I.
The first attempt made to colonize Martinique was abandoned almost as
soon as begun, because the leaders of the expedition found the country
"too rugged and too mountainous," and were "terrified by the prodigious
number of serpents which covered its soil." Landing on June 25, 1635,
Olive and Duplessis left the island after a few hours' exploration, or,
rather, observation, and made sail for Guadeloupe,--according to the
quaint and most veracious history of Père Dutertre, of the Order of
Friars-Preachers.
A single glance at the topographical map of Martinique would suffice to
confirm the father's assertion that the country was found to be
_trop haché et trop montueux_: more than two-thirds of it is peak and
mountain;--even to-day only 42,445 of its supposed 98,782 hectares have
been cultivated; and on page 426 of the last "Annuaire" (1887) I find
the statement that in the interior there are extensive Government lands
of which the area is "not exactly known." Yet mountainous as a country
must be which--although scarcely forty-nine miles long and twenty miles
in average breadth--remains partly unfamiliar to its own inhabitants
after nearly three centuries of civilization (there are not half a
dozen creoles who have travelled all over it), only two elevations in
Martinique bear the name _montagne_. These are La Montagne Pelée, in the
north, and La Montagne du Vauclin, in the south. The term _morne_,
used throughout the French West Indian colonies to designate certain
altitudes of volcanic origin, a term rather unsatisfactorily translated
in certain dictionaries as "a small mountain," is justly applied to
the majority of Martinique hills, and unjustly sometimes even to its
mightiest elevation,--called Morne Pelé, or Montagne Pelée, or simply
"La Montagne," according, perhaps, to the varying degree of respect it
inspires in different minds. But even in the popular nomenclature one
finds the orography of Martinique, as well as of other West Indian
islands, regularly classified by _pitons_, _mornes_, and _monts_ or
_montagnes_. Mornes usually have those beautiful and curious forms which
bespeak volcanic origin even to the unscientific observer: they are
most often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height; but have summits
either rounded or truncated;--their sides, green with the richest
vegetation, rise from valley-levels and coast-lines with remarkable
abruptness, and are apt to be curiously ribbed or wrinkled. The pitons,
far fewer in number, are much more fantastic in form;--volcanic
cones, or volcanic upheavals of splintered strata almost at right
angles,--sometimes sharp of line as spires, and mostly too steep for
habitation. They are occasionally mammiform, and so symmetrical that one
might imagine them artificial creations,--particularly when they
occur in pairs. Only a very important mass is dignified by the name
_montagne_... there are, as I have already observed, but two thus called
in all Martinique,--Pelée, the head and summit of the island; and La
Montagne du Vauclin, in the south-east. Vauclin is inferior in height
and bulk to several mornes and pitons of the north and north-west,--and
owes its distinction probably to its position as centre of a system
of ranges: but in altitude and mass and majesty, Pelée far outranks
everything in the island, and well deserves its special appellation, "La
Montagne."
No description could give the reader a just idea of what Martinique is,
configuratively, so well as the simple statement that, although less
than fifty miles in extreme length, and less than twenty in average
breadth, there are upwards of _four hundred mountains_ in this little
island, or of what at least might be termed mountains elsewhere.
These again are divided and interpeaked, and bear hillocks on their
slopes;--and the lowest hillock in Martinique is fifty metres high. Some
of the peaks are said to be totally inaccessible: many mornes are so
on one or two or even three sides. Ninety-one only of the principal
mountains have been named; and among these several bear similar
appellations: for example, there are two Mornes-Rouges, one in the north
and one in the south; and there are four or five Gros-Mornes. All the
elevations belong to six great groups, clustering about or radiating
from six ancient volcanic centres,--1. La Pelée; 2. Pitons du Carbet;
3. Roches Carrées; [27] 4. Vauclin; 5. Marin; 6. Morne de la Plaine.
Forty-two distinct mountain-masses belong to the Carbet system
alone,--that of Pelée including but thirteen; and the whole Carbet area
has a circumference of 120,000 metres,--much more considerable than that
of Pelée. But its centre is not one enormous pyramidal mass like that
of "La Montagne": it is marked only by a group of five remarkable
porphyritic cones,--the Pitons of Carbet;--while Pelée, dominating
everything, and filling the north, presents an aspect and occupies an
area scarcely inferior to those of AEtna.
--Sometimes, while looking at La Pelée, I have wondered if the
enterprise of the great Japanese painter who made the Hundred Views of
Fusiyama could not be imitated by some creole artist equally proud of
his native hills, and fearless of the heat of the plains or the snakes
of the slopes. A hundred views of Pelée might certainly be made: for
the enormous mass is omnipresent to dwellers in the northern part of the
island, and can be seen from the heights of the most southern mornes. It
is visible from almost any part of St. Pierre,--which nestles in a fold
of its rocky skirts. It overlooks all the island ranges, and overtops
the mighty Pitons of Carbet by a thousand feet;--you can only lose
sight of it by entering gorges, or journeying into the valleys of the
south.... But the peaked character of the whole country, and the hot
moist climate, oppose any artistic undertaking of the sort suggested:
even photographers never dream of taking views in the further interior;
nor on the east coast. Travel, moreover, is no less costly than
difficult: there are no inns or places of rest for tourists; there are,
almost daily, sudden and violent rains, which are much dreaded (since
a thorough wetting, with the pores all distended by heat, may produce
pleurisy); and there are serpents! The artist willing to devote a few
weeks of travel and study to Pelée, in spite of these annoyances and
risks, has not yet made his appearance in Martinique. [28]
[Illustration: FOOT OF PELÉE, BEHIND THE QUARTER OF THE FORT.]
Huge as the mountain looks from St. Pierre, the eye under-estimates its
bulk; and when you climb the mornes about the town, Labelle, d'Orange,
or the much grander Parnasse, you are surprised to find how much vaster
Pelée appears from these summits. Volcanic hills often seem higher, by
reason of their steepness, than they really are; but Pelée deludes in
another manner. From surrounding valleys it appears lower, and from
adjacent mornes higher than it really is: the illusion in the former
case being due to the singular slope of its contours, and the remarkable
breadth of its base, occupying nearly all the northern end of the
island; in the latter, to misconception of the comparative height of the
eminence you have reached, which deceives by the precipitous pitch of
its sides. Pelée is not very remarkable in point of altitude, however:
its height was estimated by Moreau de Jonnes at 1600 metres; and by
others at between 4400 and 4500 feet. The sum of the various imperfect
estimates made justify the opinion of Dr. Cornilliac that the extreme
summit is over 5000 feet above the sea--perhaps 5200. [29] The clouds of
the summit afford no indication to eyes accustomed to mountain scenery
in northern countries; for in these hot moist latitudes clouds hang very
low, even in fair weather. But in bulk Pelée is grandiose: it spurs out
across the island from the Caribbean to the Atlantic: the great chains
of mornes about it are merely counter-forts; the Piton Pierreux and the
Piton Pain-à-Sucre (_Sugar-loaf Peak_), and other elevations varying
from 800 to 2100 feet, are its volcanic children. Nearly thirty rivers
have their birth in its flanks,--besides many thermal springs, variously
mineralized. As the culminant point of the island, Pelée is also the
ruler of its meteorologic life,--cloud-herder, lightning-forger, and
rain-maker. During clear weather you can see it drawing to itself
all the white vapors of the land,--robbing lesser eminences of their
shoulder-wraps and head-coverings;--though the Pitons of Carbet (3700
feet) usually manage to retain about their middle a cloud-clout,--a
_lantchô_. You will also see that the clouds run in a circle about
Pelée,--gathering bulk as they turn by continual accessions from other
points. If the crater be totally bare in the morning, and shows the
broken edges very sharply against the blue, it is a sign of foul rather
than of fair weather to come. [30]
Even in bulk, perhaps, Pelée might not impress those who know the
stupendous scenery of the American ranges; but none could deny it
special attractions appealing to the senses of form and color. There is
an imposing fantasticality in its configuraion worth months of artistic
study: one does not easily tire of watching its slopes undulating
against the north sky,--and the strange jagging of its ridges,--and the
succession of its terraces crumbling down to other terraces, which again
break into ravines here and there bridged by enormous buttresses of
basalt: an extravaganza of lava-shapes overpitching and cascading into
sea and plain. All this is verdant wherever surfaces catch the sun: you
can divine what the frame is only by examining the dark and ponderous
rocks of the torrents. And the hundred tints of this verdure do not
form the only colorific charms of the landscape. Lovely as the long
upreaching slopes of cane are,--and the loftier bands of forest-growths,
so far off that they look like belts of moss,--and the more
tender-colored masses above, wrinkling and folding together up to the
frost-white clouds of the summit,--you will be still more delighted
by the shadow-colors,--opulent, diaphanous. The umbrages lining the
wrinkles, collecting in the hollows, slanting from sudden projections,
may become before your eyes almost as unreally beautiful as the
landscape colors of a Japanese fan;--they shift most generally during
the day from indigo-blue through violets and paler blues to final lilacs
and purples; and even the shadows of passing clouds have a faint blue
tinge when they fall on Pelée.
