evidently a West

Indian....

The morning is still gray, but the sun is dissolving the haze. Gradually

the gray vanishes, and a beautiful, pale, vapory blue--a spiritualized

Northern blue--colors water and sky. A cannon-shot suddenly shakes the

heavy air: it is our farewell to the American shore;--we move. Back

floats the wharf, and becomes vapory with a bluish tinge. Diaphanous

mists seem to have caught the sky color; and even the great red

storehouses take a faint blue tint as they recede. The horizon now has

a greenish glow, Everywhere else the effect is that of looking through

very light-blue glasses....

We steam under the colossal span of the mighty bridge; then for a little

while Liberty towers above our passing,--seeming first to turn towards

us, then to turn away from us, the solemn beauty of her passionless

face of bronze. Tints brighten;--the heaven is growing a little bluer, A

breeze springs up....

Then the water takes on another hue: pale-green lights play through it,

It has begun to sound, Little waves lift up their heads as though to

look at us,--patting the flanks of the vessel, and whispering to one

another.

Far off the surface begins to show quick white flashes here and there,

and the steamer begins to swing.... We are nearing Atlantic waters, The

sun is high up now, almost overhead: there are a few thin clouds in the

tender-colored sky,--flossy, long-drawn-out, white things. The horizon

has lost its greenish glow: it is a spectral blue. Masts, spars,

rigging,--the white boats and the orange chimney,--the bright

deck-lines, and the snowy rail,--cut against the colored light in almost

dazzling relief. Though the sun shines hot the wind is cold: its strong

irregular blowing fans one into drowsiness. Also the somnolent chant of

the engines--_do-do, hey! do-do, hey!_--lulls to sleep.

..Towards evening the glaucous sea-tint vanishes,--the water becomes

blue. It is full of great flashes, as of seams opening and reclosing

over a white surface. It spits spray in a ceaseless drizzle. Sometimes

it reaches up and slaps the side of the steamer with a sound as of a

great naked hand, The wind waxes boisterous. Swinging ends of cordage

crack like whips. There is an immense humming that drowns speech,--a

humming made up of many sounds: whining of pulleys, whistling of

riggings, flapping and fluttering of canvas, roar of nettings in the

wind. And this sonorous medley, ever growing louder, has rhythm,--a

_crescendo_ and _diminuendo_ timed by the steamer's regular swinging:

like a great Voice crying out, "Whoh-oh-oh! whoh-oh-oh!" We are nearing

the life-centres of winds and currents. One can hardly walk on deck

against the ever-increasing breath;--yet now the whole world is

blue,--not the least cloud is visible; and the perfect transparency and

voidness about us make the immense power of this invisible medium seem

something ghostly and awful.... The log, at every revolution, whines

exactly like a little puppy;--one can hear it through all the roar fully

forty feet away.

...It is nearly sunset. Across the whole circle of the Day we have been

steaming south. Now the horizon is gold green. All about the falling

sun, this gold-green light takes vast expansion.... Right on the edge

of the sea is a tall, gracious ship, sailing sunsetward. Catching the

vapory fire, she seems to become a phantom,--a ship of gold mist: all

her spars and sails are luminous, and look like things seen in dreams.

Crimsoning more and more, the sun drops to the sea. The phantom ship

approaches him,--touches the curve of his glowing face, sails right

athwart it! Oh, the spectral splendor of that vision! The whole great

ship in full sail instantly makes an acute silhouette against the

monstrous disk,--rests there in the very middle of the vermilion sun.

His face crimsons high above her top-masts,--broadens far beyond helm

and bowsprit. Against this weird magnificence, her whole shape changes

color: hull, masts, and sails turn black--a greenish black.

Sun and ship vanish together in another minute. Violet the night comes;

and the rigging of the foremast cuts a cross upon the face of the moon.

II.

Morning: the second day. The sea is an extraordinary blue,--looks to me

something like violet ink. Close by the ship, where the foam-clouds

are, it is beautifully mottled,--looks like blue marble with

exquisite veinings and nebulosities.... Tepid wind, and cottony white

clouds,--cirri climbing up over the edge of the sea all around. The sky

is still pale blue, and the horizon is full of a whitish haze.

... A nice old French gentleman from Guadeloupe presumes to say this is

not blue water--he declares it greenish (_verdâtre_). Because I cannot

discern the green, he tells me I do not yet know what blue water is.

_Attendez un peu!_...

... The sky-tone deepens as the sun ascends,--deepens deliciously. The

warm wind proves soporific. I drop asleep with the blue light in my

face,--the strong bright blue of the noonday sky. As I doze it seems to

burn like a cold fire right through my eyelids. Waking up with a start,

I fancy that everything is turning blue,--myself included. "Do you not

call this the real tropical blue?" I cry to my French fellow-traveller.

_"Mon Dieu! non_," he exclaims, as in astonishment at the

question;--"this is not blue!"...What can be _his_ idea of blue, I

wonder!

Clots of sargasso float by,--light-yellow sea-weed. We are nearing the

Sargasso-sea,--entering the path of the trade-winds. There is a long

ground-swell, the steamer rocks and rolls, and the tumbling water always

seems to me growing bluer; but my friend from Guadeloupe says that

this color "which I call blue" is only darkness--only the shadow of

prodigious depth.

Nothing now but blue sky and what I persist in calling blue sea. The

clouds have melted away in the bright glow. There is no sign of life in

the azure gulf above, nor in the abyss beneath--there are no wings or

fins to be seen. Towards evening, under the slanting gold light, the

color of the sea deepens into ultramarine; then the sun sinks down

behind a bank of copper-colored cloud.

III.

Morning of the third day. Same mild, warm wind. Bright blue sky, with

some very thin clouds in the horizon,--like puffs of steam. The glow of

the sea-light through the open ports of my cabin makes them seem

filled with thick blue glass.... It is becoming too warm for New York

clothing....

Certainly the sea has become much bluer. It gives one the idea of

liquefied sky: the foam might be formed of cirrus clouds compressed,--so

extravagantly white it looks to-day, like snow in the sun. Nevertheless,

the old gentleman from Guadeloupe still maintains this is not the true

blue of the tropics

... The sky does not deepen its hue to-day: it brightens it--the blue

glows as if it were taking fire throughout. Perhaps the sea may deepen

its hue;--I do not believe it can take more luminous color without being

set aflame.... I ask the ship's doctor whether it is really true that

the West Indian waters are any bluer than these. He looks a moment at

the sea, and replies, "_Oh_ yes!" There is such a tone of surprise in

his "oh" as might indicate that I had asked a very foolish question;

and his look seems to express doubt whether I am quite in earnest....

I think, nevertheless, that this water is extravagantly, nonsensically

blue!

... I read for an hour or two; fall asleep in the chair; wake up

suddenly; look at the sea,--and cry out! This sea is impossibly

blue! The painter who should try to paint it would be denounced as a

lunatic.... Yet it is transparent; the foam-clouds, as they sink down,

turn sky-blue,--a sky-blue which now looks white by contrast with the

strange and violent splendor of the sea color. It seems as if one were

looking into an immeasurable dyeing vat, or as though the whole ocean

had been thickened with indigo. To say this is a mere reflection of the

sky is nonsense!--the sky is too pale by a hundred shades for that! This

must be the natural color of the water,--a blazing azure,--magnificent,

impossible to describe.

The French passenger from Guadeloupe observes that the sea is "beginning

to become blue."

IV.

And the fourth day. One awakens unspeakably lazy;--this must be the

West Indian languor. Same sky, with a few more bright clouds than

yesterday;--always the warm wind blowing. There is a long swell.

Under this trade-breeze, warm like a human breath, the ocean seems to

pulse,--to rise and fall as with a vast inspiration and expiration.

Alternately its blue circle lifts and falls before us and behind us--we

rise very high; we sink very low,--but always with a slow long motion.

Nevertheless, the water looks smooth, perfectly smooth; the billowings

which lift us cannot be seen;--it is because the summits of these swells

are mile-broad,--too broad to be discerned from the level of our deck.

... Ten A.M.--Under the sun the sea is a flaming, dazzling lazulite.

My French friend from Guadeloupe kindly confesses this is _almost_

the color of tropical water.... Weeds floating by, a little below the

surface, are azured. But the Guadeloupe gentleman says he has seen water

still more blue. I am sorry,--I cannot believe him.

Mid-day.--The splendor of the sky is weird! No clouds above--only blue

fire! Up from the warm deep color of the sea-circle the edge of the

heaven glows as if bathed in greenish flame. The swaying circle of the

resplendent sea seems to flash its jewel-color to the zenith. Clothing

feels now almost too heavy to endure; and the warm wind brings a languor

with it as of temptation.... One feels an irresistible desire to drowse

on deck--the rushing speech of waves, the long rocking of the ship, the

lukewarm caress of the wind, urge to slumber--but the light is too vast

to permit of sleep. Its blue power compels wakefulness. And the brain

is wearied at last by this duplicated azure splendor of sky and sea. How

gratefully comes the evening to us,--with its violet glooms and promises

of coolness!

All this sensuous blending of warmth and force in winds and waters more

and more suggests an idea of the spiritualism of elements,--a sense of

world-life. In all these soft sleepy swayings, these caresses of wind

and sobbing of waters, Nature seems to confess some passional mood.

Passengers converse of pleasant tempting things,--tropical fruits,

tropical beverages, tropical mountain-breezes, tropical women It is

a time for dreams--those day-dreams that come gently as a mist, with

ghostly realization of hopes, desires, ambitions.... Men sailing to the

mines of Guiana dream of gold.

The wind seems to grow continually warmer; the spray feels warm like

blood. Awnings have to be clewed up, and wind-sails taken in;--still,

there are no white-caps,--only the enormous swells, too broad to see, as

the ocean falls and rises like a dreamer's breast....

The sunset comes with a great burning yellow glow, fading up through

faint greens to lose itself in violet light;--there is no gloaming. The

days have already become shorter.... Through the open ports, as we lie

down to sleep, comes a great whispering,--the whispering of the seas:

sounds as of articulate speech under the breath,--as, of women telling

secrets....

V.

Fifth day out. Trade-winds from the south-east; a huge tumbling of

mountain-purple waves;--the steamer careens under a full spread of

canvas. There is a sense of spring in the wind to-day,--something that

makes one think of the bourgeoning of Northern woods, when naked trees

first cover themselves with a mist of tender green,--something that

recalls the first bird-songs, the first climbings of sap to sun, and

gives a sense of vital plenitude.

... Evening fills the west with aureate woolly clouds,--the wool of the

Fleece of Gold. Then Hesperus beams like another moon, and the stars

burn very brightly. Still the ship bends under the even pressure of

the warm wind in her sails; and her wake becomes a trail of fire.

Large sparks dash up through it continuously, like an effervescence of

flame;--and queer broad clouds of pale fire swirl by. Far out, where the

water is black as pitch, there are no lights: it seems as if the steamer

were only grinding out sparks with her keel, striking fire with her

propeller.

VI.

Sixth day out. Wind tepid and still stronger, but sky very clear. An

indigo sea, with beautiful white-caps. The ocean color is deepening:

it is very rich now, but I think less wonderful than before;--it is an

opulent pansy hue. Close by the ship it looks black-blue,--the color

that bewitches in certain Celtic eyes.

There is a feverishness in the air;--the heat is growing heavy; the

least exertion provokes perspiration; below-decks the air is like the

air of an oven. Above-deck, however, the effect of all this light and

heat is not altogether disagreeable;-one feels that vast elemental

powers are near at hand, and that the blood is already aware of their

approach.

All day the pure sky, the deepening of sea-color, the lukewarm wind.

Then comes a superb sunset! There is a painting in the west wrought of

cloud-colors,--a dream of high carmine cliffs and rocks outlying in a

green sea, which lashes their bases with a foam of gold....

Even after dark the touch of the wind has the warmth of flesh. There

is no moon; the sea-circle is black as Acheron; and our phosphor wake

reappears quivering across it,--seeming to reach back to the

very horizon. It is brighter to-night,--looks like another _Via

Lactea_,--with points breaking through it like stars in a nebula. From

our prow ripples rimmed with fire keep fleeing away to right and left

into the night,--brightening as they run, then vanishing suddenly as if

they had passed over a precipice. Crests of swells seem to burst into

showers of sparks, and great patches of spume catch flame, smoulder

through, and disappear.... The Southern Cross is visible,--sloping

backward and sidewise, as if propped against the vault of the sky: it

is not readily discovered by the unfamiliarized eye; it is only after it

has been well pointed out to you that you discern its position. Then

you find it is only the _suggestion_ of a cross--four stars set almost

quadrangularly, some brighter than others.

For two days there has been little conversation on board. It may be due

in part to the somnolent influence of the warm wind,--in part to the

ceaseless booming of waters and roar of rigging, which drown men's

voices; but I fancy it is much more due to the impressions of space

and depth and vastness,--the impressions of sea and sky, which compel

something akin to awe.

VII.

Morning over the Caribbean Sea,--a calm, extremely dark-blue sea.

There are lands in sight,--high lands, with sharp, peaked, unfamiliar

outlines.

We passed other lands in the darkness: they no doubt resembled the

shapes towering up around us now; for these are evidently volcanic

creations,--jagged, coned, truncated, eccentric. Far off they first

looked a very pale gray; now, as the light increases, they change hue

a little,--showing misty greens and smoky blues. They rise very sharply

from the sea to great heights,--the highest point always with a cloud

upon it;--they thrust out singular long spurs, push up mountain shapes

that have an odd scooped-out look. Some, extremely far away, seem, as

they catch the sun, to be made of gold vapor; others have a madderish

tone: these are colors of cloud. The closer we approach them, the more

do tints of green make themselves visible. Purplish or bluish masses

of coast slowly develop green surfaces; folds and wrinkles of land turn

brightly verdant. Still, the color gleams as through a thin fog.

... The first tropical visitor has just boarded our ship: a wonderful

fly, shaped like a common fly, but at least five times larger. His body

is a beautiful shining black; his wings seem ribbed and jointed with

silver, his head is jewel-green, with exquisitely cut emeralds for eyes.

Islands pass and disappear behind us. The sun has now risen well; the

sky is a rich blue, and the tardy moon still hangs in it. Lilac tones

show through the water. In the south there are a few straggling small

white clouds,--like a long flight of birds. A great gray mountain shape

looms up before us. We are steaming on Santa Cruz.

The island has a true volcanic outline, sharp and high: the cliffs

sheer down almost perpendicularly. The shape is still vapory, varying

in coloring from purplish to bright gray; but wherever peaks and spurs

fully catch the sun they edge themselves with a beautiful green glow,

while interlying ravines seem filled with foggy blue.

As we approach, sun lighted surfaces come out still more luminously

green. Glens and sheltered valleys still hold blues and grays; but

points fairly illuminated by the solar glow show just such a fiery

green as burns in the plumage of certain humming-birds. And just as the

lustrous colors of these birds shift according to changes of light, so

the island shifts colors here and there,--from emerald to blue, and blue

to gray.... But now we are near: it shows us a lovely heaping of high

bright hills in front,--with a further coast-line very low and long

and verdant, fringed with a white beach, and tufted with spidery

palm-crests. Immediately opposite, other palms are poised; their trunks

look like pillars of unpolished silver, their leaves shimmer like

bronze.

... The water of the harbor is transparent and pale green. One can see

many fish, and some small sharks. White butterflies are fluttering about

us in the blue air. Naked black boys are bathing on the beach;--they

swim well, but will not venture out far because of the sharks. A

boat puts off to bring colored girls on board. They are tall, and not

uncomely, although very dark;--they coax us, with all sorts of endearing

words, to purchase bay rum, fruits, Florida water.... We go ashore in

boats. The water of the harbor has a slightly fetid odor.

VIII.

Viewed from the bay, under the green shadow of the hills overlooking it,

Frederiksted has the appearance of a beautiful Spanish town, with its

Romanesque piazzas, churches, many arched buildings peeping through

breaks in a line of mahogany, bread-fruit, mango, tamarind, and palm

trees,--an irregular mass of at least fifty different tints, from a

fiery emerald to a sombre bluish-green. But on entering the streets the

illusion of beauty passes: you find yourself in a crumbling, decaying

town, with buildings only two stories high. The lower part, of arched

Spanish design, is usually of lava rock or of brick, painted a light,

warm yellow; the upper stories are most commonly left unpainted, and

are rudely constructed of light timber. There are many heavy arcades and

courts opening on the streets with large archways. Lava blocks have been

used in paving as well as in building; and more than one of the narrow

streets, as it slopes up the hill through the great light, is seen to

cut its way through craggy masses of volcanic stone.

But all the buildings look dilapidated; the stucco and paint is falling

or peeling everywhere; there are fissures in the walls, crumbling

façades, tumbling roofs. The first stories, built with solidity worthy

of an earthquake region, seem extravagantly heavy by contrast with the

frail wooden superstructures. One reason may be that the city was

burned and sacked during a negro revolt in 1878;--the Spanish basements

resisted the fire well, and it was found necessary to rebuild only

the second stories of the buildings; but the work was done cheaply

and flimsily, not massively and enduringly, as by the first colonial

builders.

There is great wealth of verdure. Cabbage and cocoa palms overlook all

the streets, bending above almost every structure, whether hut or public

building;--everywhere you see the splitted green of banana leaves. In

the court-yards you may occasionally catch sight of some splendid palm

with silver-gray stem so barred as to look jointed, like the body of an

annelid.

In the market-place--a broad paved square, crossed by two rows of

tamarind-trees, and bounded on one side by a Spanish piazza--you can

study a spectacle of savage picturesqueness. There are no benches, no

stalls, no booths; the dealers stand, sit, or squat upon the ground

under the sun, or upon the steps of the neighboring arcade. Their wares

are piled up at their feet, for the most part. Some few have little

tables, but as a rule the eatables are simply laid on the dusty ground

or heaped upon the steps of the piazza--reddish-yellow mangoes, that

look like great apples squeezed out of shape, bunches of bananas,

pyramids of bright-green cocoanuts, immense golden-green oranges, and

various other fruits and vegetables totally unfamiliar to Northern

eyes.... It is no use to ask questions--the black dealers speak no

dialect comprehensible outside of the Antilles: it is a negro-English

that sounds like some African tongue,--a rolling current of vowels and

consonants, pouring so rapidly that the inexperienced ear cannot detach

one intelligible word, A friendly white coming up enabled me to learn

one phrase: "Massa, youwancocknerfoobuy?" (Master, do you want to buy a

cocoanut?)

The market is quite crowded,--full of bright color under the tremendous

noon light. Buyers and dealers are generally black;--very few yellow or

brown people are visible in the gathering. The greater number present

are women; they are very simply, almost savagely, garbed--only a skirt

or petticoat, over which is worn a sort of calico short dress, which

scarcely descends two inches below the hips, and is confined about the

waist with a belt or a string. The skirt bells out like the skirt of

a dancer, leaving the feet and bare legs well exposed; and the head is

covered with a white handkerchief, twisted so as to look like a

turban. Multitudes of these barelegged black women are walking past

us,--carrying bundles or baskets upon their heads, and smoking very long

cigars.

They are generally short and thick-set, and walk with surprising

erectness, and with long, firm steps, carrying the bosom well forward.

Their limbs are strong and finely rounded. Whether walking or standing,

their poise is admirable,--might be called graceful, were it not for the

absence of real grace of form in such compact, powerful little figures.

All wear brightly colored cottonade stuffs, and the general effect of

the costume in a large gathering is very agreeable, the dominant hues

being pink, white, and blue. Half the women are smoking. All chatter

loudly, speaking their English jargon with a pitch of voice totally

unlike the English timbre: it sometimes sounds as if they were trying to

pronounce English rapidly according to French pronunciation and pitch of

voice.

These green oranges have a delicious scent and amazing juiciness.

