Two Years in the French West Indies Part 4

A moment after pa.s.sing the gate you are in twilight,--though the sun may be blinding on the white road without. All about you is a green gloaming, up through which you see immense trunks rising. Follow the first path that slopes up on your left as you proceed, if you wish to obtain the best general view of the place in the shortest possible time.

As you proceed, the garden on your right deepens more and more into a sort of ravine;--on your left rises a sort of foliage-shrouded cliff; and all this in a beautiful crepuscular dimness, made by the foliage of great trees meeting overhead. Palms rooted a hundred feet below you hold their heads a hundred feet above you; yet they can barely reach the light.... Farther on the ravine widens to frame in two tiny lakes, dotted with artificial islands, which are miniatures of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Dominica: these are covered with tropical plants, many of which are total strangers even here: they are natives of India, Senegambia, Algeria, and the most eastern East. Arbores. cent ferps of unfammiliar elegance curve up from path-verge lake-brink; and the great _arbre-du-voyageur_ outspreads its colossal fan. Giant lianas droop down over the way in loops and festoons; tapering green cords, which are creepers descending to take root, hang everywhere; and parasites with stems thick as cables coil about the trees like boas. Trunks shooting up out of sight, into the green wilderness above, display no bark; you cannot guess what sort of trees they are; they are so thickly wrapped in creepers as to seem pillars of leaves. Between you and the sky, where everything is fighting for sun, there is an almost unbroken vault of leaves, a cloudy green confusion in which nothing particular is distinguishable.

You come to breaks now and then in the green steep to your left,--openings created for cascades pouring down from one mossed basin of brown stone to another,--or gaps occupied by flights of stone steps, green with mosses, and chocolate-colored by age. These steps lead to loftier paths; and all the stone-work,-the grottos, bridges, basins, terraces, steps,--are darkened by time and velveted with mossy things.... It is of another century, this garden: special ordinances were pa.s.sed concerning it during the French Revolution (_An. II._);--it is very quaint; it suggests an art spirit as old as Versailles, or older; but it is indescribably beautiful even now.

... At last you near the end, to hear the roar of falling water;--there is a break in the vault of green above the bed of a river below you; and at a sudden turn you in sight of the cascade. Before you is the Morne itself; and against the burst of descending light you discern a precipice-verge. Over it, down one green furrow in its brow, tumbles the rolling foam of a cataract, like falling smoke, to be caught below in a succession of moss-covered basins. The first clear leap of the water is nearly seventy feet.... Did Josephine ever rest upon that shadowed bench near by?... She knew all these paths by heart: surely they must have haunted her dreams in the after-time!

Returning by another path, you may have a view of other cascades-though none so imposing. But they are beautiful; and you will not soon forget the effect of one,--flanked at its summit by white-stemmed palms which lift their leaves so high into the light that the loftiness of them gives the sensation of vertigo.... Dizzy also the magnificence of the great colonnade of palmistes and angelins, two hundred feet high, through which: you pa.s.s if you follow the river-path from the cascade--the famed _Allee des duels_....

The vast height, the pillared solemnity of the ancient trees in the green dimness, the solitude, the strangeness of shapes but half seen,--suggesting fancies of silent aspiration, or triumph, or despair,--all combine to produce a singular impression of awe.... You are alone; you hear no human voice,--no sounds but the rushing of the river over its volcanic rocks, and the creeping of millions of lizards and tree-frogs and little toads. You see no human face; but you see all around you the labor of man being gnawed and devoured by nature,--broken bridges, sliding steps, fallen arches, strangled fountains with empty basins;--and everywhere arises the pungent odor of decay. This omnipresent odor affects one unpleasantly;--it never ceases to remind you that where Nature is most puissant to charm, there also is she mightiest to destroy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CASCADE IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES.]