... Is the great volcano dead?... Nobody knows. Less than forty years
ago it rained ashes over all the roofs of St. Pierre;--within twenty
years it has uttered mutterings. For the moment, it appears to sleep;
and the clouds have dripped into the cup of its highest crater till it
has become a lake, several hundred yards in circumference. The crater
occupied by this lake--called L'Étang, or "The Pool"--has never been
active within human memory. There are others,--difficult and dangerous
to visit because opening on the side of a tremendous gorge; and it was
one of these, no doubt, which has always been called _La Souffrière_,
that rained ashes over the city in 1851.
The explosion was almost concomitant with the last of a series of
earthquake shocks, which began in the middle of May and ended in the
first week of August,--all much more severe in Guadeloupe than in
Martinique. In the village Au Prêcheur, lying at the foot of the western
slope of Pelée, the people had been for some time complaining of an
oppressive stench of sulphur,--or, as chemists declared it, sulphuretted
hydrogen,--when, on the 4th of August, much trepidation was caused by
a long and appalling noise from the mountain,--a noise compared by
planters on the neighboring slopes to the hollow roaring made by a
packet blowing off steam, but infinitely louder. These sounds continued
through intervals until the following night, sometimes deepening into a
rumble like thunder. The mountain guides declared: "_C'est la Souffrière
qui bout!_" (the Souffrière is boiling); and a panic seized the negroes
of the neighboring plantations. At 11 P.M. the noise was terrible enough
to fill all St. Pierre with alarm; and on the morning of the 6th the
city presented an unwonted aspect, compared by creoles who had lived
abroad to the effect of a great hoar-frost. All the roofs, trees,
balconies, awnings, pavements, were covered with a white layer of ashes.
The same shower blanched the roofs of Morne Rouge, and all the villages
about the chief city,--Carbet, Fond-Corré, and Au Prêcheur; also
whitening the neighboring country: the mountain was sending up columns
of smoke or vapor; and it was noticed that the Rivière Blanche, usually
of a glaucous color, ran black into the sea like an outpouring of
ink, staining its azure for a mile. A committee appointed to make an
investigation, and prepare an official report, found that a number of
rents had either been newly formed, or suddenly become active, in the
flank of the mountain: these were all situated in the immense gorge
sloping westward from that point now known as the Morne de la Croix.
Several were visited with much difficulty,--members of the commission
being obliged to lower themselves down a succession of precipices
with cords of lianas; and it is noteworthy that their researches were
prosecuted in spite of the momentary panic created by another outburst.
It was satisfactorily ascertained that the main force of the explosion
had been exerted within a perimeter of about one thousand yards; that
various hot springs had suddenly gushed out,--the temperature of the
least warm being about 37° Réaumur (116° F.);--that there was no change
in the configuration of the mountain;--and that the terrific sounds had
been produced only by the violent outrush of vapor and ashes from some
of the rents. In hope of allaying the general alarm, a creole priest
climbed the summit of the volcano, and there planted the great cross
which gives the height its name and still remains to commemorate the
event.
There was an extraordinary emigration of serpents from the high woods,
and from the higher to the lower plantations,--where they were killed by
thousands. For a long time Pelée continued to send up an immense
column of white vapor; but there were no more showers of ashes; and the
mountain gradually settled down to its present state of quiescence.
II.
From St. Pierre, trips to Pelée can be made by several routes;--the most
popular is that by way of Morne Rouge and the Calebasse; but the summit
can be reached in much less time by making the ascent from different
points along the coast-road to Au Prêcheur,--such as the Morne St.
Martin, or a well-known path further north, passing near the celebrated
hot springs (_Fontaines Chaudes_). You drive towards Au Prêcheur, and
begin the ascent on foot, through cane-plantations.... The road by
which you follow the north-west coast round the skirts of Pelée is very
picturesque:--you cross the Roxelane, the Rivière des Pères, the
Rivière Sèche (whose bed is now occupied only by a motionless torrent
of rocks);--passing first by the suburb of Fond-Corré, with its cocoa
groves, and broad beach of iron-gray sand,--a bathing resort;--then
Pointe Prince, and the Fond de Canonville, somnolent villages that
occupy wrinkles in the hem of Pelée's lava robe. The drive ultimately
rises and lowers over the undulations of the cliff, and is well
shadowed along the greater part of its course: you will admire many huge
_fromagers_, or silk-cotton trees, various heavy lines of tamarinds,
and groups of _flamboyants_ with thick dark feathery foliage, and
cassia-trees with long pods pending and blackening from every branch,
and hedges of _campêche_, or logwood, and calabash-trees, and
multitudes of the pretty shrubs bearing the fruit called in creole
_raisins-bò-lanmè_, or "sea-side grapes." Then you reach Au Prêcheur: a
very antiquated village, which boasts a stone church and a little public
square with a fountain in it. If you have time to cross the Rivière du
Prêcheur, a little further on, you can obtain a fine view of the coast,
which, rising suddenly to a grand altitude, sweeps round in a semicircle
over the Village of the Abysses (_Aux Abymes_),--whose name was
doubtless suggested by the immense depth of the sea at that point....
It was under the shadow of those cliffs that the Confederate cruiser
_Alabama_ once hid herself, as a fish hides in the shadow of a rock, and
escaped from her pursuer, the _Iroquois_. She had long been blockaded in
the harbor of St. Pierre by the Northern man-of-war,--anxiously
awaiting a chance to pounce upon her the instant she should leave
French waters;--and various Yankee vessels in port were to send up
rocket-signals should the _Alabama_ attempt to escape under cover of
darkness. But one night the privateer took a creole pilot on board, and
steamed out southward, with all her lights masked, and her chimneys so
arranged that neither smoke nor sparks could betray her to the enemy
in the offing. However, some Yankee vessels near enough to discern
her movements through the darkness at once shot rockets south; and the
_Iroquois_ gave chase. The _Alabama_ hugged the high shore as far as
Carbet, remaining quite invisible in the shadow of it: then she suddenly
turned and recrossed the harbor. Again Yankee rockets betrayed her
manreuvre to the _Iroquois;_ but she gained Aux Abymes, laid herself
close to the enormous black cliff, and there remained indistinguishable;
the _Iroquois_ steamed by north without seeing her. Once the Confederate
cruiser found her enemy well out of sight, she put her pilot ashore and
escaped into the Dominica channel. The pilot was a poor mulatto, who
thought himself well paid with five hundred francs!