Peeling one of them is sufficient to perfume the skin of the hands for

the rest of the day, however often one may use soap and water.... We

smoke Porto Rico cigars, and drink West Indian lemonades, strongly

flavored with rum. The tobacco has a rich, sweet taste; the rum is

velvety, sugary, with a pleasant, soothing effect: both have a rich

aroma. There is a wholesome originality about the flavor of these

products, a uniqueness which certifies to their naif purity: something

as opulent and frank as the juices and odors of tropical fruits and

flowers.

The streets leading from the plaza glare violently in the strong

sunlight;--the ground, almost dead-white, dazzles the eyes.... There are

few comely faces visible,--in the streets all are black who pass. But

through open shop-doors one occasionally catches glimpses of a pretty

quadroon face,--with immense black eyes,--a face yellow like a ripe

banana.

... It is now after mid-day. Looking up to the hills, or along sloping

streets towards the shore, wonderful variations of foliage-color meet

the eye: gold-greens, sap-greens, bluish and metallic greens of many

tints, reddish-greens, yellowish-greens. The cane-fields are broad

sheets of beautiful gold-green; and nearly as bright are the masses of

_pomme-cannelle_ frondescence, the groves of lemon and orange; while

tamarind and mahoganies are heavily sombre. Everywhere palm-crests soar

above the wood-lines, and tremble with a metallic shimmering in the blue

light. Up through a ponderous thickness of tamarind rises the spire of

the church; a skeleton of open stone-work, without glasses or lattices

or shutters of any sort for its naked apertures: it is all open to the

winds of heaven; it seems to be gasping with all its granite mouths for

breath--panting in this azure heat. In the bay the water looks greener

than ever: it is so clear that the light passes under every boat

and ship to the very bottom; the vessels only cast very thin green

shadows,--so transparent that fish can be distinctly seen passing

through from sunlight to sunlight.

The sunset offers a splendid spectacle of pure color; there is only an

immense yellow glow in the west,--a lemon-colored blaze; but when it

melts into the blue there is an exquisite green light.... We leave

to-morrow.

... Morning: the green hills are looming in a bluish vapor: the long

faint-yellow slope of beach to the left of the town, under the mangoes

and tamarinds, is already thronged with bathers,--all men or boys, and

all naked: black, brown, yellow, and white. The white bathers are Danish

soldiers from the barracks; the Northern brightness of their skins forms

an almost startling contrast with the deep colors of the nature about

them, and with the dark complexions of the natives. Some very slender,

graceful brown lads are bathing with them,--lightly built as deer: these

are probably creoles. Some of the black bathers are clumsy-looking, and

have astonishingly long legs.... Then little boys come down, leading

horses;--they strip, leap naked on the animals' backs, and ride into the

sea,--yelling, screaming, splashing, in the morning light. Some are a

fine brown color, like old bronze. Nothing could-be more statuesque than

the unconscious attitudes of these bronze bodies in leaping, wrestling,

running, pitching shells. Their simple grace is in admirable harmony

with that of Nature's green creations about them,--rhymes faultlessly

with the perfect self-balance of the palms that poise along the

shore....

Boom! and a thunder-rolling of echoes. We move slowly out of the harbor,

then swiftly towards the southeast.... The island seems to turn slowly

half round; then to retreat from us. Across our way appears a long band

of green light, reaching over the sea like a thin protraction of color

from the extended spur of verdure in which the western end of the island

terminates. That is a sunken reef, and a dangerous one. Lying high upon

it, in very sharp relief against the blue light, is a wrecked vessel on

her beam-ends,--the carcass of a brig. Her decks have been broken in;

the roofs of her cabins are gone; her masts are splintered off short;

her empty hold yawns naked to the sun; all her upper parts have taken a

yellowish-white color,--the color of sun-bleached bone.

Behind us the mountains still float back. Their shining green has

changed to a less vivid hue; they are taking bluish tones here and

there; but their outlines are still sharp, and along their high soft

slopes there are white specklings, which are villages and towns.

These white specks diminish swiftly,--dwindle to the dimensions of

salt-grains,--finally vanish. Then the island grows uniformly bluish; it

becomes cloudy, vague as a dream of mountains;--it turns at last gray as

smoke, and then melts into the horizon-light like a mirage.

Another yellow sunset, made weird by extraordinary black, dense,

fantastic shapes of cloud. Night darkens, and again the Southern

Cross glimmers before our prow, and the two Milky Ways reveal

themselves,--that of the Cosmos and that ghostlier one which stretches

over the black deep behind us. This alternately broadens and narrows

at regular intervals, concomitantly with the rhythmical swing of the

steamer, Before us the bows spout: fire; behind us there is a flaming

and roaring as of Phlegethon; and the voices of wind and sea become so

loud that we cannot talk to one another,--cannot make our words heard

even by shouting.

IX.

Early morning: the eighth day. Moored in another blue harbor,--a great

semicircular basin, bounded by a high billowing of hills all green from

the fringe of yellow beach up to their loftiest clouded summit. The

land has that up-tossed look which tells a volcanic origin. There are

curiously scalloped heights, which, though emerald from base to crest,

still retain all the physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must

be lava under that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of

bright green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray-stretches a

long chain of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these

elevations are interunited by their curving hollows of land or by

filaments--very low valleys. And as they grade away in varying color

through distance, these hill-chains take a curious segmented, jointed

appearance, like insect forms, enormous ant-bodies.... This is St.

Kitt's.

We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long

wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the town

of Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people.

It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted. There

are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many bread-fruit

trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes, and unfamiliar

things the negroes call by incomprehensible names,--"sap-saps,"

"dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less reflection of light

than in Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness; no Spanish buildings,

no canary-colored arcades. All the narrow streets are gray or

neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen tone. Most of the dwellings

are timber, resting on brick props, or elevated upon blocks of lava

rock. It seems almost as if some breath from the enormous and always

clouded mountain overlooking the town had begrimed everything, darkening

even the colors of vegetation.

The population is not picturesque. The costumes are commonplace; the

tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and sombre blues and grays

are commoner than pinks, yellows, and violets. Occasionally you observe

a fine half-breed type--some tall brown girl walking by with a swaying

grace like that of a sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not

frequent. Most of those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many

stores are kept by yellow men with intensely black hair and eyes,--men

who do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine

buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer the

visitor is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and its palms,

its monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees, and its beautiful

little mountains. From some of these trees a peculiar tillandsia streams

down, much like our Spanish moss,--but it is black!

... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the island

look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones, all very green,

and connected by strips of valley-land so low that the edge of the

sea-circle on the other side of the island can be seen through the gaps.

We steam past truncated hills, past heights that have the look of the

stumps of peaks cut half down,--ancient fire-mouths choked by tropical

verdure.

Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other volcanic

forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like clouds. Those

are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the subterranean fires.

It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great mountain

flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest, with clouds

packed high upon it, still seems to smoke;--the second highest displays

the most symmetrical crater-form I have yet seen. All are still

grayish-blue or gray. Gradually through the blues break long high gleams

of green.

As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky;

the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On

the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red,

and brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are

distinguishable;--cane-plantations unfold gold-green surfaces.

We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to become

a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it continues

green;--but it is a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor. The sea

today looks almost black: the south-west wind has filled the day

with luminous mist; and the phantom of Nevis melts in the vast glow,

dissolves utterly.... Once more we are out of sight of land,--in the

centre of a blue-black circle of sea. The water-line cuts blackly

against the immense light of the horizon,--a huge white glory that

flames up very high before it fades and melts into the eternal blue.

X.

Then a high white shape like a cloud appears before us,--on the

purplish-dark edge of the sea. The cloud-shape enlarges, heightens

without changing contour. It is not a cloud, but an island! Its outlines

begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings of color. Shadowy valleys

appear, spectral hollows, phantom slopes of pallid blue or green. The

apparition is so like a mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself

one is looking at real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have

shaped itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many miles

beyond it; and it vanishes into mist again.

... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it until it

materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness to the islands we

have already passed--one dominant height, with massing of bright crater

shapes about it, and ranges of green hills linked together by low

valleys. About its highest summit also hovers a flock of clouds. At the

foot of the vast hill nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth.

The single salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of

echoes.

Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that fringes the

wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their base;--it has a curtain

of palms before it. Approaching, you discern only one or two façades

above the sea-wall, and the long wharf projecting through an opening ing

in the masonry, over which young palms stand thick as canes on a sugar

plantation. But on reaching the street that descends towards the heavily

bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy little

burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,--steep,

irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise of tiny courts

everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or displaying above their

stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes of cacti. All is old-fashioned

and quiet and queer and small. Even the palms are diminutive,--slim and

delicate; there is a something in their poise and slenderness like the

charm of young girls who have not yet ceased to be children, though soon

to become women....

There is a glorious sunset,--a fervid orange splendor, shading starward

into delicate roses and greens. Then black boatmen come astern and

quarrel furiously for the privilege of carrying one passenger ashore;

and as they scream and gesticulate, half naked, their silhouettes

against the sunset seem forms of great black apes.

... Under steam and sail we are making south again, with a warm wind

blowing south-east,--a wind very moist, very powerful, and soporific.

Facing it, one feels almost cool; but the moment one is sheltered from

it profuse perspiration bursts out. The ship rocks over immense

swells; night falls very black; and there are surprising displays of

phosphorescence.

XI.

... Morning. A gold sunrise over an indigo sea. The wind is a great

warm caress; the sky a spotless blue. We are steaming on Dominica,--the

loftiest of the lesser Antilles. While the silhouette is yet all violet

in distance nothing more solemnly beautiful can well be imagined: a

vast cathedral shape, whose spires are mountain peaks, towering in the

horizon, sheer up from the sea.

We stay at Roseau only long enough to land the mails, and wonder at the

loveliness of the island. A beautifully wrinkled mass of green and blue

and gray;--a strangely abrupt peaking and heaping of the land. Behind

the green heights loom the blues; behind these the grays--all pinnacled

against the sky-glow-thrusting up through gaps or behind promontories.

Indescribably exquisite the foldings and hollowings of the emerald

coast. In glen and vale the color of cane-fields shines like a pooling

of fluid bronze, as if the luminous essence of the hill tints had been

dripping down and clarifying there. Far to our left, a bright green spur

pierces into the now turquoise sea; and beyond it, a beautiful mountain

form, blue and curved like a hip, slopes seaward, showing lighted

wrinkles here and there, of green. And from the foreground, against the

blue of the softly outlined shape, cocoa-palms are curving,--all sharp

and shining in the sun.

... Another hour; and Martinique looms before us. At first it appears

all gray, a vapory gray; then it becomes bluish-gray; then all green.

It is another of the beautiful volcanic family: it owns the same hill

shapes with which we have already become acquainted; its uppermost

height is hooded with the familiar cloud; we see the same gold-yellow

plains, the same wonderful varieties of verdancy, the same long green

spurs reaching out into the sea,--doubtless formed by old lava

torrents. But all this is now repeated for us more imposingly, more

grandiosely;--it is wrought upon a larger scale than anything we

have yet seen. The semicircular sweep of the harbor, dominated by the

eternally veiled summit of the Montagne Pelee (misnamed, since it is

green to the very clouds), from which the land slopes down on either

hand to the sea by gigantic undulations, is one of the fairest sights

that human eye can gaze upon. Thus viewed, the whole island shape is

a mass of green, with purplish streaks and shadowings here and there:

glooms of forest-hollows, or moving umbrages of cloud. The city of St.

Pierre, on the edge of the land, looks as if it had slided down the

hill behind it, so strangely do the streets come tumbling to the port in

cascades of masonry,--with a red billowing of tiled roofs over all, and

enormous palms poking up through it,--higher even than the creamy white

twin towers of its cathedral.

We anchor in limpid blue water; the cannon-shot is answered by a

prolonged thunder-clapping of mountain echo.

Then from the shore a curious flotilla bears down upon us. There is one

boat, two or three canoes; but the bulk of the craft are simply

wooden frames,--flat-bottomed structures, made from shipping-cases or

lard-boxes, with triangular ends. In these sit naked boys,--boys between

ten and fourteen years of age,--varying in color from a fine clear

yellow to a deep reddish-brown or chocolate tint. They row with two

little square, flat pieces of wood for paddles, clutched in each hand;

and these lid-shaped things are dipped into the water on either side

with absolute precision, in perfect time,--all the pairs of little naked

arms seeming moved by a single impulse. There is much unconscious

grace in this paddling, as well as skill. Then all about the ship

these ridiculous little boats begin to describe circles,--crossing and

intercrossing so closely as almost to bring them into collision, yet

never touching. The boys have simply come out to dive for coins they

expect passengers to fling to them. All are chattering creole, laughing

and screaming shrilly; every eye, quick and bright as a bird's, watches

the faces of the passengers on deck. "'Tention-là!" shriek a dozen

soprani. Some passenger's fingers have entered his vest-pocket, and the

boys are on the alert. Through the air, twirling and glittering, tumbles

an English shilling, and drops into the deep water beyond the little

fleet. Instantly all the lads leap, scramble, topple head-foremost out

of their little tubs, and dive in pursuit. In the blue water their lithe

figures look perfectly red,--all but the soles of their upturned feet,

which show nearly white. Almost immediately they all rise again: one

holds up at arm's-length above the water the recovered coin, and then

puts it into his mouth for safe-keeping; Coin after coin is thrown in,

and as speedily brought up; a shower of small silver follows, and not

a piece is lost. These lads move through the water without apparent

effort, with the suppleness of fishes. Most are decidedly fine-looking

boys, with admirably rounded limbs, delicately formed extremities. The

best diver and swiftest swimmer, however, is a red lad;--his face

is rather commonplace, but his slim body has the grace of an antique

bronze.

... We are ashore in St. Pierre, the quaintest, queerest, and the

prettiest withal, among West Indian cities: all stone-built and

stone-flagged, with very narrow streets, wooden or zinc awnings,

and peaked roofs of red tile, pierced by gabled dormers. Most of

the buildings are painted in a clear yellow tone, which contrasts

delightfully with the burning blue ribbon of tropical sky above; and no

street is absolutely level; nearly all of them climb hills, descend into

hollows, curve, twist, describe sudden angles. There is everywhere

a loud murmur of running water,--pouring through the deep gutters

contrived between the paved thoroughfare and the absurd little

sidewalks, varying in width from one to three feet. The architecture

is quite old: it is seventeenth century, probably; and it reminds one a

great deal of that characterizing the antiquated French quarter of New

Orleans. All the tints, the forms, the vistas, would seem to have been

especially selected or designed for aquarelle studies,--just to please

the whim of some extravagant artist. The windows are frameless openings

without glass; some have iron bars; all have heavy wooden shutters with

movable slats, through which light and air can enter as through Venetian

blinds. These are usually painted green or bright bluish-gray.

So steep are the streets descending to the harbor,--by flights of old

mossy stone steps,--that looking down them to the azure water you have

the sensation of gazing from a cliff. From certain openings in the main

street--the Rue Victor Hugo--you can get something like a bird's-eye

view of the harbor with its shipping. The roofs of the street below are

under your feet, and other streets are rising behind you to meet the

mountain roads. They climb at a very steep angle, occasionally breaking

into stairs of lava rock, all grass-tufted and moss-lined.

[Illustration: LA PLACE BERTIN (THE SUGAR LANDING), ST. PIERRE,

MARTINIQUE.]

The town has an aspect of great solidity: it is a creation of crag-looks

almost as if it had been hewn out of one mountain fragment, instead of

having been constructed stone by stone. Although commonly consisting of

two stories and an attic only, the dwellings have walls three feet in

thickness;--on one street, facing the sea, they are even heavier, and

slope outward like ramparts, so that the perpendicular recesses

of windows and doors have the appearance of being opened between

buttresses. It may have been partly as a precaution against earthquakes,

and partly for the sake of coolness, that the early colonial architects

built thus;--giving the city a physiognomy so well worthy of its

name,--the name of the Saint of the Rock.

And everywhere rushes mountain water,--cool and crystal clear, washing

the streets;--from time to time you come to some public fountain

flinging a silvery column to the sun, or showering bright spray over a

group of black bronze tritons or bronze swans. The Tritons on the Place

Bertin you will not readily forget;--their curving torsos might have

been modelled from the forms of those ebon men who toil there tirelessly

all day in the great heat, rolling hogsheads of sugar or casks of

rum. And often you will note, in the course of a walk, little

drinking-fountains contrived at the angle of a building, or in the thick

walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares: glittering

threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone. Some mountain

torrent, skilfully directed and divided, is thus perpetually refreshing

the city,--supplying its fountains and cooling its courts.... This is

called the Gouyave water: it is not the same stream which sweeps and

purifies the streets.

Picturesqueness and color: these are the particular and the unrivalled

charms of St. Pierre. As you pursue the Grande Rue, or Rue Victor

Hugo,--which traverses the town through all its length, undulating over

hill-slopes and into hollows and over a bridge,--you become more and

more enchanted by the contrast of the yellow-glowing walls to right and

left with the jagged strip of gentian-blue sky overhead. Charming also

it is to watch the cross-streets climbing up to the fiery green of the

mountains behind the town. On the lower side of the main thoroughfare

other streets open in wonderful bursts of blue-warm blue of horizon and

sea. The steps by which these ways descend towards the bay are black

with age, and slightly mossed close to the wall on either side: they

have an alarming steepness,--one might easily stumble from the upper

into the lower street. Looking towards the water through these openings

from the Grande Rue, you will notice that the sea-line cuts across the

blue space just at the level of the upper story of the house on the

lower street-corner. Sometimes, a hundred feet below, you see a ship

resting in the azure aperture,--seemingly suspended there in sky-color,

floating in blue light. And everywhere and always, through sunshine or

shadow, comes to you the scent of the city,--the characteristic odor of

St. Pierre;--a compound odor suggesting the intermingling of sugar and

garlic in those strange tropical dishes which creoles love....

XII.

... A population fantastic, astonishing,--a population of the Arabian

Nights. It is many-colored; but the general dominant tint is yellow,

like that of the town itself--yellow in the interblending of all the

hues characterizing _mulâtresse, capresse, griffe, quarteronne, métisse,

chabine,_--a general effect of rich brownish yellow. You are among a

people of half-breeds,--the finest mixed race of the West Indies.

Straight as palms, and supple and tall, these colored women and men

impress one powerfully by their dignified carriage and easy elegance of

movement. They walk without swinging of the shoulders;--the perfectly

set torso seems to remain rigid; yet the step is a long full stride, and

the whole weight is springily poised on the very tip of the bare foot.

All, or nearly all, are without shoes: the treading of many naked feet

over the heated pavement makes a continuous whispering sound.

... Perhaps the most novel impression of all is that produced by the

singularity and brilliancy of certain of the women's costumes. These

were developed, at least a hundred years ago, by some curious

sumptuary law regulating the dress of slaves and colored people of free

condition,--a law which allowed considerable liberty as to material and

tint, prescribing chiefly form. But some of these fashions suggest

the Orient: they offer beautiful audacities of color contrast; and the

full-dress coiffure, above all, is so strikingly Eastern that one might

be tempted to believe it was first introduced into the colony by some

Mohammedan slave. It is merely an immense Madras handkerchief, which is

folded about the head with admirable art, like a turban;--one bright end

pushed through at the top in front, being left sticking up like a plume.

