Two Years in the French West Indies Part 3

XIII.

Following the Rue Victor Hugo in the direction of the Fort,--crossing the Riviere Roxelane, or Riviere 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 princ.i.p.al 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 ma.s.s 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-zie_ is vermilion; the _couronne_, 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-Die-manie-moin_ ("the Good-G.o.d handled me"), which has something like finger-marks upon it;--the _lambi_, a huge sea-snail;--the _pisquette_, the _laline_ (the Moon);--the _c.r.a.paud-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 n.o.blest 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s-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 a.s.sures 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 Pelee 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 Pa.s.sion. 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 _Cimetiere 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE CIMETeRE 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 Parna.s.se, 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 ma.s.s;--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 pa.s.sing 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 fact.i.tious 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-a-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 acc.u.mulating 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.'" *

* "Enquete sur le Serpent de la Martinique (Vipere Fer-de- Lance, Bothrops Lanceole, etc.)" Par le Docteur E. Rufz. 2 ed. 1859. Paris: Germer-Balliere. 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 Pere 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.sured 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, p.u.s.s.y 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 p.u.s.s.y 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 baga.s.se 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 Parna.s.se; 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.