... The more popular route to Pelée by way of Morne Rouge is otherwise
interesting... Anybody not too much afraid of the tropic sun must find
it a delightful experience to follow the mountain roads leading to the
interior from the city, as all the mornes traversed by them command
landscapes of extraordinary beauty. According to the zigzags of the way,
the scenery shifts panoramically. At one moment you are looking down
into valleys a thousand feet below, at another, over luminous leagues
of meadow or cane-field, you see some far crowding of cones and cratered
shapes;--sharp as the teeth of a saw, and blue as sapphire,--with
further eminences ranging away through pearline color to high-peaked
remotenesses of vapory gold. As you follow the windings of such a way
as the road of the Morne Labelle, or the Morne d'Orange, the city
disappears and reappears many times,--always diminishing, till at last
it looks no bigger than a chess-board. Simultaneously distant mountain
shapes appear to unfold and lengthen;--and always, always the sea
rises with your rising. Viewed at first from the bulwark (_boulevard_)
commanding the roofs of the town, its horizon-line seemed straight and
keen as a knife-edge;--but as you mount higher, it elongates, begins
to curve; and gradually the whole azure expanse of water broadens out
roundly like a disk. From certain very lofty summits further inland you
behold the immense blue circle touching the sky all round you,--except
where a still greater altitude, like that of Pelée or the Pitons, breaks
the ring; and this high vision of the sea has a phantasmal effect hard
to describe, and due to vapory conditions of the atmosphere. There are
bright cloudless days when, even as seen from the city, the ocean-verge
has a spectral vagueness; but on any day, in any season, that you ascend
to a point dominating the sea by a thousand feet, the rim of the visible
world takes a ghostliness that startles,--because the prodigious light
gives to all near shapes such intense sharpness of outline and vividness
of color.
Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain routes
from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to Morne Rouge
surpasses them, notwithstanding that it almost immediately leaves the
city behind, and out of sight. Excepting only _La Trace_,--the long
route winding over mountain ridges and between primitive forests south
to Fort-de-France,--there is probably no section of national highway in
the island more remarkable than the Morne Rouge road. Leaving the Grande
Rue by the public conveyance, you drive out through the Savane du Fort,
with its immense mango and tamarind trees, skirting the Roxelane. Then
reaching the boulevard, you pass high Morne Labelle,--and then the
Jardin des Plantes on the right, where white-stemmed palms are lifting
their heads two hundred feet,--and beautiful Parnasse, heavily timbered
to the top;--while on your left the valley of the Roxelane shallows
up, and Pelée shows less and less of its tremendous base. Then you pass
through the sleepy, palmy, pretty Village of the Three Bridges (_Trois
Ponts_),--where a Fahrenheit thermometer shows already three degrees of
temperature lower than at St. Pierre;--and the national road, making a
sharp turn to the right, becomes all at once very steep--so steep that
the horses can mount only at a walk. Around and between the wooded hills
it ascends by zigzags,--occasionally overlooking the sea,--sometimes
following the verges of ravines. Now and then you catch glimpses of the
road over which you passed half an hour before undulating far below,
looking narrow as a tape-line,--and of the gorge of the Roxelane,--and
of Pelée, always higher, now thrusting out long spurs of green and
purple land into the sea. You drive under cool shadowing of mountain
woods--under waving bamboos like enormous ostrich feathers dyed
green,--and exquisite tree-ferns thirty to forty feet high,--and
imposing ceibas, with strangely buttressed trunks,--and all sorts of
broad-leaved forms: cachibous, balisiers, bananiers.... Then you reach a
plateau covered with cane, whose yellow expanse is bounded on the right
by a demilune of hills sharply angled as crystals;--on the left it
dips seaward; and before you Pelée's head towers over the shoulders of
intervening mornes. A strong cool wind is blowing; and the horses can
trot a while. Twenty minutes, and the road, leaving the plateau, becomes
steep again;--you are approaching the volcano over the ridge of a
colossal spur. The way turns in a semicircle,--zigzags,--once more
touches the edge of a valley,--where the clear fall might be nearly
fifteen hundred feet. But narrowing more and more, the valley becomes
an ascending gorge; and across its chasm, upon the brow of the opposite
cliff, you catch sight of houses and a spire seemingly perched on the
verge, like so many birds'-nests,--the village of Morne Rouge. It is two
thousand feet above the sea; and Pelée, although looming high over it,
looks a trifle less lofty now.
One's first impression of Morne Rouge is that of a single straggling
street of gray-painted cottages and shops (or rather booths), dominated
by a plain church, with four pursy-bodied palmistes facing the main
porch. Nevertheless, Morne Rouge is not a small place, considering its
situation;--there are nearly five thousand inhabitants; but in order to
find out where they live, you must leave the public road, which is on a
ridge, and explore the high-hedged lanes leading down from it on
either side. Then you will find a veritable city of little wooden
cottages,--each screened about with banana-trees, Indian-reeds, and
_pommiers-roses_. You will also see a number of handsome private
residences--country-houses of wealthy merchants; and you will find that
the church, though uninteresting exteriorly, is rich and impressive
within: it is a famous shrine, where miracles are alleged to have been
wrought. Immense processions periodically wend their way to it from
St. Pierre,--starting at three or four o'clock in the morning, so as to
arrive before the sun is well up.... But there are no woods here,--only
fields. An odd tone is given to the lanes by a local custom of planting
hedges of what are termed _roseaux d' Inde_, having a dark-red foliage;
and there is a visible fondness for ornamental plants with crimson
leaves. Otherwise the mountain summit is somewhat bare; trees have a
scrubby aspect. You must have noticed while ascending that the palmistes
became smaller as they were situated higher: at Morne Rouge they are
dwarfed,--having a short stature, and very thick trunks.
In spite of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the
valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat
bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray
tint of the buildings,--very melancholy by comparison with the apricot
and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless
gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne Rouge,
where people are literally dwelling in the clouds. Rolling down like
white smoke from Pelée, these often create a dismal fog; and Morne Rouge
is certainly one of the rainiest places in the world. When it is dry
everywhere else, it rains at Morne Rouge. It rains at least three
hundred and sixty days and three hundred and sixty nights of the year.
It rains almost invariably once in every twenty-four hours; but oftener
five or six times. The dampness is phenomenal. All mirrors become
patchy; linen moulds in one day; leather turns while woollen goods feel
as if saturated with moisture; new brass becomes green; steel crumbles
into red powder; wood-work rots with astonishing rapidity; salt is
quickly transformed into brine; and matches, unless kept in a very warm
place, refuse to light. Everything moulders and peels and decomposes;
even the frescos of the church-interior lump out in immense blisters;
and a microscopic vegetation, green or brown, attacks all exposed
surfaces of timber or stone. At night it is often really cold;--and
it is hard to understand how, with all this dampness and coolness and
mouldiness, Morne Rouge can be a healthy place. But it is so, beyond
any question: it is the great Martinique resort for invalids; strangers
debilitated by the climate of Trinidad or Cayenne come to it for
recuperation.