Then this turban, always full of bright canary-color, is fastened

with golden brooches,--one in front and one at either side. As for the

remainder of the dress, it is simple enough: an embroidered, low-cut

chemise with sleeves; a skirt or _jupe_, very long behind, but caught

up and fastened in front below the breasts so as to bring the hem

everywhere to a level with the end of the long chemise; and finally a

_foulard_, or silken kerchief, thrown over the shoulders. These _jupes_

and _foulards_, however, are exquisite in pattern and color: bright

crimson, bright yellow, bright blue, bright green,--lilac, violet,

rose,--sometimes mingled in plaidings or checkerings or stripings: black

with orange, sky-blue with purple. And whatever be the colors of

the costume, which vary astonishingly, the coiffure must be

yellow-brilliant, flashing yellow--the turban is certain to have yellow

stripes or yellow squares. To this display add the effect of costly and

curious jewellery: immense earrings, each pendant being formed of five

gold cylinders joined together (cylinders sometimes two inches long,

and an inch at least in circumference);--a necklace of double, triple,

quadruple, or quintuple rows of large hollow gold beads (sometimes

smooth, but generally ally graven)--the wonderful _collier-choux_.

Now, this glowing jewellery is not a mere imitation of pure metal: the

ear-rings are worth one hundred and seventy-five francs a pair; the

necklace of a Martinique quadroon may cost five hundred or even one

thousand francs.... It may be the gift of her lover, her _doudoux_, but

such articles are usually purchased either on time by small payments, or

bead by bead singly until the requisite number is made up.

But few are thus richly attired: the greater number of the women

carrying burdens on their heads,--peddling vegetables, cakes, fruit,

ready-cooked food, from door to door,--are very simply dressed in a

single plain robe of vivid colors (_douillette_) reaching from neck to

feet, and made with a train, but generally girded well up so as to sit

close to the figure and leave the lower limbs partly bare and perfectly

free. These women can walk all day long up and down hill in the hot sun,

without shoes, carrying loads of from one hundred to one hundred and

fifty pounds on their heads; and if their little stock sometimes fails

to come up to the accustomed weight stones are added to make it heavy

enough. Doubtless the habit of carrying everything in this way from

childhood has much to do with the remarkable vigor and erectness of the

population.... I have seen a grand-piano carried on the heads of four

men. With the women the load is very seldom steadied with the hand

after having been once placed in position. The head remains almost most

motionless; but the black, quick, piercing eyes flash into every

window and door-way to watch for a customer's signal. And the creole

street-cries, uttered in a sonorous, far-reaching high key, interblend

and produce random harmonies very pleasant to hear.

..._"Çe moune-là, ça qui lè bel mango?"_ Her basket of mangoes

certainly weighs as much as herself.... _"Ça qui lè bel avocat?,"_ The

alligator-pear--cuts and tastes like beautiful green cheese... _"Ça qui

lè escargot?"_ Call her, if you like snails.... _"Ca qui lè titiri?"_

Minuscule fish, of which a thousand would scarcely fill a tea-cup;--one

of the most delicate of Martinique dishes.... _"Ça qui lè canna?--Ça

qui lè charbon?--Ça qui lè di pain aubè?_" (Who wants ducks, charcoal, or

pretty little loaves shaped like cucumbers.)... _"Ça qui lè pain-mi?"_ A

sweet maize cake in the form of a tiny sugar-loaf, wrapped in a piece of

banana leaf.... _"Ça qui lè fromassé" (pharmacie) "lapotécai créole?"_

She deals in creole roots and herbs, and all the leaves that make

_tisanes_ or poultices or medicines: _matriquin, feuill-corossol,

balai-doux, manioc-chapelle, Marie-Perrine, graine-enba-feuill, bois

d'lhomme, zhèbe-gras, bonnet-carré, zhèbe-codeinne, zhèbe-à-femme,

zhèbe-à-châtte, canne-dleau, poque, fleu-papillon, lateigne,_ and

a score of others you never saw or heard of before.... _"Ça qui lè

dicaments?"_ (overalls for laboring-men).... _"Çé moune-là, si ou pa lè

acheté canari-à dans lanmain moin, moin ké crazé y."_ The vender of red

clay cooking-pots;--she has only one left, if you do not buy it she will

break it!

_"Hé! zenfants-la!--en deho'!"_ Run out to meet her, little children, if

you like the sweet rice-cakes.... _"Hé! gens pa' enho', gens pa' enbas,

gens di galtas, moin ni bel gououôs poisson!"_ Ho! people up-stairs,

people down-stairs, and all ye good folks who dwell in the attics,--know

that she has very big and very beautiful fish to sell!... _"Hé! ça qui

lé mangé yonne?"_--those are "akras,"--flat yellow-brown cakes, made of

pounded codfish, or beans, or both, seasoned with pepper and fried in

butter.... And then comes the pastry-seller, black as ebony, but dressed

all in white, and white-aproned and white-capped like a French cook,

and chanting half in French, half in creole, with a voice like a

clarinet:

_"C'est louvouier de la pâtisserie qui passe,

Qui té ka veillé pou' gagner son existence,

Toujours content,

Toujours joyeux.

Oh, qu'ils sont bons!--Oh, qu'ils sont doux!"_

It is the pastryman passing by, who has been up all night to gain his

livelihood,--always content,--always happy.... Oh, how good they are

(the pies)!--Oh, how sweet they are!

... The quaint stores bordering both sides of the street bear no names

and no signs over their huge arched doors;--you must look well inside to

know what business is being done. Even then you will scarcely be able to

satisfy yourself as to the nature of the commerce;--for they are selling

gridirons and frying-pans in the dry goods stores, holy images and

rosaries in the notion stores, sweet-cakes and confectionery in the

crockery stores, coffee and stationery in the millinery stores, cigars

and tobacco in the china stores, cravats and laces and ribbons in the

jewellery stores, sugar and guava jelly in the tobacco stores! But of

all the objects exposed for sale the most attractive, because the most

exotic, is a doll,--the Martinique _poupée_. There are two kinds,--the

_poupée-capresse_, of which the body is covered with smooth

reddish-brown leather, to imitate the tint of the capresse race; and the

_poupée-négresse_, covered with black leather. When dressed, these dolls

range in price from eleven to thirty-five francs,--some, dressed to

order, may cost even more; and a good _poupée-négresse_ is a delightful

curiosity. Both varieties of dolls are attired in the costume of the

people; but the _négresse_ is usually dressed the more simply. Each doll

has a broidered chemise, a tastefully arranged _jupe_ of bright hues;

a silk _foulard_, a _collier-choux_, ear-rings of five cylinders

(_zanneaux-à-clous_), and a charming little yellow-banded Madras

turban. Such a doll is a perfect costume-model,--a perfect miniature of

Martinique fashions, to the smallest details of material and color: it

is almost too artistic for a toy.

[Illustration: ITINERANT PASTRY-SELLER. "Tourjours content, Toujours

joyeux."]

These old costume-colors of Martinique-always relieved by brilliant

yellow stripings or checkerings, except in the special violet

dresses worn on certain religious occasions--have an indescribable

luminosity,--a wonderful power of bringing out the fine warm tints of

this tropical flesh. Such are the hues of those rich costumes Nature

gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,--her honey-lovers--her

insects: these are wasp-colors. I do not know whether the fact ever

occurred to the childish fancy of this strange race; but there is

a creole expression which first suggested it to me;--in the patois,

_pouend guêpe_, "to catch a wasp," signifies making love to a pretty

colored girl.... And the more one observes these costumes, the more

one feels that only Nature could have taught such rare comprehension

of powers and harmonies among colors,--such knowledge of chromatic

witchcrafts and chromatic laws.

... This evening, as I write, La Pelée is more heavily coiffed than

is her wont. Of purple and lilac cloud the coiffure is,--a magnificent

Madras, yellow-banded by the sinking sun. La Pelée is in _costume de

fête_, like a _capresse_ attired for a baptism or a ball; and in her

phantom turban one great star glimmers for a brooch.

XIII.

Following the Rue Victor Hugo in the direction of the Fort,--crossing

the Rivière Roxelane, or Rivière des Blanchisseuses, whose rocky bed is

white with unsoaped linen far as the eye can reach,--you descend through

some tortuous narrow streets into the principal marketplace. [1]

A square--well paved and well shaded--with a fountain in the midst. Here

the dealers are seated in rows;--one half of the market is devoted to

fruits and vegetables; the other to the sale of fresh fish and meats. On

first entering you are confused by the press and deafened by the storm

of creole chatter;--then you begin to discern some order in this chaos,

and to observe curious things.

In the middle of the paved square, about the market fountain, are lying

boats filled with fish, which have been carried up from the water

upon men's shoulders,--or, if very heavy, conveyed on rollers.... Such

fish!--blue, rosy, green, lilac, scarlet, gold: no spectral tints these,

but luminous and strong like fire. Here also you see heaps of long thin

fish looking like piled bars of silver,--absolutely dazzling,--of almost

equal thickness from head to tail;--near by are heaps of flat pink

creatures;--beyond these, again, a mass of azure backs and golden

bellies. Among the stalls you can study the monsters,--twelve or fifteen

feet long,--the shark, the _vierge_, the sword fish, the _tonne_,--or

the eccentricities. Some are very thin round disks, with long,

brilliant, wormy feelers in lieu of fins, flickering in all

directions like a moving pendent silver fringe;--others bristle with

spines;--others, serpent-bodied, are so speckled as to resemble shapes

of red polished granite. These are _moringues_. The _balaou, couliou,

macriau, lazard, tcha-tcha, bonnique_, and _zorphi_ severally represent

almost all possible tints of blue and violet. The _souri_ is rose-color

and yellow; the _cirurgien_ is black, with yellow and red stripes; the

_patate_, black and yellow; the _gros-zié_ is vermilion; the _couronné_,

red and black. Their names are not less unfamiliar than their shapes

and tints;-the _aiguille-de-mer_, or sea-needle, long and thin as a

pencil;-the _Bon-Dié-manié-moin_ ("the Good-God handled me"), which

has something like finger-marks upon it;--the _lambi_, a huge

sea-snail;--the _pisquette_, the _laline_ (the Moon);--the

_crapaud-de-mer_, or sea-toad, with a dangerous dorsal fin;--the

_vermeil_, the _jacquot_, the _chaponne_, and fifty others.... As the

sun gets higher, banana or balisier leaves are laid over the fish.

Even more puzzling, perhaps, are the astonishing varieties of green,

yellow, and parti-colored vegetables,--and fruits of all hues and

forms,--out of which display you retain only a confused general memory

of sweet smells and luscious colors. But there are some oddities which

impress the recollection in a particular way. One is a great cylindrical

ivory-colored thing,--shaped like an elephant's tusk, except that it

is not curved: this is the head of the cabbage-palm, or palmiste,--the

brain of one of the noblest trees in the tropics, which must be totally

destroyed to obtain it. Raw or cooked, it is eaten in a great variety of

ways,--in salads, stews, fritters, or _akras_. Soon after this compact

cylinder of young germinating leaves has been removed, large worms begin

to appear in the hollow of the dead tree,--the _vers-palmiste_. You may

see these for sale in the market, crawling about in bowls or cans: they

are said, when fried alive, to taste like almonds, and are esteemed as a

great luxury.

... Then you begin to look about you at the faces of the black, brown,

and yellow people who are watching at you curiously from beneath their

Madras turbans, or from under the shade of mushroom-shaped hats as large

as umbrellas. And as you observe the bare backs, bare shoulders, bare

legs and arms and feet, you will find that the colors of flesh are even

more varied and surprising than the colors of fruit. Nevertheless, it is

only with fruit-colors that many of these skin-tints can be correctly

be compared; the only terms of comparison used by the colored people

themselves being terms of this kind,--such as _peau-chapotille_,

"sapota-skin." The _sapota_ or _sapotille_ is a juicy brown fruit with

a rind satiny like a human cuticle, and just the color, when flushed and

ripe, of certain half-breed skins. But among the brighter half-breeds,

the colors, I think, are much more fruit-like;--there are banana-tints,

lemon-tones, orange-hues, with sometimes such a mingling of ruddiness as

in the pink ripening of a mango. Agreeable to the eye the darker skins

certainly are, and often very remarkable--all clear tones of bronze

being represented; but the brighter tints are absolutely beautiful.

Standing perfectly naked at door-ways, or playing naked in the sun,

astonishing children may sometimes be seen,--banana-colored or gulf

orange babies, There is one rare race-type, totally unseen like the

rest: the skin has a perfect gold-tone, an exquisite metallic yellow the

eyes are long, and have long silky lashes;--the hair is a mass of thick,

rich, glossy the curls that show blue lights in the sun. What mingling

of races produced this beautiful type?--there is some strange blood in

the blending,--not of coolie, nor of African, nor of Chinese, although

there are Chinese types here of indubitable beauty. [2]

... All this population is vigorous, graceful, healthy: all you see

passing by are well made--there are no sickly faces, no scrawny limbs.

If by some rare chance you encounter a person who has lost an arm or

a leg, you can be almost certain you are looking at a victim of the

fer-de-lance,--the serpent whose venom putrefies living tissue....

Without fear of exaggerating facts, I can venture to say that the

muscular development of the working-men here is something which must be

seen in order to be believed;--to study fine displays of it, one should

watch the blacks and half-breeds working naked to the waist,--on the

landings, in the gas-houses and slaughter-houses or on the

nearest plantations. They are not generally large men, perhaps not

extraordinarily powerful; but they have the aspect of sculptural or even

of anatomical models; they seem absolutely devoid of adipose tissue;

their muscles stand out with a saliency that astonishes the eye. At

a tanning-yard, while I was watching a dozen blacks at work, a young

mulatto with the mischievous face of a faun walked by, wearing nothing

but a clout (_lantcho_) about his loins; and never, not even in bronze,

did I see so beautiful a play of muscles. A demonstrator of anatomy

could have used him for a class-model;--a sculptor wishing to shape a

fine Mercury would have been satisfied to take a cast of such a body

without thinking of making one modification from neck to heel. "Frugal

diet is the cause of this physical condition," a young French professor

assures me; "all these men," he says, "live upon salt codfish and

fruit." But frugal living alone could never produce such symmetry and

saliency of muscles: race-crossing, climate, perpetual exercise, healthy

labor--many conditions must have combined to cause it. Also it is

certain that this tropical sun has a tendency to dissolve spare flesh,

to melt away all superfluous tissue, leaving the muscular fibre dense

and solid as mahogany.

At the _mouillage_, below a green _morne_, is the bathing-place. A rocky

beach rounding away under heights of tropical wood;--palms curving out

above the sand, or bending half-way across it. Ships at anchor in blue

water, against golden-yellow horizon. A vast blue glow. Water clear as

diamond, and lukewarm.

It is about one hour after sunrise; and the high parts of Montaigne

Pelée are still misty blue. Under the palms and among the lava rocks,

and also in little cabins farther up the slope, bathers are dressing or

undressing: the water is also dotted with heads of swimmers. Women

and girls enter it well robed from feet to shoulders;--men go in very

sparsely clad;--there are lads wearing nothing. Young boys--yellow and

brown little fellows--run in naked, and swim out to pointed rocks that

jut up black above the bright water. They climb up one at a time to dive

down. Poised for the leap upon the black lava crag, and against the blue

light of the sky, each lithe figure, gilded by the morning sun, has

a statuesqueness and a luminosity impossible to paint in words. These

bodies seem to radiate color; and the azure light intensifies the hue:

it is idyllic, incredible;--Coomans used paler colors in his Pompeiian

studies, and his figures were never so symmetrical. This flesh does not

look like flesh, but like fruit-pulp....

XIV.

... Everywhere crosses, little shrines, way-side chapels, statues of

saints. You will see crucifixes and statuettes even in the forks or

hollows of trees shadowing the high-roads. As you ascend these towards

the interior you will see, every mile or half-mile, some chapel, or a

cross erected upon a pedestal of masonry, or some little niche contrived

in a wall, closed by a wire grating, through which the image of a Christ

or a Madonna is visible. Lamps are kept burning all night before these

figures. But the village of Morne Rouge--some two thousand feet

above the sea, and about an hour's drive from St. Pierre--is chiefly

remarkable for such displays: it is a place of pilgrimage as well as

a health resort. Above the village, upon the steep slope of a higher

morne, one may note a singular succession of little edifices ascending

to the summit,--fourteen little tabernacles, each containing a _relievo_

representing some incident of Christ's Passion. This is called _Le

Calvaire_: it requires more than a feeble piety to perform the religious

exercise of climbing the height, and saying a prayer before each little

shrine on the way. From the porch of the crowning structure the village

of Morne Rouge appears so far below that it makes one almost dizzy to

look at it; but even for the profane one ascent is well worth making,

for the sake of the beautiful view. On all the neighboring heights

around are votive chapels or great crucifixes.

St. Pierre is less peopled with images than Morne Rouge; but it has

several colossal ones, which may be seen from any part of the harbor.

On the heights above the middle quarter, or _Centre_, a gigantic Christ

overlooks the bay; and from the Morne d'Orange, which bounds the city

on the south, a great white Virgin-Notre Dame de la Garde, patron of

mariners--watches above the ships at anchor in the mouillage.

... Thrice daily, from the towers of the white cathedral, a superb chime

of bells rolls its _carillon_ through the town. On great holidays the

bells are wonderfully rung;--the ringers are African, and something

of African feeling is observable in their impressive but in cantatory

manner of ringing. The _bourdon_ must have cost a fortune. When it is

made to speak, the effect is startling: all the city vibrates to a weird

sound difficult to describe,--an abysmal, quivering moan, producing

unfamiliar harmonies as the voices of the smaller bells are seized

and interblended by it....One will not easily forget the ringing of a

_bel-midi_.

... Behind the cathedral, above the peaked city roofs, and at the foot

of the wood-clad Morne d'Orange, is the _Cimetière du Mouillage_....

It is full of beauty,--this strange tropical cemetery. Most of the low

tombs are covered with small square black and white tiles, set exactly

after the fashion of the squares on a chess-board; at the foot of each

grave stands a black cross, bearing on its centre a little white plaque,

on which the name is graven in delicate and tasteful lettering. So

pretty these little tombs are, that you might almost believe yourself

in a toy cemetery. Here and there, again, are miniature marble chapels

built over the dead,--containing white Madonnas and Christs and little

angels,--while flowering creepers climb and twine about the pillars.

Death seems so luminous here that one thinks of it unconciously as a

soft rising from this soft green earth,--like a vapor invisible,--to

melt into the prodigious day. Everything is bright and neat and

beautiful; the air is sleepy with jasmine scent and odor of white

lilies; and the palm--emblem of immortality--lifts its head a hundred

feet into the blue light. There are rows of these majestic and symbolic

trees;--two enormous ones guard the entrance;--the others rise from

among the tombs,--white-stemmed, out-spreading their huge parasols of

verdure higher than the cathedral towers.

[Illustration: IN THE CIMETÈRE DU MOUILLAGE, ST. PIERRE.]

Behind all this, the dumb green life of the morne seems striving to

descend, to invade the rest of the dead. It thrusts green hands over the

wall,--pushes strong roots underneath;--it attacks every joint of the

stone-work, patiently, imperceptibly, yet almost irresistibly.

... Some day there may be a great change in the little city of St.

Pierre;--there may be less money and less zeal and less remembrance of

the lost. Then from the morne, over the bulwark, the green host will

move down unopposed;--creepers will prepare the way, dislocating the

pretty tombs, pulling away the checkered tiling;--then will corne the

giants, rooting deeper,--feeling for the dust of hearts, groping among

the bones;--and all that love has hidden away shall be restored to

Nature,--absorbed into the rich juices of her verdure,--revitalized in

her bursts of color,--resurrected in her upliftings of emerald and gold

to the great sun....

XV.

Seen from the bay, the little red-white-and-yellow city forms but one

multicolored streak against the burning green of the lofty island. There

is no naked soil, no bare rock: the chains of the mountains, rising

by successive ridges towards the interior, are still covered with

forests;--tropical woods ascend the peaks to the height of four and

five thousand feet. To describe the beauty of these woods--even of those

covering the mornes in the immediate vicinity of St. Pierre--seems to

me almost impossible;--there are forms and colors which appear to demand

the creation of new words to express. Especially is this true in regard

to hue;--the green of a tropical forest is something which one familiar

only with the tones of Northern vegetation can form no just conception

of: it is a color that conveys the idea of green fire.