The beautiful garden is now little more than a wreck of what it once was; since the fall of the Empire it has been shamefully abused and neglected. Some _agronome_ sent out to take charge of it by the Republic, began its destruction by cutting down acres of enormous and magnificent trees,--including a superb alley of plants,--for the purpose of experimenting with roses. But the rose-trees would not be cultivated there; and the serpents avenged the demolition by making the experimental garden unsafe to enter;--they always swarm into underbrush and shrubbery after forest-trees have been clearedd away....

Subsequently the garden was greatly damaged by storms and torrential rains; the mountain river overflowed, carrying bridges away and demolishing stone-work. No attempt was made to repair these destructions; but neglect alone would not have ruined the lovliness of the place;--barbarism was necessary! Under the present negro-radical regime orders have been given for the wanton destruction of trees older than the colony itself;--and marvels that could not be replaced in a hundred generations were cut down and converted into charcoal for the use of public inst.i.tutions.

XIX.

How gray seem the words of poets in the presence is Nature!... The enormous silent poem of color and light--(you who know only the North do not know color, do not know light!)--of sea and sky, of the woods and the peaks, so far surpa.s.ses imagination as to paralyze it--mocking the language of admiration, defying all power of expression. That is before you which never can be painted or chanted, because there is no cunning of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your most hopeless ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. And the sight of this supreme terrestrial expression of creative magic numbs thought. In the great centres of civilization we admire and study only the results of mind,--the products of human endeavor: here one views only the work of Nature,--but Nature in all her primeval power, as in the legendary frostless morning of creation. Man here seems to bear scarcely more relation to the green life about him than the insect; and the results of human effort seem impotent by comparison son with the operation of those vast blind forces which clothe the peaks and crown the dead craters with impenetrable forest. The air itself seems inimical to thought,--soporific, and yet pregnant with activities of dissolution so powerful that the mightiest tree begins to melt like wax from the moment it has ceased to live. For man merely to exist is an effort; and doubtless in the perpetual struggle of the blood to preserve itself from fermentation, there is such an expenditure of vital energy as leaves little surplus for mental exertion.

... Scarcely less than poet or philosopher, the artist, I fancy, would feel his helplessness. In the city he may find wonderful picturesqueness to invite his pencil, but when he stands face to face alone with Nature he will discover that he has no colors! The luminosities of tropic foliage could only be imitated in fire. He who desires to paint a West Indian forest,--a West Indian landscape,--must take his view from some great height, through which the colors come to his eye softened and subdued by distance,--toned with blues or purples by the astonishing atmosphere.

... It is sunset as I write these lines, and there are witchcrafts of color. Looking down the narrow, steep street opening to the bay, I see the motionless silhouette of the steamer on a perfectly green sea,--under a lilac sky,--against a prodigious orange light.

XX.

In these tropic lat.i.tudes Night does not seem "to fall,"--to descend over the many-peaked land: it appears to rise up, like an exhalation, from the ground. The coast-lines darken first;--then the slopes and the lower hills and valleys become shadowed;--then, very swiftly, the gloom mounts to the heights, whose very loftiest peak may remain glowing like a volcano at its tip for several minutes after the rest of the island is veiled in blackness and all the stars are out....

[Ill.u.s.tration: DEPARTURE OF STEAMER FOR FORT-DE-FRANCE.]

... Tropical nights have a splendor that seems strange to northern eyes.

The sky does not look so high--so far way as in the North; but the stars are larger, and the luminosity greater.

With the rising of the moon all the violet of the sky flushes;--there is almost such a rose-color as heralds northern dawn.

Then the moon appears over the mornes, very large, very bright--brighter certainly than many a befogged sun one sees in northern Novembers; and it seems to have a weird magnetism--this tropical moon. Night-birds, insects, frogs,--everything that can sing,--all sing very low on the nights of great moons. Tropical wood-life begins with dark: in the immense white light of a full moon this nocturnal life seems afraid to cry out as usual. Also, this moon has a singular effect on the nerves.

It is very difficult to sleep on such bright nights: you feel such a vague uneasiness as the coming of a great storm gives....

XXI.