[Illustration: VILLAGE OF MORNE ROUGE, MARTINIQUE]
Leaving the village by the still uprising road, you will be surprised,
after a walk of twenty minutes northward, by a magnificent view,--the
vast valley of the Champ-Flore, watered by many torrents, and
bounded south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of
mountains,--mountains broken, peaked, tormented-looking, and tinted
(_irisées_, as the creoles say) with all those gem-tones distance gives
in a West Indian atmosphere. Particularly impressive is the beauty of
one purple cone in the midst of this many-colored chain: the Piton Gélé.
All the valley-expanse of rich land is checkered with alternations of
meadow and cane and cacao,--except northwestwardly, where woods billow
out of sight beyond a curve. Facing this landscape, on your left, are
mornes of various heights,--among which you will notice La Calebasse,
overtopping everything but Pelée shadowing behind it;--and a grass-grown
road leads up westward from the national highway towards the volcano.
This is the Calebasse route to Pelée.
III.
We must be very sure of the weather before undertaking the ascent of
Pelée; for if one merely selects some particular leisure day in advance,
one's chances of seeing anything from the summit are considerably
less than an astronomer's chances of being able to make a satisfactory
observation of the next transit of Venus. Moreover, if the heights
remain even partly clouded, it may not be safe to ascend the Morne de la
Croix,--a cone-point above the crater itself, and ordinarily invisible
from below. And a cloudless afternoon can never be predicted from the
aspect of deceitful Pelée: when the crater edges are quite clearly cut
against the sky at dawn, you may be tolerably certain there will be bad
weather during the day; and when they are all bare at sundown, you have
no good reason to believe they will not be hidden next morning. Hundreds
of tourists, deluded by such appearances, have made the weary trip in
vain,--found themselves obliged to return without having seen anything
but a thick white cold fog. The sky may remain perfectly blue for weeks
in every other direction, and Pelée's head remain always hidden. In
order to make a successful ascent, one must not wait for a period of
dry weather,--one might thus wait for years! What one must look for is a
certain periodicity in the diurnal rains,--a regular alternation of sun
and cloud; such as characterizes a certain portion of the _hivernage_,
or rainy summer season, when mornings and evenings are perfectly limpid,
with very heavy sudden rains in the middle of the day. It is of no use
to rely on the prospect of a dry spell. There is no really dry weather,
notwithstanding there recurs--in books--a _Saison de la Sécheresse_. In
fact, there are no distinctly marked seasons in Martinique:--a little
less heat and rain from October to July, a little more rain and heat
from July to October: that is about all the notable difference! Perhaps
the official notification by cannon-shot that the hivernage, the
season of heavy rains and hurricanes, begins on July 15th, is no more
trustworthy than the contradictory declarations of Martinique authors
who have attempted to define the vague and illusive limits of the
tropic seasons. Still, the Government report on the subject is more
satisfactory than any: according to the "Annuaire," there are these
seasons:--1. _Saison fraîche_. December to March. Rainfall, about 475
millimetres. 2. _Saison chaude et sèche_. April to July. Rainfall, about
140 millimetres. 3. _Saison chaude et pluvieuse_. July to November.
Rainfall average, 121 millimetres.
Other authorities divide the _saison chaude et sèche_ into two periods,
of which the latter, beginning about May, is called the _Renouveau_; and
it is at least true that at the time indicated there is a great burst
of vegetal luxuriance. But there is always rain, there are almost always
clouds, there is no possibility of marking and dating the beginnings
and the endings of weather in this country where the barometer is almost
useless, and the thermometer mounts in the sun to twice the figure
it reaches in the shade. Long and patient observation has, however,
established the fact that during the hivernage, if the heavy showers
have a certain fixed periodicity,--falling at midday or in the heated
part of the afternoon,--Pelée is likely to be clear early in the
morning; and by starting before daylight one can then have good chances
of a fine view from the summit.
IV.
At five o'clock of a September morning, warm and starry, I leave St.
Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent by the
shortest route of all,--that of the Morne St. Martin, one of Pelée's
western counterforts. We drive north along the shore for about half an
hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a winding mountain road,
leading to the upper plantations, between leagues of cane. The sky
begins to brighten as we ascend, and a steely glow announces that day
has begun on the other side of the island. Miles up, the crest of the
volcano cuts sharp as a saw-edge against the growing light: there is not
a cloud visible. Then the light slowly yellows behind the vast cone;
and one of the most beautiful dawns I ever saw reveals on our right
an immense valley through which three rivers flow. This deepens very
quickly as we drive; the mornes about St. Pierre, beginning to catch
the light, sink below us in distance; and above them, southwardly, an
amazing silouette begins to rise,--all blue,--a mountain wall capped
with cusps and cones, seeming high as Pelée itself in the middle,
but sinking down to the sea-level westward. There are a number of
extraordinary acuminations; but the most impressive shape is the
nearest,--a tremendous conoidal mass crowned with a group of peaks, of
which two, taller than the rest, tell their name at once by the beauty
of their forms,--the Pitons of Carbet. They wear their girdles of cloud,
though Pelée is naked to-day. All this is blue: the growing light only
deepens the color, does not dissipate it;--but in the nearer valleys
gleams of tender yellowish green begin to appear. Still the sun has
not been able to show himself;--it will take him some time yet to climb
Pelée.
Reaching the last plantation, we draw rein in a village of small wooden
cottages,--the quarters of the field hands,--and receive from the
proprietor, a personal friend of my friends, the kindest welcome. At his
house we change clothing and prepare for the journey;--he provides for
our horses, and secures experienced guides for us,--two young colored
men belonging to the plantation. Then we begin the ascent. The guides
walk before, barefoot, each carrying a cutlass in his hand and a package
on his head--our provisions, photographic instruments, etc.
The mountain is cultivated in spots up to twenty-five hundred feet; and
for three-quarters of an hour after leaving the planter's residence we
still traverse fields of cane and of manioc. The light is now strong in
the valley; but we are in the shadow of Pelée. Cultivated fields end at
last; the ascending path is through wild cane, wild guavas, guinea-grass
run mad, and other tough growths, some bearing pretty pink blossoms.
The forest is before us. Startled by our approach, a tiny fer-de-lance
glides out from a bunch of dead wild-cane, almost under the bare feet of
our foremost guide, who as instantly decapitates it with a touch of his
cutlass. It is not quite fifteen inches long, and almost the color of
the yellowish leaves under which it had been hiding.... The conversation
turns on snakes as we make our first halt at the verge of the woods.
Hundreds may be hiding around us; but a snake never shows himself by
daylight except under the pressure of sudden alarm. We are not likely,
in the opinion of all present, to meet with another. Every one in the
party, except myself, has some curious experience to relate. I hear for
the first time, about the alleged inability of the trigonocephalus to
wound except at a distance from his enemy of not less than one-third of
his length;--about M. A--, a former director of the Jardin des Plantes,
who used to boldly thrust his arm into holes where he knew snakes were,
and pull them out,--catching them just behind the head and wrapping the
tail round his arm,--and place them alive in a cage without ever getting
bitten;--about M. B--, who, while hunting one day, tripped in the coils
of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his fright that the
serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite him;--about M. C--, who
could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail, and "crack it like a whip"
until the head would fly off;--about an old white man living in the
Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-meat, and who always kept in his
ajoupa "a keg of salted serpents" (_yon ka sèpent-salé_);--about a
monster eight feet long which killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles
Fabre's white cat, but was also killed by the cat after she had been
caught in the folds of the reptile;--about the value of snakes as
protectors of the sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats;--about an
unsuccessful effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe,
to introduce the fer-de-lance there;--about the alleged power of a
monstrous toad, the _crapaud-ladre_, to cause the death of the snake
that swallows it;--and, finally, about the total absence of the idyllic
and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to the presence
of reptiles everywhere. "Even the flora and fauna of the country remain
to a large extent unknown,"--adds the last speaker, an amiable old
physician of St. Pierre,--"because the existence of the fer-de-lance
renders all serious research dangerous in the extreme."