You have only to follow the high-road leading out of St. Pierre by way

of the Savane du Fort to find yourself, after twenty minutes' walk,

in front of the Morne Parnasse, and before the verge of a high

wood,--remnant of the enormous growth once covering all the island. What

a tropical forest is, as seen from without, you will then begin to feel,

with a sort of awe, while you watch that beautiful upclimbing of green

shapes to the height of perhaps a thousand feet overhead. It presents

one seemingly solid surface of vivid color,--rugose like a cliff. You

do not readily distinguish whole trees in the mass;--you only perceive

suggestions, dreams of trees, Doresqueries. Shapes that seem to

be staggering under weight of creepers rise a hundred feet above

you;--others, equally huge, are towering above these; and still higher,

a legion of monstrosities are nodding, bending, tossing up green arms,

pushing out great knees, projecting curves as of backs and shoulders,

intertwining mockeries of limbs. No distinct head appears except where

some palm pushes up its crest in the general fight for sun. All else

looks as if under a veil,--hidden and half smothered by heavy drooping

things. Blazing green vines cover every branch and stem;--they form

draperies and tapestries and curtains and motionless cascades--pouring

down over all projections like a thick silent flood: an amazing

inundation of parasitic life.... It is a weird awful beauty that you

gaze upon; and yet the spectacle is imperfect. These woods have been

decimated; the finest trees have been cut down: you see only a ruin of

what was. To see the true primeval forest, you must ride well into the

interior.

The absolutism of green does not, however, always prevail in these

woods. During a brief season, corresponding to some of our winter

months, the forests suddenly break into a very conflagration of color,

caused by blossoming of the lianas--crimson, canary-yellow, blue and

white. There are other flowerings, indeed; but that of the lianas alone

has chromatic force enough to change the aspect of a landscape.

XVI.

... If it is possible for a West Indian forest to be described at all,

it could not be described more powerfully than it has been by Dr. E.

Rufz, a creole of Martinique, one of whose works I venture to translate

the following remarkable pages:

... "The sea, the sea alone, because it is the most colossal of earthly

spectacles,--only the sea can afford us any terms of comparison for the

attempt to describe a _grand-bois_;--but even then one must imagine the

sea on a day of a storm, suddenly immobilized in the expression of

its mightiest fury. For the summits of these vast woods repeat all

the inequalities of the land they cover; and these inequalities are

mountains from 4200 to 4800 feet in height, and valleys of corresponding

profundity. All this is hidden, blended together, smoothed over by

verdure, in soft and enormous undulations,--in immense billowings of

foliage. Only, instead of a blue line at the horizon, you have a green

line; instead of flashings of blue, you have flashings of green,--and in

all the tints, in all the combinations of which green is capable: deep

green, light green, yellow-green, black-green.

"When your eyes grow weary--if it indeed be possible for them to

weary--of contemplating the exterior of these tremendous woods, try to

penetrate a little into their interior. What an inextricable chaos it

is! The sands of a sea are not more closely pressed together than

the trees are here: some straight, some curved, some upright, some

toppling,--fallen, or leaning against one another, or heaped high upon

each other. Climbing lianas, which cross from one tree to the other,

like ropes passing from mast to mast, help to fill up all the gaps in

this treillage; and parasites--not timid parasites like ivy or like

moss, but parasites which are trees self-grafted upon trees--dominate

the primitive trunks, overwhelm them, usurp the place of their foliage,

and fall back to the ground, forming factitious weeping-willows. You

do not find here, as in the great forests of the North, the

eternal monotony of birch and fir: this is the kingdom of infinite

variety;--species the most diverse elbow each other, interlace, strangle

and devour each other: all ranks and orders are confounded, as in a

human mob. The soft and tender _balisier_ opens its parasol of leaves

beside the _gommier_, which is the cedar of the colonies you see the

_acomat_, the _courbaril_, the mahogany, the _tedre-à-caillou_, the

iron-wood... but as well enumerate by name all the soldiers of an army!

Our oak, the balata, forces the palm to lengthen itself prodigiously in

order to get a few thin beams of sunlight; for it is as difficult here

for the poor trees to obtain one glance from this King of the world, as

for us, subjects of a monarchy, to obtain one look from our monarch. As

for the soil, it is needless to think of looking at it: it lies as far

below us probably as the bottom of the sea;--it disappeared, ever so

long ago, under the heaping of debris,--under a sort of manure that has

been accumulating there since the creation: you sink into it as into

slime; you walk upon putrefied trunks, in a dust that has no name!

Here indeed it is that one can get some comprehension of what vegetable

antiquity signifies;--a lurid light (_lurida lux_), greenish, as wan at

noon as the light of the moon at midnight, confuses forms and lends

them a vague and fantastic aspect; a mephitic humidity exhales from all

parts; an odor of death prevails; and a calm which is not silence (for

the ear fancies it can hear the great movement of composition and of

decomposition perpetually going on) tends to inspire you with that old

mysterious horror which the ancients felt in the primitive forests of

Germany and of Gaul:

"'Arboribus suus horror inest.'" *

* "Enquête sur le Serpent de la Martinique (Vipère Fer-de-

Lance, Bothrops Lancéolé, etc.)" Par le Docteur E. Rufz. 2

ed. 1859. Paris: Germer-Ballière. pp. 55-57 (note).

XVII.

But the sense of awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly greater

than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the North could ever

have created. The brilliancy of colors that seem almost preternatural;

the vastness of the ocean of frondage, and the violet blackness of rare

gaps, revealing its in conceived profundity; and the million mysterious

sounds which make up its perpetual murmur,--compel the idea of

a creative force that almost terrifies. Man feels here like an

insect,--fears like an insect on the alert for merciless enemies; and

the fear is not unfounded. To enter these green abysses without a guide

were folly: even with the best of guides there is peril. Nature is

dangerous here: the powers that build are also the powers that putrefy;

here life and death are perpetually interchanging office in the

never-ceasing transformation of forces,--melting down and reshaping

living substance simultaneously within the same vast crucible. There

are trees distilling venom, there are plants that have fangs, there

are perfumes that affect the brain, there are cold green creepers

whose touch blisters flesh like fire; while in all the recesses and the

shadows is a swarming of unfamiliar life, beautiful or hideous,--insect,

reptile, bird,--inter-warring, devouring, preying.... But the great

peril of the forest--the danger which deters even the naturalist;--is

the presence of the terrible _fer-de-lance (trigonocephalus

lanceolatus,--bothrops lanceolatus,--craspodecephalus_),--deadliest of

the Occidental thanatophidia, and probably one of the deadliest serpents

of the known world.

... There are no less than eight varieties of it,--the most common being

the dark gray, speckled with black--precisely the color that enables

the creature to hide itself among the protruding roots of the trees, by

simply coiling about them, and concealing its triangular head. Sometimes

the snake is a clear bright yellow: then it is difficult to distinguish

it from the bunch of bananas among which it conceals itself. Or the

creature may be a dark yellow,--or a yellowish brown,--or the color

of wine-lees, speckled pink and black,--or dead black with a yellow

belly,--or black with a pink belly: all hues of tropical forest-mould,

of old bark, of decomposing trees.... The iris of the eye is

orange,--with red flashes: it glows at night like burning charcoal.

And the fer-de-lance reigns absolute king over the mountains and the

ravines; he is lord of the forest and solitudes by day, and by night

he extends his dominion over the public roads, the familiar paths, the

parks, pleasure resorts. People must remain at home after dark, unless

they dwell in the city itself: if you happen to be out visiting after

sunset, only a mile from town, your friends will caution you anxiously

not to follow the boulevard as you go back, and to keep as closely as

possible to the very centre of the path. Even in the brightest noon you

cannot venture to enter the woods without an experienced escort; you

cannot trust your eyes to detect danger: at any moment a seeming branch,

a knot of lianas, a pink or gray root, a clump of pendent yellow It, may

suddenly take life, writhe, stretch, spring, strike.... Then you

will need aid indeed, and most quickly; for within the span of a few

heart-beats the wounded flesh chills, tumefies, softens. Soon it changes

or, and begins to spot violaceously; while an icy coldness creeps

through all the blood. If the _panseur_ or the physician arrives in

time, and no vein has been pierced, there is hope; but it more often

happens that the blow is received directly on a vein of the foot or

ankle,--in which case nothing can save the victim. Even when life is

saved the danger is not over. Necrosis of the tissues is likely to set

in: the flesh corrupts, falls from the bone sometimes in tatters;

and the colors of its putrefaction simuulate the hues of vegetable

decay,--the ghastly grays and pinks and yellows of trunks rotting down

into the dark soil which gave them birth. The human victim moulders as

the trees moulder,--crumbles and dissolves as crumbles the substance of

the dead palms and balatas: the Death-of-the-Woods is upon him.

To-day a fer-de-lance is seldom found exceeding six feet length; but the

dimensions of the reptile, at least, would seem to have been decreased

considerably by man's warring upon it since the time of Père Labat, who

mentions having seen a fer-de-lance nine feet long and five inches

in diameter. He also speaks of a _couresse_--a beautiful and harmless

serpent said to kill the fer-de-lance--over ten feet long and thick as

a man's leg; but a large couresse is now seldom seen. The negro woodsmen

kill both creatures indiscriminately; and as the older reptiles are

the least likely to escape observation, the chances for the survival

of extraordinary individuals lessen with the yearly decrease of

forest-area.

... But it may be doubted whether the number of deadly snakes has been

greatly lessened since the early colonial period. Each female produces

viviparously from forty to sixty young at a birth. The favorite haunts

of the fer-de-lance are to a large extent either inaccessible or

unexplored, and its multiplication is prodigious. It is really only the

surplus of its swarming that overpours into the cane-fields, and makes

the public roads dangerous after dark;--yet more than three hundred

snakes have been killed in twelve months on a single plantation. The

introduction of the Indian mongoos, or _mangouste_ (ichneumon), proved

futile as a means of repressing the evil. The mangouste kills the

fer-de-lance when it has a chance but it also kills fowls and sucks

their eggs, which condemns it irrevocably with the country negroes, who

live to a considerable extent by raising and selling chickens.

[Illustration: IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES, ST. PIERRE.]

... Domestic animals are generally able to discern the presence of their

deadly enemy long before a human eye, can perceive it. If your horse

rears and plunges in the darkness, trembles and sweats, do not try to

ride on until you are assured the way is clear. Or your dog may come

running back, whining, shivering: you will do well to accept his

warning. The animals kept about country residences usually try to fight

for their lives; the hen battles for her chickens; the bull endeavors to

gore and stamp the enemy; the pig gives more successful combat; but the

creature who fears the monster least is the brave cat. Seeing a snake,

she at once carries her kittens to a place of safety, then boldly

advances to the encounter. She will walk to the very limit of the

serpent striking range, and begin to feint,--teasing him, startling

him, trying to draw his blow. How the emerald and the topazine eyes glow

then!--they are flames! A moment more and the triangular head, hissing

from the coil, flashes swift as if moved by wings. But swifter still

the stroke of the armed paw that dashes the horror aside, flinging

it mangled in the dust. Nevertheless, pussy does not yet dare to

spring;--the enemy, still active, has almost instantly reformed his

coil;--but she is again in front of him, watching,--vertical pupil

against vertical pupil. Again the lashing stroke; again the beautiful

countering;--again the living death is hurled aside; and now the scaled

skin is deeply torn,--one eye socket has ceased to flame. Once more the

stroke of the serpent once more the light, quick, cutting blow. But the

trionocephalus is blind, is stupefied;--before he can attempt to coil

pussy has leaped upon him,--nailing the horrible flat head fast to the

ground with her two sinewy Now let him lash, writhe, twine, strive to

strangle her!--in vain! he will never lift his head: an instant more

and he lies still:--the keen white teeth of the cat have severed the

vertebra just behind the triangular skull!...

XVIII.

The Jardin des Plantes is not absolutely secure from visits of the

serpent; for the trigonocephalus goes everywhere,--mounting to the very

summits of the cocoa-palms, swimming rivers, ascending walls, hiding in

thatched roofs, breeding in bagasse heaps. But, despite what has been

printed to the contrary, this reptile fears man and hates light: it

rarely shows itself voluntarily during the day. Therefore, if you

desire, to obtain some conception of the magnificence of Martinique

vegetation, without incurring the risk of entering the high woods, you

can do so by visiting the Jardin des Plantes,--only taking care to use

your eyes well while climbing over fallen trees, or picking your way

through dead branches. The garden is less than a mile from the city, on

the slopes of the Morne Parnasse; and the primitive forest itself has

been utilized in the formation of it,--so that the greater part of the

garden is a primitive growth. Nature has accomplished here infinitely

more than art of man (though such art has done much to lend the place

its charm),--and until within a very recent time the result might have

been deemed, without exaggeration, one of the wonders of the world.

A moment after passing the gate you are in twilight,--though the sun

may be blinding on the white road without. All about you is a green

gloaming, up through which you see immense trunks rising. Follow the

first path that slopes up on your left as you proceed, if you wish to

obtain the best general view of the place in the shortest possible time.

As you proceed, the garden on your right deepens more and more into a

sort of ravine;--on your left rises a sort of foliage-shrouded cliff;

and all this in a beautiful crepuscular dimness, made by the foliage of

great trees meeting overhead. Palms rooted a hundred feet below you

hold their heads a hundred feet above you; yet they can barely reach

the light.... Farther on the ravine widens to frame in two tiny lakes,

dotted with artificial islands, which are miniatures of Martinique,

Guadeloupe, and Dominica: these are covered with tropical plants, many

of which are total strangers even here: they are natives of India,

Senegambia, Algeria, and the most eastern East. Arbores. cent ferps of

unfammiliar elegance curve up from path-verge lake-brink; and the great

_arbre-du-voyageur_ outspreads its colossal fan. Giant lianas droop

down over the way in loops and festoons; tapering green cords, which are

creepers descending to take root, hang everywhere; and parasites with

stems thick as cables coil about the trees like boas. Trunks shooting

up out of sight, into the green wilderness above, display no bark; you

cannot guess what sort of trees they are; they are so thickly wrapped

in creepers as to seem pillars of leaves. Between you and the sky, where

everything is fighting for sun, there is an almost unbroken vault

of leaves, a cloudy green confusion in which nothing particular is

distinguishable.

You come to breaks now and then in the green steep to your

left,--openings created for cascades pouring down from one mossed basin

of brown stone to another,--or gaps occupied by flights of stone steps,

green with mosses, and chocolate-colored by age. These steps lead to

loftier paths; and all the stone-work,-the grottos, bridges, basins,

terraces, steps,--are darkened by time and velveted with mossy

things.... It is of another century, this garden: special ordinances

were passed concerning it during the French Revolution (_An. II._);--it

is very quaint; it suggests an art spirit as old as Versailles, or

older; but it is indescribably beautiful even now.

... At last you near the end, to hear the roar of falling water;--there

is a break in the vault of green above the bed of a river below you; and

at a sudden turn you in sight of the cascade. Before you is the

Morne itself; and against the burst of descending light you discern a

precipice-verge. Over it, down one green furrow in its brow, tumbles the

rolling foam of a cataract, like falling smoke, to be caught below in a

succession of moss-covered basins. The first clear leap of the water is

nearly seventy feet.... Did Josephine ever rest upon that shadowed bench

near by?... She knew all these paths by heart: surely they must have

haunted her dreams in the after-time!

Returning by another path, you may have a view of other cascades-though

none so imposing. But they are beautiful; and you will not soon forget

the effect of one,--flanked at its summit by white-stemmed palms which

lift their leaves so high into the light that the loftiness of them

gives the sensation of vertigo.... Dizzy also the magnificence of

the great colonnade of palmistes and angelins, two hundred feet

high, through which: you pass if you follow the river-path from the

cascade--the famed _Allée des duels_....

The vast height, the pillared solemnity of the ancient trees in

the green dimness, the solitude, the strangeness of shapes but

half seen,--suggesting fancies of silent aspiration, or triumph, or

despair,--all combine to produce a singular impression of awe.... You

are alone; you hear no human voice,--no sounds but the rushing of the

river over its volcanic rocks, and the creeping of millions of lizards

and tree-frogs and little toads. You see no human face; but you see all

around you the labor of man being gnawed and devoured by nature,--broken

bridges, sliding steps, fallen arches, strangled fountains with

empty basins;--and everywhere arises the pungent odor of decay. This

omnipresent odor affects one unpleasantly;--it never ceases to remind

you that where Nature is most puissant to charm, there also is she

mightiest to destroy.

[Illustration: CASCADE IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES.]

The beautiful garden is now little more than a wreck of what it once

was; since the fall of the Empire it has been shamefully abused

and neglected. Some _agronome_ sent out to take charge of it by the

Republic, began its destruction by cutting down acres of enormous and

magnificent trees,--including a superb alley of plants,--for the purpose

of experimenting with roses. But the rose-trees would not be

cultivated there; and the serpents avenged the demolition by making the

experimental garden unsafe to enter;--they always swarm into

underbrush and shrubbery after forest-trees have been clearedd away....

Subsequently the garden was greatly damaged by storms and torrential

rains; the mountain river overflowed, carrying bridges away

and demolishing stone-work. No attempt was made to repair these

destructions; but neglect alone would not have ruined the lovliness of

the place;--barbarism was necessary! Under the present negro-radical

regime orders have been given for the wanton destruction of trees older

than the colony itself;--and marvels that could not be replaced in a

hundred generations were cut down and converted into charcoal for the

use of public institutions.

XIX.

How gray seem the words of poets in the presence is Nature!... The

enormous silent poem of color and light--(you who know only the North

do not know color, do not know light!)--of sea and sky, of the woods and

the peaks, so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze it--mocking the

language of admiration, defying all power of expression. That is before

you which never can be painted or chanted, because there is no cunning

of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your most hopeless

ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. And the sight of

this supreme terrestrial expression of creative magic numbs thought. In

the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results

of mind,--the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work

of Nature,--but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary

frostless morning of creation. Man here seems to bear scarcely more

relation to the green life about him than the insect; and the results of

human effort seem impotent by comparison son with the operation of those

vast blind forces which clothe the peaks and crown the dead craters

with impenetrable forest. The air itself seems inimical to

thought,--soporific, and yet pregnant with activities of dissolution so

powerful that the mightiest tree begins to melt like wax from the

moment it has ceased to live. For man merely to exist is an effort; and

doubtless in the perpetual struggle of the blood to preserve itself from

fermentation, there is such an expenditure of vital energy as leaves

little surplus for mental exertion.

... Scarcely less than poet or philosopher, the artist, I fancy, would

feel his helplessness. In the city he may find wonderful picturesqueness

to invite his pencil, but when he stands face to face alone with Nature

he will discover that he has no colors! The luminosities of tropic

foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West

Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some

great height, through which the colors come to his eye softened and

subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing

atmosphere.

... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of

color. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I

see the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green

sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light.

XX.

In these tropic latitudes Night does not seem "to fall,"--to descend

over the many-peaked land: it appears to rise up, like an exhalation,

from the ground. The coast-lines darken first;--then the slopes and the

lower hills and valleys become shadowed;--then, very swiftly, the gloom

mounts to the heights, whose very loftiest peak may remain glowing like

a volcano at its tip for several minutes after the rest of the island is

veiled in blackness and all the stars are out....

[Illustration: DEPARTURE OF STEAMER FOR FORT-DE-FRANCE.]

... Tropical nights have a splendor that seems strange to northern eyes.

The sky does not look so high--so far way as in the North; but the stars

are larger, and the luminosity greater.

With the rising of the moon all the violet of the sky flushes;--there is

almost such a rose-color as heralds northern dawn.

Then the moon appears over the mornes, very large, very bright--brighter

certainly than many a befogged sun one sees in northern Novembers; and

it seems to have a weird magnetism--this tropical moon. Night-birds,

insects, frogs,--everything that can sing,--all sing very low on the

nights of great moons. Tropical wood-life begins with dark: in the

immense white light of a full moon this nocturnal life seems afraid to

cry out as usual. Also, this moon has a singular effect on the nerves.

It is very difficult to sleep on such bright nights: you feel such a

vague uneasiness as the coming of a great storm gives....

XXI.

You reach Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, steamer from

St. Pierre, in about an hour and a... There is an overland route--_La

Trace_, but it twenty-five-mile ride, and a weary one in such a climate,

notwithstanding the indescribable beauty of the landscapes which the

lofty road commands.

Rebuilt in wood after the almost total destruction by an earthquake

of its once picturesque streets of stone, Fort-de-France (formerly

Fort-Royal) has little of outward interest by comparison with St.

Pierre. It lies in a low, moist plain, and has few remarkable buildings:

you can walk allover the little town in about half an hour. But the

Savane,--the great green public square, with its grand tamarinds and

_sabliers_,--would be worth the visit alone, even were it not made

romantic by the marble memory of Josephine.

I went to look at the white dream of her there, a creation of

master-sculptors.... It seemed to me absolutely lovely.

Sea winds have bitten it; tropical rains have streaked it: some

microscopic growth has darkened the exquisite hollow of the throat. And

yet such is the human charm of the figure that you almost fancy you are

gazing at a living presence.... Perhaps the profile is less artistically

real,--statuesque to the point of betraying the chisel; but when you

look straight up into the sweet creole face, you can believe she lives:

all the wonderful West Indian charm of the woman is there.

She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion

of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand

leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven

tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into

the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel

that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here

the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history

is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumor has it that she

spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the

thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet

space of summer sea; through the vast splendor of azure light, she is

looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy

Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive

smile,--unutterably touching....

[Illustration: STATUE OF JOSEPHINE.]

XXII.

One leaves Martinique with regret, even after so brief a stay: the old

colonial life itself, not less than the revelation of tropic nature,

having in this island a quality of uniqueness, a special charm, unlike

anything previously seen.... We steam directly for Barbadoes;--the

vessel will touch at the intervening islands only on her homeward route.

... Against a hot wind south,--under a sky always deepening in beauty.

Towards evening dark clouds begin to rise before us; and by nightfall

they spread into one pitch-blackness over all the sky. Then comes a

wind in immense sweeps, lifting the water,--but a wind that is still

strangely warm. The ship rolls heavily in the dark for an hour or

more;--then torrents of tepid rain make the sea smooth again; the clouds

pass, and the viole transparency of tropical night reappears,--ablaze

with stars.

At early morning a long low land appears on the horizon,--totally unlike

the others we have seen; it has no visable volcanic forms. That

is Barbadoes,--a level burning coral coast,--a streak of green,

white-edged, on the verge of the sea. But hours pass before the green

line begins to show outlines of foliage.

... As we approach the harbor an overhanging black cloud suddenly bursts

down in illuminated rain,--through which the shapes of moored ships seem

magnified as through a golden fog. It ceases as suddenly as it begun;

the cloud vanishes utterly; and the azure is revealed unflecked,

dazzling, wondrous.... It is a sight worth the whole journey,--the

splendor of this noon sky at Barbadoes;--the horizon glow is almost

blinding, the sea-line sharp as a razor-edge; and motionless upon

the sapphire water nearly a hundred ships lie,--masts, spars, booms,

cordage, cutting against the amazing magnificence of blue.... Mean while

the island coast has clearly brought out all its beauties: first you

note the long white winding thread-line of beach-coral and bright

sand;--then the deep green fringe of vegetation through which roofs and

spires project here and there, and quivering feathery heads of palms

with white trunks. The general tone of this verdure is sombre green,

though it is full of lustre: there is a glimmer in it as of metal.

Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of misty pale, green are

visible,--far slopes of low hill and plain the highest curving line, the

ridge of the island, bears a row of cocoa-palms, They are so far that

their stems diminish almost to invisibility: only the crests are clearly

distinguishable,--like spiders hanging between land and sky. But there

are no forests: the land is a naked unshadowed green far as the eye can

reach beyond the coast-line. There is no waste space in Barbadoes: it

is perhaps one of the most densely-peopled places on the globe--(one

thousand and thirty-five inhabitants to the square mile)--.and it

sends black laborers by thousands to the other British colonies every

year,--the surplus of its population.

... The city of Bridgetown disappoints the stranger who expects to

find any exotic features of architecture or custom,--disappoints more,

perhaps, than any other tropical port in this respect. Its principal

streets give you the impression of walking through an English town,--not

an old-time town, but a new one, plain almost to commonplaceness, in

spite of Nelson's monument. Even the palms are powerless to lend the

place a really tropical look;--the streets are narrow without being

picturesque, white as lime roads and full of glare;--the manners, the

costumes, the style of living, the system of business are thoroughly

English;--the population lacks visible originality; and its

extraordinary activity, so oddly at variance with the quiet indolence of

other West Indian peoples, seems almost unnatural. Pressure of numbers

has largely contributed to this characteristic; but Barbadoes would be

in any event, by reason of position alone, a busy colony. As the most

windward of the West Indies it has naturally become not only the chief

port, but also the chief emporium of the Antilles. It has railroads,

telephones, street-cars, fire and life insurance companies, good hotels,

libraries and reading-rooms, and excellent public schools. Its annual

export trade figures for nearly $6,000,000.

[Illustration: INNER BASIN, BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES.]

The fact which seems most curious to the stranger, on his first

acquaintance with the city, is that most of this business activity is

represented by black men--black merchants, shopkeepers, clerks. Indeed,

the Barbadian population, as a mass, strikes one as the darkest in the

West Indies. Black regiments march through the street to the sound of

English music,--uniformed as Zouaves; black police, in white helmets and

white duck uniforms, maintain order; black postmen distribute the mails;

black cabmen wait for customers at a shilling an hour. It is by no means

an attractive population, physically,--rather the reverse, and

frankly brutal as well--different as possible from the colored race of

Martinique; but it has immense energy, and speaks excellent English. One

is almost startled on hearing Barbadian negroes speaking English with a

strong Old Country accent Without seeing the speaker, you could scarcely

believe such English uttered by black lips; and the commonest negro

laborer about the port pronounces as well as a Londoner. The purity of

Barbadian English is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that, unlike most

of the other islands, Barbadoes has always remained in the possession

of Great Britain. Even as far back as 1676 Barbadoes was in a very

different condition of prosperity from that of the other colonies, and

offered a totally different social aspect--having a white population of

50,000. At that time the island could muster 20,000 infantry and 3000

horse; there were 80,000 slaves; there were 1500 houses in Bridgetown

and an immense number of shops; and not less than two hundred ships were

required to export the annual sugar crop alone.

But Barbadoes differs also from most of the Antilles geologically; and

there can be no question that the nature of its soil has considerably

influenced the physical character of its inhabitants. Although Barbadoes

is now known to be also of volcanic origin,--a fact which its low

undulating surface could enable no unscientific observer to suppose,--it

is superficially a calcareous formation; and the remarkable effect

of limestone soil upon the bodily development of a people is not less

marked in this latitude than elsewhere. In most of the Antilles the

white race degenerates and dwarfs under the influence of climate

and environment; but the Barbadian creole--tall, muscular, large

of bone--preserves and perpetuates in the tropics the strength and

sturdiness of his English forefathers.

XXIII.

... Night: steaming for British Guiana;--we shall touch at no port

before reaching Demerara.... A strong warm gale, that compels the taking

in of every awning and wind-sail. Driving tepid rain; and an intense

darkness, broken only by the phosphorescence of the sea, which to-night

displays extraordinary radiance.

[Illustration: TRAFALGAR SQUARE, BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES.]

The steamer's wake is a great broad, seething river of fire,--white like

strong moonshine: the glow is bright enough to read by. At its

centre the trail is brightest;--towards either edge it pales off

cloudily,--curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up

momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are

the long slow fires that keep burning at a distance, out in the dark.

Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and

pass;--serpentine flames wriggle by;--there are long billowing crests of

fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light up

all at the same time, glow for a while, disappear, reappear, and swirl

away in a prolonged smouldering.

There are warm gales and heavy rain each night,--it is the hurricane

season;--and it seems these become more violent the farther south we

sail. But we are nearing those equinoctial regions where the calm of

nature is never disturbed by storms.

... Morning: still steaming south, through a vast blue day. The azure

of the heaven always seems to be growing deeper. There is a bluish-white

glow in the horizon,--almost too bright to look at. An indigo sea....

There are no clouds; and the splendor endures until sunset.

Then another night, very luminous and calm. The Southern constellations

burn whitely.... We are nearing the great shallows of the South American

coast.

XXIV.

... It is the morning of the third day since we left Barbadoes, and for

the first time since entering tropic waters all things seem changed.

The atmosphere is heavy with strange mists; and the light of an

orange-colored sun, immensely magnified by vapors, illuminates a

greenish-yellow sea,--foul and opaque, as if stagnant.... I remember

just such a sunrise over the Louisiana gulf-coast.

We are in the shallows, moving very slowly. The line-caster keeps

calling, at regular intervals: "Quarter less five, sir!" "And a half

four, sir!"... There is little variation in his soundings--a quarter

of a fathom or half a fathom difference. The warm air has a sickly

heaviness, like the air of a swamp; the water shows olive and ochreous

tones alternately;--the foam is yellow in our wake. These might be the

colors of a fresh-water inundation....

A fellow-traveller tells me, as we lean over the rail, that this same

viscous, glaucous sea washes the great penal colony of Cayenne--which

he visited. When a convict dies there, the corpse, sewn up in a sack, is

borne to the water, and a great bell tolled. Then the still surface is

suddenly broken by fins innumerable--black fins of sharks rushing to the

hideous funeral: they know the Bell!...

There is land in sight--very low land,--a thin dark line suggesting

marshiness; and the nauseous color of the water always deepens.

As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical appearance. The

sombre green line brightens color, I sharpens into a splendid fringe

of fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling with palm crests. Then a mossy

sea-wall comes into sight--dull gray stone--work, green-lined at all its

joints. There is a fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a

queer echo, and the cannon-shot once reverberated--only once: there

are no mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water

becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and more

ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. Vessels becalmed everywhere

speck the glass-level of the sea, like insects sticking upon a mirror.

It begins, all of a sudden, to rain torrentially; and through the white

storm of falling drops nothing is discernible.

XXV.

At Georgetown, steamers entering the river can lie close to the

wharf;--we can enter the Government warehouses without getting wet. In

fifteen minutes the shower ceases; and we leave the warehouses to find

ourselves in a broad, palm-bordered street illuminated by the most

prodigious day that yet shone upon our voyage. The rain has cleared the

air and dissolved the mists; and the light is wondrous.

[Illustration: STREET IN GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA.]

My own memory of Demerara will always be a memory of enormous light. The

radiance has an indescribable dazzling force that conveys the idea of

electric fire;--the horizon blinds like a motionless sheet of lightning;

and you dare not look at the zenith.... The brightest summer-day in

the North is a gloaming to this. Men walk only under umbrellas, or

with their eyes down--and the pavements, already dry, flare almost

unbearably.

... Georgetown has an exotic aspect peculiar to itself,--different from

that of any West Indian city we have seen; and this is chiefly due to

the presence of palm-trees. For the edifices, the plan, the general idea

of the town, are modern; the white streets, laid out very broad to the

sweep of the sea-breeze, and drained by canals running through

their centres, with bridges at cross-streets, display the value of

nineteenth-century knowledge regarding house-building with a view to

coolness as well as to beauty. The architecture might be described as a

tropicalized Swiss style--Swiss eaves are developed into veranda roofs,

and Swiss porches prolonged and lengthened into beautiful piazzas and

balconies. The men who devised these large cool halls, these admirably

ventilated rooms, these latticed windows opening to the ceiling, may

have lived in India; but the physiognomy of the town also reveals a fine

sense of beauty in the designers: all that is strange and beautiful in

the vegetation of the tropics has had a place contrived for it, a home

prepared for it. Each dwelling has its garden; each garden blazes with

singular and lovely color; but everywhere and always tower the palms.

There are colonnades of palms, clumps of palms, groves of palms-sago and

cabbage and cocoa and fan palms. You can see that the palm is cherished

here, is loved for its beauty, like a woman. Everywhere you find palms,

in all stages of development, from the first sheaf of tender green

plumes rising above the soil to the wonderful colossus that holds its

head a hundred feet above the roofs; palms border the garden walks in

colonnades; they are grouped in exquisite poise about the basins of

fountains; they stand like magnificent pillars at either side of gates;

they look into the highest windows of public buildings and hotels.

... For miles and miles and miles we drive along avenues of

palms--avenues leading to opulent cane-fields, traversing queer coolie

villages. Rising on either side of the road to the same level, the palms

present the vista of a long unbroken double colonnade of dead-silver

trunks, shining tall pillars with deep green plume-tufted summits,

almost touching, almost forming something like the dream of an

interminable Moresque arcade. Sometimes for a full mile the trees are

only about thirty or forty feet high; then, turning into an older alley,

we drive for half a league between giants nearly a hundred feet in

altitude. The double perspective lines of their crests, meeting before

us and behind us in a bronze-green darkness, betray only at long

intervals any variation of color, where some dead leaf droops like an

immense yellow feather.

XXVI.

In the marvellous light, which brings out all the rings of their bark,

these palms sometimes produce a singular impression of subtle, fleshy,

sentient life,--seem to move with a slowly stealthy motion as you ride

or drive past them. The longer you watch them, the stronger this idea

becomes,--the more they seem alive,--the more their long silver-gray

articulated bodies seem to poise, undulate, stretch.... Certainly the

palms of a Demerara country-road evoke no such real emotion as

that produced by the stupendous palms of the Jardin des Plantes in

Martinique. That beautiful, solemn, silent life up-reaching through

tropical forest to the sun for warmth, for color, for power,--filled me,

I remember, with a sensation of awe different from anything which I had

ever experienced.... But even here in Guiana, standing alone under the

sky, the palm still seems a creature rather than a tree,--gives you the

idea of personality;--you could almost believe each lithe shape animated

by a thinking force,--believe that all are watching you with such

passionless calm as legend lends to beings super-natural.... And I

wonder if some kindred fancy might not have inspired the name given by

the French colonists to the male palmiste,--_angelin_....

[Illustration: AVENUE IN GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA.]

Very wonderful is the botanical garden here. It is new; and there are

no groves, no heavy timber, no shade; but the finely laid-out

grounds,--alternations of lawn and flower-bed,--offer everywhere

surprising sights. You observe curious orange-colored shrubs; plants

speckled with four different colors; plants that look like wigs of

green hair; plants with enormous broad leaves that seem made of

colored crystal; plants that do not look like natural growths, but like

idealizations of plants,--those beautiful fantasticalities imagined by

sculptors. All these we see in glimpses from a carriage-window,--yellow,

indigo, black, and crimson plants.... We draw rein only to observe in

the ponds the green navies of the Victoria Regia,--the monster among

water-lilies. It covers all the ponds and many of the canals. Close to

shore the leaves are not extraordinarily large; but they increase in

breadth as they float farther out, as if gaining bulk proportionately

to the depth of water. A few yards off, they are large as soup-plates;

farther out, they are broad as dinner-trays; in the centre of the

pond or canal they have surface large as tea-tables. And all have an

up-turned edge, a perpendicular rim. Here and there you see the imperial

flower,--towering above the leaves.... Perhaps, if your hired driver

be a good guide, he will show you the snake-nut,--the fruit of an

extraordinary tree native to the Guiana forests. This swart nut--shaped

almost like a clam-shell, and halving in the same way along its sharp

edges--encloses something almost incredible. There is a pale envelope

about the kernel; remove it, and you find between your fingers a little

viper, triangular-headed, coiled thrice upon itself, perfect in every

detail of form from head to tail. Was this marvellous mockery

evolved for a protective end? It is no eccentricity: in every nut the

serpent-kernel lies coiled the same.

... Yet in spite of a hundred such novel impressions, what a delight it

is to turn again cityward through the avenues of palms, and to feel once

more the sensation of being watched, without love or hate, by all those

lithe, tall, silent, gracious shapes!

XXVII.

Hindoos; coolies; men, women, and children-standing, walking, or sitting

in the sun, under the shadowing of the palms. Men squatting, with hands

clasped over their black knees, are watching us from under their white

turbans-very steadily, with a slight scowl. All these Indian faces have

the same set, stern expression, the same knitting of the brows; and the

keen gaze is not altogether pleasant. It borders upon hostility; it is

the look of measurement--measurement physical and moral. In the mighty

swarming of India these have learned the full meaning and force of

life's law as we Occidentals rarely learn it. Under the dark fixed frown

eye glitters like a serpent's.

[Illustration: VICTORIA REGIA IN THE CANAL AT GEORGETOWN]

Nearly all wear the same Indian dress; the thickly folded turban,

usually white, white drawers reaching but half-way down the thigh,

leaving the knees and the legs bare, and white jacket. A few don long

blue robes, and wear a colored head-dress: these are babagees-priests.

Most of the men look tall; they are slender and small-boned, but the

limbs are well turned. They are grave--talk in low tones, and seldom

smile. Those you see heavy black beards are probably Mussulmans: I

am told they have their mosques here, and that the muezzein's call to

prayer is chanted three times daily on many plantations. Others shave,

but the Mohammedans allow all the beard to grow.... Very comely some of

the women are in their close-clinging soft brief robes and tantalizing

veils--a costume leaving shoulders, arms, and ankles bare. The dark arm

is always tapered and rounded; the silver-circled ankle always elegantly

knit to the light straight foot. Many slim girls, whether standing or

walking or in repose, offer remarkable studies of grace; their attitude

when erect always suggests lightness and suppleness, like the poise of a

dancer.

... A coolie mother passes, carrying at her hip a very pretty naked

baby. It has exquisite delicacy of limb: its tiny ankles are circled

by thin bright silver rings; it looks like a little bronze statuette, a

statuette of Kama, the Indian Eros. The mother's arms are covered from

elbow to wrist with silver bracelets,--some flat and decorated; others

coarse, round, smooth, with ends hammered into the form of viper-heads.

She has large flowers of gold in her ears, a small gold flower in her

very delicate little nose. This nose ornament does not seem absurd; on

these dark skins the effect is almost as pleasing as it is bizarre.

This jewellery is pure metal;--it is thus the coolies carry their

savings,--melting down silver or gold coin, and recasting it into

bracelets, ear-rings, and nose ornaments.

[Illustration: DEMERARA COOLIE GIRL.]

... Evening is brief: all this time the days have been growing shorter:

it will be black at 6 P.M. One does not regret it;--the glory of such a

tropical day as this is almost too much to endure for twelve hours.

The sun is already low, and yellow with a tinge of orange: as he falls

between the palms his stare colors the world with a strange hue--such a

phantasmal light as might be given by a nearly burnt-out sun. The air

is full of unfamiliar odors. We pass a flame-colored bush; and an

extraordinary perfume--strange, rich, sweet--envelops us like a caress:

the soul of a red jasmine....

... What a tropical sunset is this-within two days' steam-journey of

the equator! Almost to the zenith the sky flames up from the sea,--one

tremendous orange incandescence, rapidly deepening to vermilion as the

sun dips. The indescribable intensity of this mighty burning makes one

totally unprepared for the spectacle of its sudden passing: a seeming

drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light....

Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with

vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown

creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the

note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, keen, as of

a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents,

aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a

continuous dripping sound; the drops fall heavily, like bodies of clumsy

insects. But it is not dew, nor insects; it is a thick, transparent

jelly--a fleshy liquor that falls in immense drops.... The night grows

chill with dews, with vegetable breath; and we sleep with windows nearly

closed.

XXVIII.

... Another sunset like the conflagration of a world, as we steam away

from Guiana;--another unclouded night; and morning brings back to us

that bright blue in the sea-water which we missed for the first time on

our approach to the main-land. There is a long swell all day, and tepid

winds. But towards evening the water once more shifts its hue--takes

olive tint--the mighty flood of the Orinoco is near.

Over the rim of the sea rise shapes faint pink, faint gray-misty shapes

that grow and lengthen as we advance. We are nearing Trinidad.

It first takes definite form as a prolonged, undulating, pale gray

mountain chain,--the outline of a sierra. Approaching nearer, we discern

other hill summits rounding up and shouldering away behind the chain

itself. Then the nearest heights begin to turn faint green--very slowly.

Right before the outermost spur of cliff, fantastic shapes of rock are

rising sheer from the water: partly green, partly reddish-gray where the

surface remains unclothed by creepers and shrubs. Between them the sea

leaps and whitens.

... And we begin to steam along a magnificent tropical coast,--before

a billowing of hills wrapped in forest from sea to summit,--astonishing

forest, dense, sombre, impervious to sun--every gap a blackness as of

ink. Giant palms here and there overtop the denser foliage; and queer

monster trees rise above the forest-level against the blue,--spreading

out huge flat crests from which masses of lianas stream down. This

forest-front has the apparent solidity of a wall, and forty-five miles

of it undulate uninterruptedly by us-rising by terraces, or projecting

like turret-lines, or shooting up into semblance of cathedral forms or

suggestions of castellated architecture.... But the secrets of these

woods have not been unexplored;--one of the noblest writers of our time

has so beautifully and fully written of them as to leave little for

anyone else to say. He who knows Charles Kingsley's "At Last" probably

knows the woods of Trinidad far better than many who pass them daily.

Even as observed from the steamer's deck, the mountains and forests of

Trinidad have an aspect very different from those of the other Antilles.

The heights are less lofty,--less jagged and abrupt,--with rounded

summits; the peaks of Martinique or Dominica rise fully two

thousand feet higher. The land itself is a totally different

formation,--anciently being a portion of the continent; and its flora

and fauna are of South America.

... There comes a great cool whiff of wind,--another and another;--then

a mighty breath begins to blow steadily upon us,--the breath of the

Orinoco.... It grows dark before we pass through the Ape's Mouth, to

anchor in one of the calmest harbors in the world,--never disturbed by

hurricanes. Over unruffled water the lights of Port-of-Spain shoot long

still yellow beams. The night grows chill;--the air is made frigid by

the breath of the enormous river and the vapors of the great woods.

XXIX.

... Sunrise: a morning of supernal beauty,--the sky of a fairy

tale,--the sea of a love-poem.

Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a

perfect luminous dove-color,--the horizon being filled to a great height

with greenish-golden haze,--a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue

that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an

impossiblity. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also

inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has but just risen

above them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy

level of the flood, winds of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid

gold begin to shoot and quiver and broaden; these are the currents of

the morning, catching varying color with the deepening of the day and

the lifting of the tide.

Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the

grays; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves

through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only

the city still remains invisible; it lies exactly between us and

the downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such

radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the

gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow; the hills take soft,

rich, sensuous colors. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous

tone--a seemingly diaphanous aureate color, the very ghost of gold. But

at last all of them sharpen bluely, show bright folds and ribbings

of green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if

filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of

cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue.

All these tints and colors have a spectral charm, a preternatural

loveliness; everything seems subdued, softened, semi-vaporized,--the

only very sharply defined silhouettes being those of the little becalmed

ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading colored wings to catch

the morning breeze.

The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the

landscape out of vapory blue; the hills all become green-faced, reveal

the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails--white, red,

yellow,--ripples the water, and turns it green. Little fish begin to

leap; they spring and fall in glittering showers like opalescent blown

spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled

roofs reveal themselves: the city is unveiled-a city full of color,

somewhat quaint, somewhat Spanish-looking--a little like St. Pierre, a

little like New Orleans in the old quarter; everywhere fine tall palms.

XXX.

Ashore, through a black swarming and a great hum of creole chatter....

Warm yellow narrow streets under a burning blue day;--a confused

impression of long vistas, of low pretty houses and cottages, more

or less quaint, bathed in sun and yellow-wash,--and avenues of

shade-trees,--and low garden-walls overtopped by waving banana leaves

and fronds of palms.... A general sensation of drowsy warmth and vast

light and exotic vegetation,--coupled with some vague disappointment

a the absence of that picturesque humanity that delighted us in the

streets of St. Pierre, Martinique. The bright costumes of the French

colonies are not visible here: there is nothing like them in any of

the English islands. Nevertheless, this wonderful Trinidad is as

unique ethnologically as it is otherwise remarkable among all the other

Antilles. It has three distinct creole populations,--English, Spanish,

and French,--besides its German and Madeiran settlers. There is also a

special black or half-breed element, corresponding to each creole race,

and speaking the language of each; there are fifty thousand Hindoo

coolies, and a numerous body of Chinese. Still, this extraordinary

diversity of race elements does not make itself at once apparent to the

stranger. Your first impressions, as you pass through the black crowd

upon the wharf, is that of being among a population as nearly African

as that of Barbadoes; and indeed the black element dominates to such an

extent that upon the streets white faces look strange by contrast. When

a white face does appear, it is usually under the shadow of an Indian

helmet, and heavily bearded, and austere: the physiognomy of one used

to command. Against the fantastic ethnic background of all this colonial

life, this strong, bearded English visage takes something of heroic

relief;--one feels, in a totally novel way, the dignity of a white skin.

[Illustration: ST. JAMES AVENUE, PORT-OF-SPAIN, TRINIDAD.]

... I hire a carriage to take me to the nearest coolie village;--a

delightful drive.... Sometimes the smooth white road curves round

the slope of a forest-covered mountain;--sometimes overlooks a valley

shining with twenty different shades of surface green;--sometimes

traverses marvellous natural arcades formed by the interweaving and

intercrossing of bamboos fifty feet high. Rising in vast clumps, and

spreading out sheafwise from the soil towards the sky, the curves of

their beautiful jointed stems meet at such perfect angles above the way,

and on either side of it, as to imitate almost exactly the elaborate

Gothic arch-work of old abbey cloisters. Above the road, shadowing the

slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure.

They are green--burning, flashing green--covered with parasitic green

creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form,

fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter along the

way-side; palms shoot up to vast altitudes, like pillars of white metal;

and there is a perpetual shifting of foliage color, from yellow-green to

orange, from reddish-green to purple, from emerald-green to black-green.

But the background color, the dominant tone, is like the plumage of a

green parrot.

... We drive into the coolie village, along a narrower way, lined with

plantain-trees, bananas, flamboyants, and unfamiliar shrubs with large

broad leaves. Here and there are cocoa-palms. Beyond the little ditches

on either side, occupying openings in the natural hedge, are the

dwellings--wooden cabins, widely separated from each other. The narrow

lanes that enter the road are also lined with habitations, half hidden

by banana-trees. There is a prodigious glare, an intense heat. Around,

above the trees and the roofs, rise the far hill shapes, some brightly

verdant, some cloudy blue, some gray. The road and the lanes are almost

deserted; there is little shade; only at intervals some slender brown

girl or naked baby appears at a door-way. The carriage halts before a

shed built against a wall--a simple roof of palm thatch supported upon

jointed posts of bamboo.

It is a little coolie temple. A few weary Indian laborers slumber in its

shadow; pretty naked children, with silver rings round their ankles, are

playing there with a white dog. Painted over the wall surface, in

red, yellow, brown, blue, and green designs upon a white ground, are

extraordinary figures of gods and goddesses. They have several pairs of

arms, brandishing mysterious things,--they seem to dance, gesticulate,

threaten; but they are all very naïf;--remind one of the first efforts

of a child with the first box of paints. While I am looking at these

things, one coolie after another wakes up (these men sleep lightly) and

begins to observe me almost as curiously, and I fear much less kindly,

than I have been observing the gods. "Where is your babagee?" I inquire.

No one seems to comprehend my question; the gravity of each dark face

remains unrelaxed. Yet I would have liked to make an offering unto Siva.

... Outside the Indian goldsmith's cabin, palm shadows are crawling

slowly to and fro in the white glare, like shapes of tarantulas. Inside,

the heat is augmented by the tiny charcoal furnace which glows beside

a ridiculous little anvil set into a wooden block buried level with the

soil. Through a rear door come odors of unknown known flowers and the

cool brilliant green of banana leaves.... A minute of waiting in the hot

silence;--then, noiselessly as a phantom, the nude-limbed smith enters

by a rear door,--squats down, without a word, on his little mat beside

his little anvil,--and turns towards me, inquiringly, a face half veiled

by a black beard,--a turbaned Indian face, sharp, severe, and slightly

unpleasant in expression. "_Vlé béras!_" explains my creole driver,

pointing to his client. The smith opens his lips to utter in the tone of

a call the single syllable "_Ra_!" then folds his arms.

[Illustration: COOLIES OF TRINIDAD.]

Almost immediately a young Hindoo woman enters, squats down on the

earthen floor at the end of the bench which forms the only furniture of

the shop, and turns upon me a pair of the finest black eyes I have ever

seen,--like the eyes of a fawn. She is very simply clad, in a coolie

robe leaving arms and ankles bare, and clinging about the figure in

gracious folds; her color is a clear bright brown-new bronze; her face a

fine oval, and charmingly aquiline. I perceive a little silver ring, in

the form of a twisted snake, upon the slender second toe of each bare

foot; upon each arm she has at least ten heavy silver rings; there are

also large silver rings about her ankles; a gold flower is fixed by a

little hook in one nostril, and two immense silver circles, shaped like

new moons, shimmer in her ears. The smith mutters something to her in

his Indian tongue. She rises, and seating herself on the bench beside

me, in an attitude of perfect grace, holds out one beautiful brown arm

to me that I may choose a ring.

The arm is much more worthy of attention than the rings: it has the

tint, the smoothness, the symmetry, of a fine statuary's work in

metal;--the upper arm, tattooed with a bluish circle of arabesques, is

otherwise unadorned; all the bracelets are on the fore-arm. Very clumsy

and coarse they prove to be on closer examination: it was the fine dark

skin which by color contrast made them look so pretty. I choose the

outer one, a round ring with terminations shaped like viper heads;--the

smith inserts a pair of tongs between these ends, presses outward

slowly and strongly, and the ring is off. It has a faint musky odor, not

unpleasant, the perfume of the tropical flesh it clung to. I would have

taken it thus; but the smith snatches it from me, heats it red in his

little charcoal furnace, hammers it into a nearly perfect circle again,

slakes it, and burnishes it.

Then I ask for children's _béras_, or bracelets; and the young mother

brings in her own baby girl,--a little darling just able to walk. She

has extraordinary eyes;--the mother's eyes magnified (the father's are

small and fierce). I bargain for the single pair of thin rings on her

little wrists;--while the smith is taking them off, the child keeps her

wonderful gaze fixed on my face. Then I observe that the peculiarity of

the eye is the size of the iris rather than the size of the ball. These

eyes are not soft like the mother's, after all; they are ungentle,

beautiful as they are; they have the dark and splendid flame of the eyes

of a great bird--a bird of prey.

... She will grow up, this little maid, into a slender, graceful woman,

very beautiful, no doubt; perhaps a little dangerous. She will marry,

of course: probably she is betrothed even now, according to Indian

custom,--pledged to some brown boy, the son of a friend. It will not

be so many years before the day of their noisy wedding: girls shoot up

under this sun with as swift a growth as those broad-leaved beautiful

shapes which fill the open door-way with quivering emerald. And she

will know the witchcraft of those eyes, will feel the temptation to use

them,--perhaps to smile one of those smiles which have power over life

and death.

[Illustration: COOLIE SERVANT.]

And then the old coolie story! One day, in the yellowing cane-fields,

among the swarm of veiled and turbaned workers, a word is overheard,

a side glance intercepted;--there is the swirling flash of a cutlass

blade; a shrieking gathering of women about a headless corpse in the

sun; and passing cityward, between armed and helmeted men, the vision of

an Indian prisoner, blood-crimsoned, walking very steadily, very erect,

with the solemnity of a judge, the dry bright gaze of an idol....

XXXI.

... We steam very slowly into the harbor of St. George, Grenada, in dead

silence. No cannon-signal allowed here.... Some one suggests that the

violence of the echoes in this harbor renders the firing of cannon

dangerous; somebody else says the town is in so ruinous a condition that

the report of a gun would shake it down.

... There are heavy damp smells in the warm air as of mould, or of wet

clay freshly upturned.

This harbor is a deep clear basin, surrounded and shadowed by immense

volcanic hills, all green. The opening by which we entered is cut off

from sight by a promontory, and hill shapes beyond the promontory;--we

seem to be in the innermost ring of a double crater. There is a

continuous shimmering and plashing of leaping fish in the shadow of the

loftiest height, which reaches half across the water.

As it climbs up the base of the huge hill at a precipitous angle, the

city can be seen from the steamer's deck almost as in a bird's-eye view.

A senescent city; mostly antiquated Spanish architecture,--ponderous

archways and earthquake-proof walls. The yellow buildings fronting us

beyond the wharf seem half decayed; they are strangely streaked with

green, look as if they had been long under water. We row ashore, land in

a crowd of lazy-looking, silent blacks.

... What a quaint, dawdling, sleepy place it is! All these narrow

streets are falling into ruin; everywhere the same green stains upon

the walls, as of slime left by a flood; everywhere disjointed brickwork,

crumbling roofs, pungent odors of mould. Yet this Spanish architecture

was built to endure; those yellow, blue, or green walls were constructed

with the solidity of fortress-work; the very stairs are stone; the

balustrades and the railings were made of good wrought iron. In a

Northern clime such edifices would resist the wear and tear of five

hundred years. But here the powers of disintegration are extraordinary,

and the very air would seem to have the devouring force of an acid. All

surfaces and angles are yielding to the attacks of time, weather, and

microscopic organisms; paint peels, stucco falls, tiles tumble,

stones slip out of place, and in every chink tiny green things nestle,

propagating themselves through the jointures and dislocating the

masonry. There is an appalling mouldiness, an exaggerated mossiness--the

mystery and the melancholy of a city deserted. Old warehouses without

signs, huge and void, are opened regularly every day for so many

hours; yet the business of the aged merchants within seems to be a

problem;--you might fancy those gray men were always waiting for ships

that sailed away a generation ago, and will never return. You see no

customers entering the stores, but only a black mendicant from time to

time. And high above all this, overlooking streets too steep for any

vehicle, slope the red walls of the mouldering fort, patched with the

viridescence of ruin.

[Illustration: COOLIE MERCHANT.]

By a road leading up beyond the city, you reach the cemetery. The

staggering iron gates by which you enter it are almost rusted from their

hinges, and the low wall enclosing it is nearly all verdant. Within, you

see a wilderness of strange weeds, vines, creepers, fantastic shrubs run

mad, with a few palms mounting above the green confusion;--only here and

there a gleam of slabs with inscriptions half erased. Such as you can

read are epitaphs of seamen, dating back to the years 1800, 1802, 1812.

Over these lizards are running; undulations in the weeds warn you

to beware of snakes; toads leap away as you proceed; and you observe

everywhere crickets perched--grass-colored creatures with two ruby

specks for eyes. They make a sound shrill as the scream of machinery

beveling marble. At the farther end of the cemetery is a heavy ruin that

would seem to have once been part of a church: it is so covered with

creeping weeds now that you only distinguish the masonry on close

approach, and high trees are growing within it. There is something

in tropical ruin peculiarly and terribly impressive: this luxuriant,

evergreen, ever-splendid Nature consumes the results of human endeavor

so swiftly, buries memories so profoundly, distorts the labors of

generations so grotesquely, that one feels here, as nowhere else, how

ephemeral man is, how intense and how tireless the effort necessary

to preserve his frail creations even a little while from the vast

unconscious forces antagonistic to all stability, to all factitious

equilibrium.

... A gloomy road winds high around one cliff overlooking the hollow of

the bay, Following it, you pass under extraordinarily dark shadows of

foliage, and over a blackish soil strewn with pretty bright green fruit

that has fallen from above. Do not touch them even with the tip of your

finger! Those are manchineel apples; with their milky juice the old

Caribs were wont to poison the barbs of their parrot-feathered arrows.

Over the mould, swarming among the venomous fruit, innumerable crabs

make a sound almost like the murmuring of water. Some are very large,

with prodigious stalked eyes, and claws white as ivory, and a red

cuirass; others, very small and very swift in their movements, are

raspberry-colored; others, again, are apple-green, with queer mottlings

of black and white. There is an unpleasant odor of decay in the

air--vegetable decay.

Emerging from the shadow of the manchineel-trees, you may follow the

road up, up, up, under beetling cliffs of plutonian rock that seem about

to topple down upon the path-way. The rock is naked and black near the

road; higher, it is veiled by a heavy green drapery of lianas, curling

creepers, unfamiliar vines. All around you are sounds of crawling, dull

echoes of dropping; the thick growths far up waver in the breathless air

as if something were moving sinuously through them. And always the

odor of humid decomposition. Farther on, the road looks wilder,

sloping between black rocks, through strange vaultings of foliage and

night-black shadows. Its lonesomeness oppresses; one returns without

regret, by rusting gate-ways and tottering walls, back to the old West

Indian city rotting in the sun.

... Yet Grenada, despite the dilapidation of her capital and the seeming

desolation of its environs, is not the least prosperous of the Antilles.

Other islands have been less fortunate: the era of depression has almost

passed for Grenada; through the rapid development of her secondary

cultures--coffee and cocoa--she hopes with good reason to repair some of

the vast losses involved by the decay of the sugar industry.

Still, in this silence of mouldering streets, this melancholy of

abandoned dwellings, this invasion of vegetation, there is a suggestion

of what any West Indian port might become when the resources of the

island had been exhausted, and its commerce ruined. After all persons of

means and energy enough to seek other fields of industry and enterprise

had taken their departure, and the plantations had been abandoned, and

the warehouses closed up forever, and the voiceless wharves left to rot

down into the green water, Nature would soon so veil the place as to

obliterate every outward visible sign of the past. In scarcely more than

a generation from the time that the last merchant steamer had taken her

departure some traveller might look for the once populous and busy mart

in vain: vegetation would have devoured it.

... In the mixed English and creole speech of the black population one

can discern evidence of a linguistic transition. The original French

_patois_ is being rapidly forgotten or transformed irrecognizably.

Now, in almost every island the negro idiom is different. So often have

some of the Antilles changed owners, moreover, that in them the negro

has never been able to form a true _patois_. He had scarcely acquired

some idea of the language of his first masters, when other rulers and

another tongue were thrust upon him,--and this may have occurred three

or four times! The result is a totally incoherent agglomeration of

speech-forms--a baragouin fantastic and unintelligible beyond the power

of anyone to imagine who has not heard it....

XXXII.

... A beautiful fantastic shape floats to us through the morning light;

first cloudy gold like the horizon, then pearly gray, then varying blue,

with growing green lights;--Saint Lucia. Most strangely formed of all

this volcanic family;--everywhere mountainings sharp as broken crystals.

Far off the Pitons--twin peaks of the high coast-show softer contours,

like two black breasts pointing against the sky....