My own experiences do not justify my taking part in such a
conversation;--I never saw alive but two very small specimens of the
trigonocephalus. People who have passed even a considerable time
in Martinique may have never seen a fer-de-lance except in a jar of
alcohol, or as exhibited by negro snake-catchers, tied fast to a bamboo,
But this is only because strangers rarely travel much in the interior
of the country, or find themselves on country roads after sundown. It is
not correct to suppose that snakes are uncommon even in the neighborhood
of St. Pierre: they are often killed on the bulwarks behind the city and
on the verge of the Savane; they have been often washed into the streets
by heavy rains; and many washer-women at the Roxelane have been bitten
by them. It is considered very dangerous to walk about the bulwarks
after dark;--for the snakes, which travel only at night, then descend
from the mornes towards the river, The Jardin des Plantes shelters great
numbers of the reptiles; and only a few days prior to the writing of
these lines a colored laborer in the garden was stricken and killed by a
fer-de-lance measuring one metre and sixty-seven centimetres in length.
In the interior much larger reptiles are sometimes seen: I saw one
freshly killed measuring six feet five inches, and thick as a man's leg
in the middle. There are few planters in the island who have not some
of their hands bitten during the cane-cutting and cocoa-gathering
seasons;--the average annual mortality among the class of _travailleurs_
from serpent bite alone is probably fifty, [31]--always fine young men
or women in the prime of life. Even among the wealthy whites deaths from
this cause are less rare than might be supposed: I know one gentleman, a
rich citizen of St, Pierre, who in ten years lost three relatives by
the trigonocephalus,--the wound having in each case been received in
the neighborhood of a vein. When the vein has been pierced, cure is
impossible.
V.
... We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields,
and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening
in the west. It has already broadened surprisingly, the sea appears to
have risen up, not as a horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure
precipice: what will it look like when we shall have reached the top?
Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands--the whole _atelier_,
as it is called, of a plantation slowly descending a slope, hewing
the canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder
(_amarreuse_): she gathers the canes as they are cut down; binds them
with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and carries them
away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so beautifully that
it is a delight to watch them. One cannot often enjoy such a spectacle
nowadays; for the introduction of the piece-work system has destroyed
the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the island, with rare
exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an
army;--first advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then
the amareuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the
ka, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the song;--and
lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old days, too, it
was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an English corsair on the
coast converted this soldiery of labor into veritable military: more
than one attack was repelled by the cutlasses of a plantation atelier.
At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though not
distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice, powerful as a
bugle, rings out,--the voice of the Commandeur: he walks along the line,
looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I ask one of our guides what
the cry is:--
--"_Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent_," he replies. (He is
telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the cutlassers
approach the end of their task, the greater the danger: for the
reptiles, retreating before them to the last clump of cane,
become massed there, and will fight desperately. Regularly as the
ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human lives from among
the workers. But when one falls, another steps into the vacant
place,--perhaps the Commandeur himself: these dark swordsmen never
retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as before; there is hardly any
emotion; the travailleur is a fatalist.... [32]
VI.
... We enter the grands-bois,--the primitive forest,--the "high woods."
As seen with a field-glass from St. Pierre, these woods present only the
appearance of a band of moss belting the volcano, and following all
its corrugations,--so densely do the leafy crests intermingle. But on
actually entering them, you find yourself at once in green twilight,
among lofty trunks uprising everywhere like huge pillars wrapped with
vines;--and the interspaces between these bulks are all occupied
by lianas and parasitic creepers,--some monstrous,--veritable
parasite-trees,--ascending at all angles, or dropping straight down from
the tallest crests to take root again. The effect in the dim light
is that of innumerable black ropes and cables of varying thicknesses
stretched taut from the soil to the tree-tops, and also from branch
to branch, like rigging. There are rare and remarkable trees
here,--acomats, courbarils, balatas, ceibas or fromagers, acajous,
gommiers;--hundreds have been cut down by charcoal-makers; but the
forest is still grand. It is to be regretted that the Government has
placed no restriction upon the barbarous destruction of trees by the
_charbonniers_, which is going on throughout the island. Many valuable
woods are rapidly disappearing. The courbaril, yielding a fine-grained,
heavy, chocolate-colored timber; the balata, giving a wood even heavier,
denser, and darker; the acajou, producing a rich red wood, with a
strong scent of cedar; the bois-de-fer; the bois d'Inde; the superb
acomat,--all used to flourish by tens of thousands upon these volcanic
slopes, whose productiveness is eighteen times greater than that of
the richest European soil. All Martinique furniture used to be made of
native woods; and the colored cabinet-makers still produce work which
would probably astonish New York or London manufacturers. But to-day the
island exports no more hard woods: it has even been found necessary
to import much from neighboring islands;--and yet the destruction
of forests still goes on. The domestic fabrication of charcoal from
forest-trees has been estimated at 1,400,000 hectolitres per annum.
Primitive forest still covers the island to the extent of 21.37 per
cent; but to find precious woods now, one must climb heights like those
of Pelée and Carbet, or penetrate into the mountains of the interior.
[Illustration: LA MONTAGNE PELÉE, AS SEEN FROM GRANDE ANSE.]
Most common formerly on these slopes were the gommiers, from which
canoes of a single piece, forty-five feet long by seven wide, used to
be made. There are plenty of gommiers still; but the difficulty of
transporting them to the shore has latterly caused a demand for the
gommiers of Dominica. The dimensions of canoes now made from these trees
rarely exceed fifteen feet in length by eighteen inches in width: the
art of making them is an inheritance from the ancient Caribs. First the
trunk is shaped to the form of the canoe, and pointed at both ends; it
is then hollowed out. The width of the hollow does not exceed six inches
at the widest part; but the cavity is then filled with wet sand, which
in the course of some weeks widens the excavation by its weight, and
gives the boat perfect form. Finally gunwales of plank are fastened on;
seats are put in--generally four;--and no boat is more durable nor more
swift.
... We climb. There is a trace rather than a foot-path;--no visible
soil, only vegetable detritus, with roots woven over it in every
direction. The foot never rests on a flat surface,--only upon surfaces
of roots; and these are covered, like every protruding branch along the
route, with a slimy green moss, slippery as ice. Unless accustomed to
walking in tropical woods, one will fall at every step. In a little
while I find it impossible to advance. Our nearest guide, observing my
predicament, turns, and without moving the bundle upon his head, cuts
and trims me an excellent staff with a few strokes of his cutlass. This
staff not only saves me from dangerous slips, but also serves at times
to probe the way; for the further we proceed, the vaguer the path
becomes. It was made by the _chasseurs-de-choux_ (cabbage-hunters),--the
negro mountaineers who live by furnishing heads of young cabbage-palm to
the city markets; and these men also keep it open,--otherwise the woods
would grow over it in a month. Two chasseurs-de-choux stride past us
as we advance, with their freshly gathered palm-salad upon their heads,
wrapped in cachibou or balisier leaves, and tied with lianas. The
palmiste-franc easily reaches a stature of one hundred feet; but the
young trees are so eagerly sought for by the chasseurs-de-choux that in
these woods few reach a height of even twelve feet before being cut.