... As we enter the harbor of Castries, the lines of the land seem no

less exquisitely odd, in spite of their rich verdure, than when viewed

afar off;--they have a particular pitch of angle.... Other of these

islands show more or less family resemblance;--you might readily mistake

one silhouette for another as seen at a distance, even after several

West Indian journeys. But Saint Lucia at once impresses you by its

eccentricity.

[Illustration: CHURCH STREET, ST. GEORGE, GRENADA.]

Castries, drowsing under palm leaves at the edge of its curving

harbor,--perhaps an ancient crater,--seems more of a village than

a town: streets of low cottages and little tropic gardens. It has a

handsome half-breed population: the old French colonial manners have

been less changed here by English influence than in Saint Kitt's and

elsewhere;--the creole _patois_ is still spoken, though the costumes

have changed.... A more beautiful situation could scarcely be

imagined,--even in this tropic world. In the massing of green heights

about the little town are gaps showing groves of palm beyond; but the

peak summits catch the clouds. Behind us the harbor mouth seems spanned

by steel-blue bars: these are lines of currents. Away, on either hand,

volcanic hills are billowing to vapory distance; and in their nearer

hollows are beautiful deepenings of color: ponded shades of diaphanous

blue or purplish tone.... I first remarked this extraordinary coloring

of shadows in Martinique, where it exists to a degree that tempts one

to believe the island has a special atmosphere of its own.... A friend

tells me the phenomenon is probably due to inorganic substances

floating in the air--each substance in diffusion having its own index

of refraction. Substances so held in suspension by vapors would vary

according to the nature of soil in different islands, and might thus

produce special local effects of atmospheric tinting.

... We remain but half an hour at Castries; then steam along the

coast to take in freight at another port. Always the same delicious

color-effects as we proceed, with new and surprising visions of hills.

The near slopes descending to the sea are a radiant green, with streaks

and specklings of darker verdure;--the farther-rising hills faint blue,

with green saliencies catching the sun;--and beyond these are upheavals

of luminous gray--pearl-gray--sharpened in the silver glow of the

horizon.... The general impression of the whole landscape is one

of motion suddenly petrified,--of an earthquake surging and tossing

suddenly arrested and fixed: a raging of cones and peaks and monstrous

truncated shapes.... We approach the Pitons.

Seen afar off, they first appeared twin mammiform peaks,--naked and

dark against the sky; but now they begin to brighten a little and show

color,--also to change form. They take a lilaceous hue, broken by gray

and green lights; and as we draw yet nearer they prove dissimilar

both in shape and tint.... Now they separate before us, throwing long

pyramidal shadows across the steamer's path. Then, as they open to our

coming, between them a sea bay is revealed--a very lovely curving bay,

bounded by hollow cliffs of fiery green. At either side of the gap the

Pitons rise like monster pylones. And a charming little settlement, a

beautiful sugar-plantation, is nestling there between them, on the very

edge of the bay.

Out of a bright sea of verdure, speckled with oases of darker foliage,

these Pitons from the land side tower in sombre vegetation. Very high

up, on the nearer one, amid the wooded slopes, you can see houses

perched; and there are bright breaks in the color there--tiny mountain

pastures that look like patches of green silk velvet.

... We pass the Pitons, and enter another little craterine harbor, to

cast anchor before the village of Choi-seul. It lies on a ledge above

the beach and under high hills: we land through a surf, running the boat

high up on soft yellowish sand. A delicious saline scent of sea-weed.

It is disappointing, the village: it is merely one cross of brief

streets, lined with blackening wooden dwellings there are no buildings

worth looking at, except the queer old French church, steep-roofed and

bristling with points that look like extinguishers. Over broad reaches

of lava rock a shallow river flows by the village to the sea, gurgling

under shadows of tamarind foliage. It passes beside the market-place--a

market-place without stalls, benches, sheds, or pavements: meats,

fruits, and vegetables are simply fastened to the trees. Women

are washing and naked children bathing in the stream; they are

bronze-skinned, a fine dark color with a faint tint of red in it....

There is little else to look at: steep wooded hills cut off the view

towards the interior.

But over the verge of the sea there is something strange growing

visible, looming up like a beautiful yellow cloud. It is an island,

so lofty, so luminous, so phantom-like, that it seems a vision of the

Island of the Seven Cities. It is only the form of St. Vincent, bathed

in vapory gold by the sun.

... Evening at La Soufrière: still another semicircular bay in a hollow

of green hills. Glens hold bluish shadows ows. The color of the heights

is very tender; but there are long streaks and patches of dark green,

marking watercourses and very abrupt surfaces. From the western side

immense shadows are pitched brokenly across the valley and over half the

roofs of the palmy town. There is a little river flowing down to the bay

on the left; and west of it a walled cemetery is visible, out of which

one monumental palm rises to a sublime height: its crest still bathes in

the sun, above the invading shadow. Night approaches; the shade of the

hills inundates all the landscape, rises even over the palm-crest. Then,

black-towering into the golden glow of sunset, the land loses all its

color, all its charm; forms of frondage, variations of tint, become

invisible. Saint Lucia is only a monstrous silhouette; all its billowing

hills, its volcanic bays, its amphitheatrical valleys, turn black as

ebony.

And you behold before you a geological dream, a vision of the primeval

sea: the apparition of the land as first brought forth, all peak-tossed

and fissured and naked and grim, in the tremendous birth of an

archipelago.

XXXIII.

Homeward bound.

Again the enormous poem of azure and emerald unrolls before us, but in

order inverse; again is the island--Litany of the Saints repeated for

us, but now backward. All the bright familiar harbors once more open to

receive us;--each lovely Shape floats to us again, first golden yellow,

then vapory gray, then ghostly blue, but always sharply radiant at last,

symmetrically exquisite, as if chiselled out of amethyst and emerald and

sapphire. We review the same wondrous wrinkling of volcanic hills, the

cities that sit in extinct craters, the woods that tower to heaven, the

peaks perpetually wearing that luminous cloud which seems the breathing

of each island-life,--its vital manifestation....

[Illustration: CASTRIES, ST. LUCIA.]

... Only now do the long succession of exotic and unfamiliar impressions

received begin to group and blend, to form homogeneous results,--general

ideas or convictions. Strongest among these is the belief that the white

race is disappearing from these islands, acquired and held at so vast a

cost of blood and treasure. Reasons almost beyond enumeration have

been advanced--economical, climatic, ethnical, political--all of which

contain truth, yet no single one of which can wholly explain the fact.

Already the white West Indian populations are diminishing at a rate that

almost staggers credibility. In the island paradise of Martinique in

1848 there were 12,000 whites; now, against more than 160,000 blacks and

half-breeds, there are perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic

struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less.

Many of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former

cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin; St.

Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has

lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous,

the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full

decadence. And while the white element is disappearing, the dark

races are multiplying as never before;--the increase of the negro and

half-breed populations has been everywhere one of the startling results

of emancipation. The general belief among the creole whites of the

Lesser Antilles would seem to confirm the old prediction that the slave

races of the past must become the masters of the future. Here and there

the struggle may be greatly prolonged, but everywhere the ultimate

result must be the same, unless the present conditions of commerce and

production become marvellously changed. The exterminated Indian peoples

of the Antilles have already been replaced by populations equally fitted

to cope with the forces of the nature about them,--that splendid and

terrible Nature of the tropics which consumes the energies of the races

of the North, which devours all that has been accomplished by their

heroism or their crimes,--effacing their cities, rejecting their

civilization. To those peoples physiologically in harmony with this

Nature belong all the chances of victory in the contest--already

begun--for racial supremacy.

But with the disappearance of the white populations the ethnical problem

would be still unsettled. Between the black and mixed peoples prevail

hatreds more enduring and more intense than any race prejudices between

whites and freedmen in the past;--a new struggle for supremacy could

not fail to begin, with the perpetual augmentation of numbers, the

ever-increasing competition for existence. And the true black element,

more numerically powerful, more fertile, more cunning, better adapted to

pyrogenic climate and tropical environment, would surely win. All these

mixed races, all these beautiful fruit-colored populations, seem doomed

to extinction: the future tendency must be to universal blackness, if

existing conditions continue--perhaps to universal savagery. Everywhere

the sins of the past have borne the same fruit, have furnished the

colonies with social enigmas that mock the wisdom of legislators, a

dragon-crop of problems that no modern political science has yet proved

competent to deal with. Can it even be hoped that future sociologists

will be able to answer them, after Nature--who never forgives--shall

have exacted the utmost possible retribution for all the crimes and

follies of three hundred years?

PART TWO--MARTINIQUE SKETCHES.

CHAPTER I. -- LES PORTEUSES.

I.

When you find yourself for the first time, upon some unshadowed day, in

the delightful West Indian city of St. Pierre,--supposing that you own

the sense of poetry, the recollections of a student,--there is apt to

steal upon your fancy an impression of having seen it all before, ever

so long ago,--you cannot tell where. The sensation of some happy dream

you cannot wholly recall might be compared to this feeling. In the

simplicity and solidity of the quaint architecture,--in the eccentricity

of bright narrow streets, all aglow with warm coloring,--in the tints

of roof and wall, antiquated by streakings and patchings of mould greens

and grays,--in the startling absence of window-sashes, glass, gas

lamps, and chimneys,--in the blossom-tenderness of the blue heaven, the

splendor of tropic light, and the warmth of the tropic wind,--you find

less the impression of a scene of to-day than the sensation of something

that was and is not. Slowly this feeling strengthens with your pleasure

in the colorific radiance of costume,--the semi-nudity of passing

figures,--the puissant shapeliness of torsos ruddily swart like statue

metal,--the rounded outline of limbs yellow as tropic fruit,--the grace

of attitudes,--the unconscious harmony of groupings,--the gathering and

folding and falling of light robes that oscillate with swaying of free

hips,--the sculptural symmetry of unshod feet. You look up and down the

lemon-tinted streets,--down to the dazzling azure brightness of meeting

sky and sea; up to the perpetual verdure of mountain woods--wondering

at the mellowness of tones, the sharpness of lines in the light, the

diaphaneity of colored shadows; always asking memory: "When?... where

did I see all this... long ago?"....

Then, perhaps, your gaze is suddenly riveted by the vast and

solemn beauty of the verdant violet-shaded mass of the dead

Volcano,--high-towering above the town, visible from all its ways, and

umbraged, maybe, with thinnest curlings of cloud,--like spectres of its

ancient smoking to heaven. And all at once the secret of your dream

is revealed, with the rising of many a luminous memory,--dreams of the

Idyllists, flowers of old Sicilian song, fancies limned upon Pompeiian

walls. For a moment the illusion is delicious: you comprehend as never

before the charm of a vanished world,--the antique life, the story of

terra-cottas and graven stones and gracious things exhumed: even the sun

is not of to-day, but of twenty centuries gone;--thus, and under such

a light, walked the women of the elder world. You know the fancy

absurd;--that the power of the orb has visibly abated nothing in all the

eras of man,--that millions are the ages of his almighty glory; but for

one instant of reverie he seemeth larger,--even that sun impossible who

coloreth the words, coloreth the works of artist-lovers of the past,

with the gold light of dreams.

Too soon the hallucination is broken by modern sounds, dissipated

by modern sights,--rough trolling of sailors descending to their

boats,--the heavy boom of a packet's signal-gun,--the passing of an

American buggy. Instantly you become aware that the melodious tongue

spoken by the passing throng is neither Hellenic nor Roman: only the

beautiful childish speech of French slaves.

II.

But what slaves were the fathers of this free generation? Your

anthropologists, your ethnologists, seem at fault here: the African

traits have become transformed; the African characteristics have been so

modified within little more than two hundred years--by inter-blending

of blood, by habit, by soil and sun and all those natural powers which

shape the mould of races,--that you may look in vain for verification of

ethnological assertions.... No: the heel does _not_ protrude;--the foot

is _not_ flat, but finely arched;--the extremities are not large;--all

the limbs taper, all the muscles are developed; and prognathism has

become so rare that months of research may not yield a single striking

case of it.... No: this is a special race, peculiar to the island as

are the shapes of its peaks,--a mountain race; and mountain races are

comely.... Compare it with the population of black Barbadoes, where

the apish grossness of African coast types has been perpetuated

unchanged;--and the contrast may well astonish!...

III.

The erect carriage and steady swift walk of the women who bear burdens

is especially likely to impress the artistic observer: it is the sight

of such passers-by which gives, above all, the antique tone and color to

his first sensations;--and the larger part of the female population

of mixed race are practised carriers. Nearly all the transportation of

light merchandise, as well as of meats, fruits, vegetables, and food

stuffs,--to and from the interior,--is effected upon human heads. At

some of the ports the regular local packets are loaded and unloaded by

women and girls,--able to carry any trunk or box to its destination.

At Fort-de-France the great steamers of the Compagnie Générale

Transatlantique, are entirely coaled by women, who carry the coal on

their heads, singing as they come and go in processions of hundreds; and

the work is done with incredible rapidity. Now, the creole _porteuse_,

or female carrier, is certainly one of the most remarkable physical

types in the world; and whatever artistic enthusiasm her graceful port,

lithe walk, or half-savage beauty may inspire you with, you can form no

idea, if a total stranger, what a really wonderful being she is.... Let

me tell you something about that highest type of professional female

carrier, which is to the _charbonnière_, or coaling-girl, what the

thorough-bred racer is to the draught-horse,--the type of porteuse

selected for swiftness and endurance to distribute goods in the interior

parishes, or to sell on commission at long distances. To the same class

naturally belong those country carriers able to act as porteuses of

plantation produce, fruits, or vegetables,--between the nearer ports and

their own interior parishes.... Those who believe that great physical

endurance and physical energy cannot exist in the tropics do not know

the creole carrier-girl.

IV.

At a very early age--perhaps at five years--she learns to carry small

articles upon her head,--a bowl of rice,--a dobanne, or red earthen

decanter, full of water,--even an orange on a plate; and before long

she is able to balance these perfectly without using her hands to steady

them. (I have often seen children actually run with cans of water upon

their heads, and never spill a drop.) At nine or ten she is able to

carry thus a tolerably heavy basket, or a _trait_ (a wooden tray with

deep outward sloping sides) containing a weight of from twenty to thirty

pounds; and is able to accompany her mother, sister, or cousin on long

peddling journeys,--walking barefoot twelve and fifteen miles a day.

At sixteen or seventeen she is a tall robust girl,--lithe, vigorous,

tough,--all of tendon and hard flesh;--she carries a tray or a basket of

the largest size, and a burden of one hundred and twenty to one hundred

and fifty pounds weight;--she can now earn about thirty francs (about

six dollars) a month, _by walking fifty miles a day_, as an itinerant

seller. Among her class there are figures to make you dream of

Atalanta;--and all, whether ugly or attractive as to feature, are finely

shapen as to body and limb. Brought into existence by extraordinary

necessities of environment, the type is a peculiarly local one,--a type

of human thorough-bred representing the true secret of grace: economy

of force. There are no corpulent porteuses for the long interior routes;

all are built lightly and firmly as those racers. There are no old

porteuses;--to do the work even at forty signifies a constitution of

astounding solidity. After the full force of youth and health is spent,

the poor carrier must seek lighter labor;--she can no longer compete

with the girls. For in this calling the young body is taxed to its

utmost capacity of strength, endurance, and rapid motion.

As a general rule, the weight is such that no well-freighted porteuse

can, unassisted, either "load" or "unload" (_châgé_ or _déchâgé_, in

creole phrase); the effort to do so would burst a blood-vessel, wrench

a nerve, rupture a muscle. She cannot even sit down under her burden

without risk of breaking her neck: absolute perfection of the balance is

necessary for self-preservation. A case came under my own observation of

a woman rupturing a muscle in her arm through careless haste in the mere

act of aiding another to unload.

And no one not a brute will ever refuse to aid a woman to lift or to

relieve herself of her burden;--you may see the wealthiest merchant, the

proudest planter, gladly do it;--the meanness of refusing, or of making

any conditions for the performance of this little kindness has only

been imagined in those strange Stories of Devils wherewith the oral and

uncollected literature of the creole abounds. [3]

V.

Preparing for her journey, the young _màchanne_ (marchande) puts on the

poorest and briefest chemise in her possession, and the most worn of her

light calico robes. These are all she wears. The robe is drawn upward

and forward, so as to reach a little below the knee, and is confined

thus by a waist-string, or a long kerchief bound tightly round the

loins. Instead of a Madras or painted turban-kerchief, she binds a plain

_mouchoir_ neatly and closely about her head; and if her hair be long,

it is combed back and gathered into a loop behind. Then, with a second

mouchoir of coarser quality she makes a pad, or, as she calls it,

_tòche_, by winding the kerchief round her fingers as you would coil up

a piece of string;--and the soft mass, flattened with a patting of the

hand, is placed upon her head, over the coiffure. On this the great

loaded trait is poised.

[Illustration: 'TI MARIE (On the Route from St. Pierre to

Basse-Pointe.)]

She wears no shoes! To wear shoes and do her work swiftly and well in

such a land of mountains would be impossible. She must climb thousands

and descend thousands of feet every day,--march up and down slopes so

steep that the horses of the country all break down after a few years

of similar journeying. The girl invariably outlasts the horse,--though

carrying an equal weight. Shoes, unless extraordinarily well made, would

shift place a little with every change from ascent to descent, or the

reverse, during the march,--would yield and loosen with the ever-varying

strain,--would compress the toes,--produce corns, bunions, raw places

by rubbing, and soon cripple the porteuse. Remember, she has to walk

perhaps fifty miles between dawn and dark, under a sun to which a single

hour's exposure, without the protection of an umbrella, is perilous to

any European or American--the terrible sun of the tropics! Sandals are

the only conceivable foot-gear suited to such a calling as hers; but she

needs no sandals: the soles of her feet are toughened so as to feel no

asperities, and present to sharp pebbles a surface at once yielding and

resisting, like a cushion of solid caoutchouc.

Besides her load, she carries only a canvas purse tied to her girdle

on the right side, and on the left a very small bottle of rum, or white

_tafia_,--usually the latter, because it is so cheap.... For she may

not always find the Gouyave Water to drink,--the cold clear pure stream

conveyed to the fountains of St. Pierre from the highest mountains by a

beautiful and marvellous plan of hydraulic engineering: she will have

to drink betimes the common spring-water of the bamboo-fountains on the

remoter high-roads; and this may cause dysentery if swallowed without

a spoonful of spirits. Therefore she never travels without a little

liquor.

VI.

... So!--She is ready: "_Châgé moin, souplè, chè!_" She bends

to lift the end of the heavy trait: some one takes the

other,--_yon!-dé!--toua!_--it is on her head. Perhaps she winces an

instant;--the weight is not perfectly balanced; she settles it with her

hands,--gets it in the exact place. Then, all steady,--lithe, light,

half naked,--away she moves with a long springy step. So even her walk

that the burden never sways; yet so rapid her motion that however good a

walker you may fancy yourself to be you will tire out after a sustained

effort of fifteen minutes to follow her uphill. Fifteen minutes;--and

she can keep up that pace without slackening--save for a minute to eat

and drink at mid-day,--for at least twelve hours and fifty-six minutes,

the extreme length of a West Indian day. She starts before dawn; tries

to reach her resting-place by sunset: after dark, like all her people,

she is afraid of meeting _zombis_.

Let me give you some idea of her average speed under an average weight

of one hundred and twenty-five pounds,--estimates based partly upon

my own observations, partly upon the declarations of the trustworthy

merchants who employ her, and partly on the assertion of habitants of

the burghs or cities named--all of which statements perfectly agree.

From St. Pierre to Basse-Pointe, by the national road, the distance is

a trifle less than twenty-seven kilometres and three-quarters. She

makes the transit easily in three hours and a half; and returns in the

afternoon, after an absence of scarcely more than eight hours. From St.