... Walking becomes more difficult;--there seems no termination to the
grands-bois: always the same faint green light, the same rude natural
stair-way of slippery roots,--half the time hidden by fern leaves and
vines. Sharp ammoniacal scents are in the air; a dew, cold as ice-water,
drenches our clothing. Unfamiliar insects make trilling noises in dark
places; and now and then a series of soft clear notes ring out, almost
like a thrush's whistle: the chant of a little tree-frog. The path
becomes more and more overgrown; and but for the constant excursions of
the cabbage-hunters, we should certainly have to cutlass every foot of
the way through creepers and brambles. More and more amazing also is
the interminable interweaving of roots: the whole forest is thus spun
together--not underground so much as overground. These tropical trees
do not strike deep, although able to climb steep slopes of porphyry and
basalt: they send out great far-reaching webs of roots,--each such web
interknotting with others all round it, and these in turn with further
ones;--while between their reticulations lianas ascend and descend:
and a nameless multitude of shrubs as tough as india-rubber push up,
together with mosses, grasses, and ferns. Square miles upon square miles
of woods are thus interlocked and interbound into one mass solid enough
to resist the pressure of a hurricane; and where there is no path
already made, entrance into them can only be effected by the most
dexterous cutlassing.
An inexperienced stranger might be puzzled to understand how this
cutlassing is done. It is no easy feat to sever with one blow a liana
thick as a man's arm; the trained cutlasser does it without apparent
difficulty: moreover, he cuts horizontally, so as to prevent the severed
top presenting a sharp angle and proving afterwards dangerous. He never
appears to strike hard,--only to give light taps with his blade, which
flickers continually about him as he moves. Our own guides in cutlassing
are not at all inconvenienced by their loads; they walk perfectly
upright, never stumble, never slip, never hesitate, and do not even seem
to perspire: their bare feet are prehensile. Some creoles in our party,
habituated to the woods, walk nearly as well in their shoes; but they
carry no loads.
... At last we are rejoiced to observe that the trees are becoming
smaller;--there are no more colossal trunks;--there are frequent
glimpses of sky: the sun has risen well above the peaks, and sends
occasional beams down through the leaves. Ten minutes, and we reach a
clear space,--a wild savane, very steep, above which looms a higher belt
of woods. Here we take another short rest.
Northward the view is cut off by a ridge covered with herbaceous
vegetation;--but to the south-west it is open, over a gorge of which
both sides are shrouded in sombre green-crests of trees forming a
solid curtain against the sun. Beyond the outer and lower cliff
valley-surfaces appear miles away, flinging up broad gleams of
cane-gold; further off greens disappear into blues, and the fantastic
masses of Carbet loom up far higher than before. St. Pierre, in a curve
of the coast, is a little red-and-yellow semicircular streak, less than
two inches long. The interspaces between far mountain chains,--masses of
pyramids, cones, single and double humps, queer blue angles as of raised
knees under coverings,--resemble misty lakes: they are filled with
brume;--the sea-line has vanished altogether. Only the horizon,
enormously heightened, can be discerned as a circling band of faint
yellowish light,--auroral, ghostly,--almost on a level with the tips of
the Pitons. Between this vague horizon and the shore, the sea no longer
looks like sea, but like a second hollow sky reversed. All the landscape
has unreal beauty:--there are no keen lines; there are no definite
beginnings or endings; the tints are half-colors only;--peaks rise
suddenly from mysteries of bluish fog as from a flood; land melts
into sea the same hue. It gives one the idea of some great aquarelle
unfinished,--abandoned before tones were deepened and details brought
out.
VII.
We are overlooking from this height the birthplaces of several rivers;
and the rivers of Pelée are the clearest and the coolest of the island.
From whatever direction the trip be undertaken, the ascent of the
volcano must be made over some one of those many immense ridges sloping
from the summit to the sea west, north, and east,--like buttresses
eight to ten miles long,--formed by ancient lava-torrents. Down the deep
gorges between them the cloud-fed rivers run,--receiving as they descend
the waters of countless smaller streams gushing from either side of the
ridge. There are also cold springs,--one of which furnishes St. Pierre
with her _Eau-de-Gouyave_ (guava-water), which is always sweet, clear,
and cool in the very hottest weather. But the water of almost everyone
of the seventy-five principal rivers of Martinique is cool and clear and
sweet. And these rivers are curious in their way. Their average fall
has been estimated at nine inches to every six feet;--many are
cataracts;--the Rivière de Case-Navire has a fall of nearly 150 feet to
every fifty yards of its upper course. Naturally these streams cut for
themselves channels of immense depth. Where they flow through forests
and between mornes, their banks vary from 1200 to 1600 feet high,--so
as to render their beds inaccessible; and many enter the sea through
a channel of rock with perpendicular walls from 100 to 200 feet high.
Their waters are necessarily shallow in normal weather; but during
rain-storms they become torrents thunderous, and terrific beyond
description. In order to comprehend their sudden swelling, one must
know what tropical rain is. Col. Boyer Peyreleau, in 1823, estimated the
annual rainfall in these colonies at 150 inches on the coast, to 350 on
the mountains,--while the annual fall at Paris was only eighteen inches.
The character of such rain is totally different from that of rain in
the temperate zone: the drops are enormous, heavy, like hailstones,--one
will spatter over the circumference of a saucer;--and the shower roars
so that people cannot hear each other speak without shouting. When there
is a true storm, no roofing seems able to shut out the cataract; the
best-built houses leak in all directions; and objects but a short
distance off become invisible behind the heavy curtain of water. The
ravages of such rain may be imagined! Roads are cut away in an hour;
trees are overthrown as if blown down;--for there are few West Indian
trees which plunge their roots even as low as two feet; they merely
extend them over a large diameter; and isolated trees will actually
slide under rain. The swelling of rivers is so sudden that washer-women
at work in the Roxelane and other streams have been swept away and
drowned without the least warning of their danger; the shower occurring
seven or eight miles off.
Most of these rivers are well stocked with fish, of which the _tétart_,
_banane_, _loche_, and _dormeur_ are the principal varieties. The tétart
(best of all) and the loche climb the torrents to the height of 2500 and
even 3000 feet: they have a kind of pneumatic sucker, which enables them
to cling to rocks. Under stones in the lower basins crawfish of the most
extraordinary size are taken; some will measure thirty-six inches from
claw to tail. And at all the river-mouths, during July and August, are
caught vast numbers of "_titiri_" [33] --tiny white fish, of which a
thousand might be put into one teacup. They are delicious when served in
oil,--infinitely more delicate than the sardine. Some regard them as
a particular species: others believe them to be only the fry of larger
fish,--as their periodical appearance and disappearance would seem to
indicate. They are often swept by millions into the city of St. Pierre,
with the flow of mountain-water which purifies the streets: then
you will see them swarming in the gutters, fountains, and
bathing-basins;--and on Saturdays, when the water is temporarily shut
off to allow of the pipes being cleansed, the titiri may die in the
gutters in such numbers as to make the air offensive.
[Illustration: ARBORESCENT FERNS ON A MOUNTAIN ROAD.]
The mountain-crab, celebrated for its periodical migrations, is
also found at considerable heights. Its numbers appear to have been
diminished extraordinarily by its consumption as an article of negro
diet; but in certain islands those armies of crabs described by the old
writers are still occasionally to be seen. The Père Dutertre relates
that in 1640, at St. Christophe, thirty sick emigrants, temporarily left
on the beach, were attacked and devoured alive during the night by a
similar species of crab. "They descended from the mountains in such
multitude," he tells us, "that they were heaped higher than houses over
the bodies of the poor wretches... whose bones were picked so clean that
not one speck of flesh could be found upon them."...