Pierre to Morne Rouge--two thousand feet up in the mountains (an ascent

so abrupt that no one able to pay carriage-fare dreams of attempting to

walk it)--the distance is seven kilometres and three-quarters. She makes

it in little more than an hour. But this represents only the

beginning of her journey. She passes on to Grande Anse, twenty-one and

three-quarter kilometres away. But she does not rest there: she returns

at the same pace, and reaches St. Pierre before dark. From St. Pierre

to Gros-Morne the distance to be twice traversed by her is more than

thirty-two kilometres. A journey of sixty-four kilometres,--daily,

perhaps,--forty miles! And there are many màchannes who make yet longer

trips,--trips of three or four days' duration;--these rest at villages

upon their route.

VII.

Such travel in such a country would be impossible but for the excellent

national roads,--limestone highways, solid, broad, faultlessly

graded,--that wind from town to town, from hamlet to hamlet, over

mountains, over ravines; ascending by zigzags to heights of twenty-five

hundred feet; traversing the primeval forests of the interior; now

skirting the dizziest precipices, now descending into the loveliest

valleys. There are thirty-one of these magnificent routes, with a total

length of 488,052 metres (more than 303 miles), whereof the construction

required engineering talent of the highest order,--the building of

bridges beyond counting, and devices the most ingenious to provide

against dangers of storms, floods, and land-slips. Most

have drinking-fountains along their course at almost regular

intervals,--generally made by the negroes, who have a simple but

excellent plan for turning the water of a spring through bamboo pipes

to the road-way. Each road is also furnished with mile-stones, or rather

kilometre-stones; and the drainage is perfect enough to assure of the

highway becoming dry within fifteen minutes after the heaviest rain, so

long as the surface is maintained in tolerably good condition. Well-kept

embankments of earth (usually covered with a rich growth of mosses,

vines, and ferns), or even solid walls of masonry, line the side

that overhangs a dangerous depth. And all these highways pass through

landscapes of amazing beauty,--visions of mountains so many-tinted and

so singular of outline that they would almost seem to have been created

for the express purpose of compelling astonishment. This tropic Nature

appears to call into being nothing ordinary: the shapes which she

evokes are always either gracious or odd,--and her eccentricities, her

extravagances, have a fantastic charm, a grotesqueness as of artistic

whim. Even where the landscape-view is cut off by high woods the forms

of ancient trees--the infinite interwreathing of vine growths all on

fire with violence of blossom-color,--the enormous green outbursts

of balisiers, with leaves ten to thirteen feet long,--the columnar

solemnity of great palmistes,--the pliant quivering exqisiteness of

bamboo,--the furious splendor of roses run mad--more than atone for

the loss of the horizon. Sometimes you approach a steep covered with a

growth of what, at first glance, looks precisely like fine green fur: it

is a first-growth of young bamboo. Or you see a hill-side covered with

huge green feathers, all shelving down and overlapping as in the tail

of some unutterable bird: these are baby ferns. And where the road leaps

some deep ravine with a double or triple bridge of white stone, note

well what delicious shapes spring up into sunshine from the black

profundity on either hand! Palmiform you might hastily term them,--but

no palm was ever so gracile; no palm ever bore so dainty a head of green

plumes light as lace! These likewise are ferns (rare survivors, maybe,

of that period of monstrous vegetation which preceded the apparition

of man), beautiful tree-ferns, whose every young plume, unrolling in a

spiral from the bud, at first assumes the shape of a crozier,--a

crozier of emerald! Therefore are some of this species called

"archbishop-trees," no doubt.... But one might write for a hundred years

of the sights to be seen upon such a mountain road.

VIII.

In every season, in almost every weather, the porteuse makes her

journey,--never heeding rain;--her goods being protected by double and

triple water-proof coverings well bound down over her trait. Yet these

tropical rains, coming suddenly with a cold wind upon her heated and

almost naked body, are to be feared. To any European or un-acclimated

white such a wetting, while the pores are all open during a profuse

perspiration, would probably prove fatal: even for white natives the

result is always a serious and protracted illness. But the porteuse

seldom suffers in consequences: she seems proof against fevers,

rheumatisms, and ordinary colds. When she does break down, however,

the malady is a frightful one,--a pneumonia that carries off the victim

within forty-eight hours. Happily, among her class, these fatalities are

very rare.

And scarcely less rare than such sudden deaths are instances of failure

to appear on time. In one case, the employer, a St. Pierre shopkeeper,

on finding his _marchande_ more than an hour late, felt so certain

something very extraordinary must have happened that he sent out

messengers in all directions to make inquiries. It was found that the

woman had become a mother when only half-way upon her journey home. The

child lived and thrived;--she is now a pretty chocolate-colored girl of

eight, who follows her mother every day from their mountain ajoupa down

to the city, and back again,--bearing a little trait upon her head.

Murder for purposes of robbery is not an unknown crime in Martinique;

but I am told the porteuses are never molested. And yet some of these

girls carry merchandise to the value of hundreds of francs; and all

carry money,--the money received for goods sold, often a considerable

sum. This immunity may be partly owing to the fact that they travel

during the greater part of the year only by day,--and usually in

company. A very pretty girl is seldom suffered to journey unprotected:

she has either a male escort or several experienced and powerful women

with her. In the cacao season-when carriers start from Grande Anse

as early as two o'clock in the morning, so as to reach St. Pierre by

dawn--they travel in strong companies of twenty or twenty-five, singing

on the way. As a general rule the younger girls at all times go two

together,--keeping step perfectly as a pair of blooded fillies; only the

veterans, or women selected for special work by reason of extraordinary

physical capabilities, go alone. To the latter class belong certain

girls employed by the great bakeries of Fort-de-France and St. Pierre:

these are veritable caryatides. They are probably the heaviest-laden

of all, carrying baskets of astounding size far up into the mountains

before daylight, so as to furnish country families with fresh bread

at an early hour; and for this labor they receive about four dollars

(twenty francs) a month and one loaf of bread per diem.... While

stopping at a friend's house among the hills, some two miles from

Fort-de-France, I saw the local bread-carrier halt before our porch

one morning, and a finer type of the race it would be difficult for

a sculptor to imagine. Six feet tall,--strength and grace united

throughout her whole figure from neck to heel; with that clear black

skin which is beautiful to any but ignorant or prejudiced eyes; and the

smooth, pleasing, solemn features of a sphinx,--she looked to me, as she

towered there in the gold light, a symbolic statue of Africa. Seeing

me smoking one of those long thin Martinique cigars called _bouts_, she

begged one; and, not happening to have another, I gave her the price of

a bunch of twenty,--ten sous. She took it without a smile, and went her

way. About an hour and a half later she came back and asked for me,--to

present me with the finest and largest mango I had ever seen, a monster

mango. She said she wanted to see me eat it, and sat down on the ground

to look on. While eating it, I learned that she had walked a whole mile

out of her way under that sky of fire, just to bring her little gift of

gratitude.

[Illustration: FORT-DE-FRANCE, MARTINIQUE--(FORMERLY FORT ROYAL.)]

IX.

Forty to fifty miles a day, always under a weight of more than a hundred

pounds,--for when the trait has been emptied she puts in stones for

ballast;--carrying her employer's merchandise and money over the

mountain ain ranges, beyond the peaks, across the ravines, through

the tropical forest, sometimes through by-ways haunted by the

fer-de-lance,--and this in summer or winter, the deason of rains or the

season of heat, the time of fevers or the time of hurricanes, at a franc

a day!... How does she live upon it?

There are twenty sous to the franc. The girl leaves St. Pierre with her

load at early morning. At the second village, Morne Rouge, she halts

to buy one, two, or three biscuits at a sou apiece; and reaching

Ajoupa-Bouillon later in the forenoon, she may buy another biscuit or

two. Altogether she may be expected to eat five Sous of biscuit or bread

before reaching Grande Anse, where she probably has a meal waiting for

her. This ought to cost her ten sous,--especially if there be meat

in her ragoût: which represents a total expense of fifteen sous for

eatables. Then there is the additional cost of the cheap liquor, which

she must mix with her drinking-water, as it would be more than dangerous

to swallow pure cold water in her heated condition; two or three sous

more. This almost makes the franc. But such a hasty and really erroneous

estimate does not include expenses of lodging and clothing;--she may

sleep on the bare floor sometimes, and twenty francs a year may keep her

in clothes; but she must rent the floor and pay for the clothes out

of that franc. As a matter of fact she not only does all this upon her

twenty sous a day, but can even economize something which will enable

her, when her youth and force decline, to start in business for herself.

And her economy will not seem so wonderful when I assure you that

thousands of men here--huge men muscled like bulls and lions--live upon

an average expenditure of five sous a day. One sou of bread, two sous of

manioc flour, one sou of dried codfish, one sou of tafia: such is their

meal.

There are women carriers who earn more than a franc a day,--women with

a particular talent for selling, who are paid on commission--from ten to

fifteen per cent. These eventually make themselves independent in many

instances;--they continue to sell and bargain in person, but hire a

young girl to carry the goods.

X.

... "_Ou 'lè màchanne!_" rings out a rich alto, resonant as the tone of

a gong, from behind the balisiers that shut in our garden. There are

two of them--no, three--Maiyotte, Chéchelle, and Rina. Maiyotte and

Chéchelle have just arrived from St. Pierre;--Rina come from Gros-Morne

with fruits and vegetables. Suppose we call them all in, and see what

they have got. Maiyotte and Chéchelle sell on commission; Rina sells for

her mother, who has a little garden at Gros-Morne.

... "_Bonjou', Maiyotte;--bonjou', Chéchelle! coument ou kallé, Rina,

chè!_"... Throw open the folding-doors to let the great trays pass....

Now all three are unloaded by old Théréza and by young Adou;--all

the packs are on the floor, and the water-proof wrappings are being

un-corded, while Ah-Manmzell, the adopted child, brings the rum and

water for the tall walkers.... "Oh, what a medley, Maiyotte!"...

Inkstands and wooden cows; purses and paper dogs and cats; dolls and

cosmetics; pins and needles and soap and tooth-brushes; candied fruits

and smoking-caps; _pelotes_ of thread, and tapes, and ribbons, and

laces, and Madeira wine; cuffs, and collars, and dancing-shoes, and

tobacco _sachets_.... But what is in that little flat bundle? Presents

for your _guêpe_, if you have one.... _Fesis-Maïa!_--the pretty

foulards! Azure and yellow in checkerings; orange and crimson

in stripes; rose and scarlet in plaidings; and bronze tints, and

beetle-tints of black and green.

"Chéchelle, what a _bloucoutoum_ if you should ever let that tray

fall--_aïe yaïe yaïe!_" Here is a whole shop of crockeries and

porcelains;--plates, dishes, cups,--earthen-ware _canaris_ and

_dobannes_, and gift-mugs and cups bearing creole girls' names,--all

names that end in _ine_. "Micheline," "Honorine," "Prospérine" [you will

never sell that, Chéchelle: there is not a Prospérine this side of St.

Pierre], "Azaline," "Leontine," "Zéphyrine," "Albertine," "Chrysaline,"

"Florine," "Coralline," "Alexandrine."...And knives and forks, and cheap

spoons, and tin coffee-pots, and tin rattles for babies, and tin flutes

for horrid little boys,--and pencils and note-paper and envelopes!...

... "Oh, Rina, what superb oranges!--fully twelve inches round--!

... "and these, which look something like our mandarins, what do you

call them?" "Zorange-macaque!" (monkey-oranges). And here are

avocados--beauties!--guavas of three different kinds,--tropical cherries

(which have four seeds instead of one),--tropical raspberries, whereof

the entire eatable portion comes off in one elastic piece, lined with

something like white silk.... Here are fresh nutmegs: the thick green

case splits in equal halves at a touch; and see the beautiful heart

within,--deep dark glossy red, all wrapped in a bright net-work of flat

blood-colored fibre, spun over it like branching veins.... This big

heavy red-and-yellow thing is a _pomme-cythère_: the smooth cuticle,

bitter as gall, covers a sweet juicy pulp, interwoven with something

that seems like cotton thread.... Here is a _pomme-cannelle_: inside its

scaly covering is the most delicious yellow custard conceivable, with

little black seeds floating in it. This larger _corossol_ has almost as

delicate an interior, only the custard is white instead of yellow....

Here are _christophines_,--great pear-shaped things, white and green,

according to kind, with a peel prickly and knobby as the skin of a

horned toad; but they stew exquisitely. And _mélongènes_, or egg-plants;

and palmiste-pith, and _chadèques_, and _pommes-d' Haïti_,--and

roots that at first sight look all alike, but they are not: there are

_camanioc_, and _couscous_, and _choux-caraïbes_, and _zignames_,

and various kinds of _patates_ among them. Old Théréza's magic will

transform these shapeless muddy things, before evening, into pyramids

of smoking gold,--into odorous porridges that will look like messes of

molten amber and liquid pearl;--for Rina makes a good sale.

Then Chéchelle manages to dispose of a tin coffee-pot and a big

canari.... And Maiyotte makes the best sale of all; for the sight of a

funny _biscuit_ doll has made Ah-Manmzell cry and smile so at the same

time that I should feel unhappy for the rest of my life if I did not

buy it for her. I know I ought to get some change out of that six

francs;--and Maiyotte, who is black but comely as the tents of Kedar, as

the curtains of Solomon, seems to be aware of the fact.

Oh, Maiyotte, how plaintive that pretty sphinx face of yours, now turned

in profile;--as if you knew you looked beautiful thus,--with the great

gold circlets of your ears glittering and swaying as you bend! And

why are you so long, so long untying that poor little canvas

purse?--fumbling and fingering it?--is it because you want me to think

of the weight of that trait and the sixty kilometres you must walk,

and the heat, and the dust, and all the disappointments? Ah, you are

cunning, Maiyotte! No, I do not want the change!

XI.

... Travelling together, the porteuses often walk in silence for hours

at a time;--this is when they feel weary. Sometimes they sing,--most

often when approaching their destination;--and when they chat, it is in

a key so high-pitched that their voices can be heard to a great distance

in this land of echoes and elevations. But she who travels alone is

rarely silent: she talks to herself or to inanimate things;--you may

hear her talking to the trees, to the flowers,--talking to the high

clouds and the far peaks of changing color,--talking to the setting sun!

Over the miles of the morning she sees, perchance, the mighty Piton

Gélé, a cone of amethyst in the light; and she talks to it: "_Ou jojoll,

oui!--moin ni envie monté assou ou, pou moin ouè bien, bien!_" (Thou art

pretty, pretty, aye!--I would I might climb thee, to see far, far off!)

By a great grove of palms she passes;--so thickly mustered they are that

against the sun their intermingled heads form one unbroken awning of

green. Many rise straight as masts; some bend at beautiful angles,

seeming to intercross their long pale single limbs in a fantastic dance;

others curve like bows: there is one that undulates from foot to crest,

like a monster serpent poised upon its tail. She loves to look at

that one--"_joli pié-bois-là!_"--talks to it as she goes by,--bids it

good-day.

Or, looking back as she ascends, she sees the huge blue dream of the

sea,--the eternal haunter, that ever becomes larger as she mounts the

road; and she talks to it: "_Mi lanmé ka gaudé moin!_" (There is the

great sea looking at me!) "_Màché toujou deïé moin, lanmè!_" (Walk after

me, 0 Sea!)

Or she views the clouds of Pelée, spreading gray from the invisible

summit, to shadow against the sun; and she fears the rain, and she talks

to it: "_Pas mouillé moin, laplie-à! Quitté moin rivé avant mouillé

moin!_" (Do not wet me, 0 Rain! Let me get there before thou wettest

me!)

Sometimes a dog barks at her, menaces her bare limbs; and she talks

to the dog: "_Chien-a, pas mòdé moin, chien--anh! Moin pa fé ou arien,

chien, pou ou mòdé moin!_" (Do not bite me, 0 Dog! Never did I anything

to thee that thou shouldst bite me, 0 Dog! Do not bite me, dear! Do not

bite me, _doudoux_!)

Sometimes she meets a laden sister travelling the opposite way....

"_Coument ou yé, chè?_" she cries. (How art thou, dear?) And the other

makes answer, "_Toutt douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All sweetly, dear,--and

thou?) And each passes on without pausing: they have no time!

... It is perhaps the last human voice she will hear for many a

mile. After that only the whisper of the grasses--_graïe-gras,

graïe-gras!_--and the gossip of the canes--_chououa, chououa!_--and the

husky speech of the _pois-Angole, ka babillé conm yon vié fenme_,--that

babbles like an old woman;--and the murmur of the _filao_-trees, like

the murmur of the River of the Washerwomen.

XII.

... Sundown approaches: the light has turned a rich yellow;--long

black shapes lie across the curving road, shadows of balisier and palm,

shadows of tamarind and Indian-reed, shadows of ceiba and giant-fern.

And the porteuses are coming down through the lights and darknesses of

the way from far Grande Anse, to halt a moment in this little village.

They are going to sit down on the road-side here, before the house of

the baker; and there is his great black workman, Jean-Marie, looking

for them from the door-way, waiting to relieve them of their loads....

Jean-Marie is the strongest man in all the Champ-Flore: see what a

torso,--as he stands there naked to the waist!... His day's work is

done; but he likes to wait for the girls, though he is old now, and has

sons as tall as himself. It is a habit: some say that he had a daughter

once,--a porteuse like those coming, and used to wait for her thus at

that very door-way until one evening that she failed to appear, and

never returned till he carried her home in his arms dead,--stricken by a

serpent in some mountain path where there was none to aid.... The roads

were not as good then as now.

... Here they come, the girls--yellow, red, black. See the flash of the

yellow feet where they touch the light! And what impossible tint the

red limbs take in the changing glow!... Finotte, Pauline, Médelle,-all

together, as usual,--with Ti-Clê trotting behind, very tired.... Never

mind, Ti-Clê!--you will outwalk your cousins when you are a few years

older,--pretty Ti-Clê.... Here come Cyrillia and Zabette, and Fêfê

and Dodotte and Fevriette. And behind them are coming the two

_chabines_,--golden girls: the twin-sisters who sell silks and threads

and foulards; always together, always wearing robes and kerchiefs of

similar color,--so that you can never tell which is Lorrainie and which

Édoualise.

And all smile to see Jean-Marie waiting for them, and to hear his deep

kind voice calling, "_Coument ou yé, chè? coument ou kallé?_" ...(How art

thou, dear?--how goes it with thee?)

And they mostly make answer, _"Toutt douce, chè,--et ou?_" (All sweetly,

dear,--and thou?) But some, over-weary, cry to him, "_Ah! déchâgé moin

vite, chè! moin lasse, lasse!_" (Unload me quickly, dear; for I am very,

very weary.) Then he takes off their burdens, and fetches bread for

them, and says foolish little things to make them laugh. And they are

pleased, and laugh, just like children, as they sit right down on the

road there to munch their dry bread.

... So often have I watched that scene!... Let me but close my eyes

one moment, and it will come back to me,--through all the thousand

miles,--over the graves of the days....

Again I see the mountain road in the yellow glow, banded with umbrages

of palm. Again I watch the light feet coming,--now in shadow, now in

sun,--soundlessly as falling leaves. Still I can hear the voices crying,

"_Ah! déchâgé moin vite, chè! moin lasse!_"--and see the mighty arms

outreach to take the burdens away. ... Only, there is a change',--I

know not what!... All vapory the road is, and the fronds, and the comely

coming feet of the bearers, and even this light of sunset,--sunset that

is ever larger and nearer to us than dawn, even as death than birth.

And the weird way appeareth a way whose dust is the dust of

generations;--and the Shape that waits is never Jean-Marie, but one

darker; and stronger;--and these are surely voices of tired souls. I who

cry to Thee, thou dear black Giver of the perpetual rest, "_Ah! déchâgé

moin vite, chè! moin lasse!_"