VIII.
... We enter the upper belt of woods--green twilight again. There are
as many lianas as ever: but they are less massive in stem;--the trees,
which are stunted, stand closer together; and the web-work of roots is
finer and more thickly spun. These are called the _petits-bois_
(little woods), in contradistinction to the grands-bois, or high woods.
Multitudes of balisiers, dwarf-palms, arborescent ferns, wild guavas,
mingle with the lower growths on either side of the path, which has
narrowed to the breadth of a wheel-rut, and is nearly concealed by
protruding grasses and fern leaves. Never does the sole of the foot
press upon a surface large as itself,--always the slippery backs of
roots crossing at all angles, like loop-traps, over sharp fragments
of volcanic rock or pumice-stone. There are abrupt descents, sudden
acclivities, mud-holes, and fissures;--one grasps at the ferns on both
sides to keep from falling; and some ferns are spiked sometimes on the
under surface, and tear the hands. But the barefooted guides stride
on rapidly, erect as ever under their loads,--chopping off with their
cutlasses any branches that hang too low. There are beautiful flowers
here,--various unfamiliar species of lobelia;--pretty red and
yellow blossoms belonging to plants which the creole physician calls
_Bromeliacoe_; and a plant like the _Guy Lussacia_ of Brazil, with
violet-red petals. There is an indescribable multitude of ferns,--a very
museum of ferns! The doctor, who is a great woodsman, says that he never
makes a trip to the hills without finding some new kind of fern; and he
had already a collection of several hundred.
The route is continually growing steeper, and makes a number of turns
and windings: we reach another bit of savane, where we have to walk over
black-pointed stones that resemble slag;--then more petits-bois, still
more dwarfed, then another opening. The naked crest of the volcano
appears like a peaked precipice, dark-red, with streaks of green, over a
narrow but terrific chasm on the left: we are almost on a level with the
crater, but must make a long circuit to reach it, through a wilderness
of stunted timber and bush. The creoles call this undergrowth _razié_:
it is really only a prolongation of the low jungle which carpets the
high forests below, with this difference, that there are fewer creepers
and much more fern.... Suddenly we reach a black gap in the path about
thirty inches wide--half hidden by the tangle of leaves,--_La Fente_. It
is a volcanic fissure which divides the whole ridge, and is said to have
no bottom: for fear of a possible slip, the guides insist upon holding
our hands while we cross it. Happily there are no more such clefts;
but there are mud-holes, snags, roots, and loose rocks beyond counting.
Least disagreeable are the _bourbiers_, in which you sink to your
knees in black or gray slime. Then the path descends into open light
again;--and we find ourselves at the Étang,--in the dead Crater of the
Three Palmistes.
An immense pool, completely encircled by high green walls of rock, which
shut out all further view, and shoot up, here and there, into cones, or
rise into queer lofty humps and knobs. One of these elevations at the
opposite side has almost the shape of a blunt horn: it is the Morne
de la Croix. The scenery is at once imposing and sinister: the shapes
towering above the lake and reflected in its still surface have the
weirdness of things seen in photographs of the moon. Clouds are circling
above them and between them;--one descends to the water, haunts us a
moment, blurring everything; then rises again. We have travelled too
slow; the clouds have had time to gather.
I look in vain for the Three Palmistes which gave the crater a name:
they were destroyed long ago. But there are numbers of young ones
scattered through the dense ferny covering of the lake-slopes,--just
showing their heads like bunches of great dark-green feathers.
--The estimate of Dr. Rufz, made in 1851, and the estimate of the last
"Annuaire" regarding the circumference of the lake, are evidently both
at fault. That of the "Annuaire," 150 metres, is a gross error: the
writer must have meant the diameter,--following Rufz, who estimated the
circumference at something over 300 paces. As we find it, the Étang,
which is nearly circular, must measure 200 yards across;--perhaps it
has been greatly swollen by the extraordinary rains of this summer. Our
guides say that the little iron cross projecting from the water about
two yards off was high and dry on the shore last season. At present
there is only one narrow patch of grassy bank on which we can rest,
between the water and the walls of the crater.
The lake is perfectly clear, with a bottom of yellowish shallow mud,
which rests--according to investigations made in 1851--upon a mass of
pumice-stone mixed in places with ferruginous sand; and the yellow mud
itself is a detritus of pumice-stone. We strip for a swim.
Though at an elevation of nearly 5000 feet, this water is not so cold
as that of the Roxelane, nor of other rivers of the north-west and
north-east coasts. It has an agreeable fresh taste, like dew. Looking
down into it, I see many larvae of the _maringouin_, or large mosquito:
no fish. The maringouins themselves are troublesome,--whirring around us
and stinging. On striking out for the middle, one is surprised to feel
the water growing slightly warmer. The committee of investigation in
1851 found the temperature of the lake, in spite of a north wind, 20.5
Centigrade, while that of the air was but 19 (about 69 F. for the water,
and 66.2 for the air). The depth in the centre is over six feet; the
average is scarcely four.
Regaining the bank, we prepare to ascend the Morne de la Croix. The
circular path by which it is commonly reached is now under water; and we
have to wade up to our waists. All the while clouds keep passing over us
in great slow whirls. Some are white and half-transparent; others opaque
and dark gray;--a dark cloud passing through; a white one looks like
a goblin. Gaining the opposite shore, we find a very rough path over
splintered stone, ascending between the thickest fern-growths possible
to imagine. The general tone of this fern is dark green; but there are
paler cloudings of yellow and pink,--due to the varying age of the
leaves, which are pressed into a cushion three or four feet high, and
almost solid enough to sit upon. About two hundred and fifty yards from
the crater edge, the path rises above this tangle, and zigzags up the
morne, which now appears twice as lofty as from the lake, where we had
a curiously foreshortened view of it. It then looked scarcely a hundred
feet high; it is more than double that. The cone is green to the top
with moss, low grasses, small fern, and creeping pretty plants, like
violets, with big carmine flowers. The path is a black line: the rock
laid bare by it looks as if burned to the core. We have now to use our
hands in climbing; but the low thick ferns give a good hold. Out of
breath, and drenched in perspiration, we reach the apex,--the highest
point of the island. But we are curtained about with clouds,--moving in
dense white and gray masses: we cannot see fifty feet away.
The top of the peak has a slightly slanting surface of perhaps twenty
square yards, very irregular in outline;--southwardly the morne pitches
sheer into a frightful chasm, between the converging of two of those
long corrugated ridges already described as buttressing the volcano on
all sides. Through a cloud-rift we can see another crater-lake twelve
hundred feet below--said to be five times larger than the Étang we have
just left: it is also of more irregular outline. This is called the
_Étang Sec_, or "Dry Pool," because dry in less rainy seasons. It
occupies a more ancient crater, and is very rarely visited: the path
leading to it is difficult and dangerous,--a natural ladder of roots and
lianas over a series of precipices. Behind us the Crater of the Three
Palmistes now looks no larger than the surface on which we stand;--over
its further boundary we can see the wall of another gorge, in which
there is a third crater-lake. West and north are green peakings, ridges,
and high lava walls steep as fortifications. All this we can only note
in the intervals between passing of clouds. As yet there is no landscape
visible southward;--we sit down and wait.
IX.
... Two crosses are planted nearly at the verge of the precipice; a
small one of iron; and a large one of wood--probably the same put up by
the Abbé Lespinasse during the panic of 1851, after the eruption. This
has been splintered to pieces by a flash of lightning; and the fragments
are clumsily united with cord. There is also a little tin plate let
into a slit in a black post: it bears a date,--_8 Avril, 1867_.... The
volcanic vents, which were active in 1851, are not visible from the
peak: they are in the gorge descending from it, at a point nearly on a
level with the Étang Sec.
The ground gives out a peculiar hollow sound when tapped, and is covered
with a singular lichen,--all composed of round overlapping leaves about
one-eighth of an inch in diameter, pale green, and tough as fish-scales.
Here and there one sees a beautiful branching growth, like a mass of
green coral: it is a gigantic moss. _Cabane-Jésus_ ("bed of-Jesus") the
patois name is: at Christmas-time, in all the churches, those decorated
cribs in which the image of the Child-Saviour is laid are filled
with it. The creeping crimson violet is also here. Fire-flies with
bronze-green bodies are crawling about;-I notice also small frogs, large
gray crickets, and a species of snail with a black shell. A solitary
humming-bird passes, with a beautiful blue head, flaming like sapphire.
All at once the peak vibrates to a tremendous sound from somewhere
below.... It is only a peal of thunder; but it startled at first,
because the mountain rumbles and grumbles occasionally.... From the
wilderness of ferns about the lake a sweet long low whistle comes--three
times;-a _siffleur-de-montagne_ has its nest there. There is a
rain-storm over the woods beneath us: clouds now hide everything but the
point on which we rest; the crater of the Palmistes becomes invisible.
But it is only for a little while that we are thus befogged: a wind
comes, blows the clouds over us, lifts them up and folds them like a
drapery, and slowly whirls them away northward. And for the first
time the view is clear over the intervening gorge,--now spanned by the
rocket-leap of a perfect rainbow.
... Valleys and mornes, peaks and ravines,--succeeding each other
swiftly as surge succeeds surge in a storm,--a weirdly tossed world, but
beautiful as it is weird: all green the foreground, with all tints of
green, shadowing off to billowy distances of purest blue. The sea-line
remains invisible as ever: you know where it is only by the zone of pale
light ringing the double sphericity of sky and ocean. And in this double
blue void the island seems to hang suspended: far peaks seem to come
up from nowhere, to rest on nothing--like forms of mirage. Useless
to attempt photography;--distances take the same color as the sea.
Vauclin's truncated mass is recognizable only by the shape of its indigo
shadows. All is vague, vertiginous;--the land still seems to quiver with
the prodigious forces that up-heaved it.
High over all this billowing and peaking tower the Pitons of Carbet,
gem-violet through the vapored miles,--the tallest one filleted with a
single soft white band of cloud. Through all the wonderful chain of the
Antilles you might seek in vain for other peaks exquisite of form as
these. Their beauty no less surprises the traveller today than it did
Columbus three hundred and eighty-six years ago, when--on the thirteenth
day of June, 1502--his caravel first sailed into sight of them, and he
asked his Indian guide the name of the unknown land, and the names of
those marvellous shapes. Then, according to Pedro Martyr de Anghiera,
the Indian answered that the name of the island was Madiana; that those
peaks had been venerated from immemorial time by the ancient peoples of
the archipelago as the birthplace of the human race; and that the
first brown habitants of Madiana, having been driven from their
natural heritage by the man-eating pirates of the south--the cannibal
Caribs,--remembered and mourned for their sacred mountains, and gave
the names of them, for a memory, to the loftiest summits of their new
home,--Hayti.... Surely never was fairer spot hallowed by the legend
of man's nursing-place than the valley blue-shadowed by those
peaks,--worthy, for their gracious femininity of shape, to seem the
visible breasts of the All-nourishing Mother,--dreaming under this
tropic sun.
Touching the zone of pale light north-east, appears a beautiful peaked
silhouette,--Dominica. We had hoped to perceive Saint Lucia; but the
atmosphere is too heavily charged with vapor to-day. How magnificent
must be the view on certain extraordinary days, when it reaches from
Antigua to the Grenadines--over a range of three hundred miles! But the
atmospheric conditions which allow of such a spectacle are rare indeed.
As a general rule, even in the most unclouded West Indian weather, the
loftiest peaks fade into the light at a distance of one hundred miles.
A sharp ridge covered with fern cuts off the view of the northern
slopes: one must climb it to look down upon Macouba. Macouba occupies
the steepest slope of Pelée, and the grimmest part of the coast: its
little _chef-lieu_ is industrially famous for the manufacture of native
tobacco, and historically for the ministrations of Père Labat, who
rebuilt its church. Little change has taken place in the parish since
his time. "Do you know Macouba?" asks a native writer;--"it is not
Pelion upon Ossa, but ten or twelve Pelions side by side with ten or
twelve Ossae, interseparated by prodigious ravines. Men can speak to
each other from places whence, by rapid walking, it would require hours
to meet;--to travel there is to experience on dry land the sensation of
the sea."
With the diminution of the warmth provoked by the exertion of climbing,
you begin to notice how cool it feels;--you could almost doubt the
testimony of your latitude. Directly east is Senegambia: we are well
south of Timbuctoo and the Sahara,--on a line with southern India. The
ocean has cooled the winds; at this altitude the rarity of the air is
northern; but in the valleys below the vegetation is African. The best
alimentary plants, the best forage, the flowers of the gardens, are
of Guinea;--the graceful date-palms are from the Atlas region: those
tamarinds, whose thick shade stifles all other vegetal life beneath it,
are from Senegal. Only, in the touch of the air, the vapory colors of
distance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not of Africa:
that strange fascination which has given to the island its poetic creole
name,--_le Pays de Revenants_. And the charm is as puissant in our
own day as it was more than two hundred years ago, when Père Dutertre
wrote:--"I have never met one single man, nor one single woman, of
all those who came back therefrom, in whom I have not remarked a most
passionate desire to return thereunto."
Time and familiarity do not weaken the charm, either for those born
among these scenes who never voyaged beyond their native island, or for
those to whom the streets of Paris and the streets of St. Pierre are
equally well known. Even at a time when Martinique had been forsaken by
hundreds of her ruined planters, and the paradise-life of the old days
had become only a memory to embitter exile,--a Creole writes:--
"Let there suddenly open before you one of those vistas, or _anses_,
with colonnades of cocoa-palm--at the end of which you see smoking the
chimney of a sugar-mill, and catch a glimpse of the hamlet of negro
cabins (_cases_);--or merely picture to yourself one of the most
ordinary, most trivial scenes: nets being hauled by two ranks of
fishermen; a _canot_ waiting for the _embellie_ to make a dash for the
beach; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and
running along the shore to get to market;--and illuminate that with
the light of our sun! What landscapes!--O Salvator Rosa! 0 Claude
Lorrain,--if I had your pencil!... Well do I remember the day on which,
after twenty years of absence, I found myself again in presence of these
wonders;--I feel once more the thrill of delight that made all my body
tremble, the tears that came to my eyes. It was my land, my own land,
that appeared so beautiful."... [34]
X.
At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the
world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new
impressions: every face was radiant.... Now all look serious;--none
speak. The first physical joy of finding oneself on this point in violet
air, exalted above the hills, soon yields to other emotions inspired by
the mighty vision and the colossal peace of the heights. Dominating
all, I think, is the consciousness of the awful antiquity of what one is
looking upon,--such a sensation, perhaps, as of old found utterance in
that tremendous question of the Book of Job:--"_Wast thou brought
forth before the hills?_"... And the blue multitude of the peaks,
the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast
resplendence,--telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless
permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath,--until something
like the fulness of a great grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For
all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and
color, will surely endure,--marvellous as now,--after we shall have lain
down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of
our rest to look upon it. [34]