You reach Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, steamer from St. Pierre, in about an hour and a... There is an overland route--_La Trace_, but it twenty-five-mile ride, and a weary one in such a climate, notwithstanding the indescribable beauty of the landscapes which the lofty road commands.

Rebuilt in wood after the almost total destruction by an earthquake of its once picturesque streets of stone, Fort-de-France (formerly Fort-Royal) has little of outward interest by comparison with St.

Pierre. It lies in a low, moist plain, and has few remarkable buildings: you can walk allover the little town in about half an hour. But the Savane,--the great green public square, with its grand tamarinds and _sabliers_,--would be worth the visit alone, even were it not made romantic by the marble memory of Josephine.

I went to look at the white dream of her there, a creation of master-sculptors.... It seemed to me absolutely lovely.

Sea winds have bitten it; tropical rains have streaked it: some microscopic growth has darkened the exquisite hollow of the throat. And yet such is the human charm of the figure that you almost fancy you are gazing at a living presence.... Perhaps the profile is less artistically real,--statuesque to the point of betraying the chisel; but when you look straight up into the sweet creole face, you can believe she lives: all the wonderful West Indian charm of the woman is there.

She is standing just in the centre of the Savane, robed in the fashion of the First Empire, with gracious arms and shoulders bare: one hand leans upon a medallion bearing the eagle profile of Napoleon.... Seven tall palms stand in a circle around her, lifting their comely heads into the blue glory of the tropic day. Within their enchanted circle you feel that you tread holy ground,--the sacred soil of artist and poet;--here the recollections of memoir-writers vanish away; the gossip of history is hushed for you; you no longer care to know how rumor has it that she spoke or smiled or wept: only the bewitchment of her lives under the thin, soft, swaying shadows of those feminine palms.... Over violet s.p.a.ce of summer sea; through the vast splendor of azure light, she is looking back to the place of her birth, back to beautiful drowsy Trois-Islets,--and always with the same half-dreaming, half-plaintive smile,--unutterably touching....

[Ill.u.s.tration: STATUE OF JOSEPHINE.]

XXII.

One leaves Martinique with regret, even after so brief a stay: the old colonial life itself, not less than the revelation of tropic nature, having in this island a quality of uniqueness, a special charm, unlike anything previously seen.... We steam directly for Barbadoes;--the vessel will touch at the intervening islands only on her homeward route.

... Against a hot wind south,--under a sky always deepening in beauty.

Towards evening dark clouds begin to rise before us; and by nightfall they spread into one pitch-blackness over all the sky. Then comes a wind in immense sweeps, lifting the water,--but a wind that is still strangely warm. The ship rolls heavily in the dark for an hour or more;--then torrents of tepid rain make the sea smooth again; the clouds pa.s.s, and the viole transparency of tropical night reappears,--ablaze with stars.

At early morning a long low land appears on the horizon,--totally unlike the others we have seen; it has no visable volcanic forms. That is Barbadoes,--a level burning coral coast,--a streak of green, white-edged, on the verge of the sea. But hours pa.s.s before the green line begins to show outlines of foliage.

... As we approach the harbor an overhanging black cloud suddenly bursts down in illuminated rain,--through which the shapes of moored ships seem magnified as through a golden fog. It ceases as suddenly as it begun; the cloud vanishes utterly; and the azure is revealed unflecked, dazzling, wondrous.... It is a sight worth the whole journey,--the splendor of this noon sky at Barbadoes;--the horizon glow is almost blinding, the sea-line sharp as a razor-edge; and motionless upon the sapphire water nearly a hundred ships lie,--masts, spars, booms, cordage, cutting against the amazing magnificence of blue.... Mean while the island coast has clearly brought out all its beauties: first you note the long white winding thread-line of beach-coral and bright sand;--then the deep green fringe of vegetation through which roofs and spires project here and there, and quivering feathery heads of palms with white trunks. The general tone of this verdure is sombre green, though it is full of l.u.s.tre: there is a glimmer in it as of metal.

Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of misty pale, green are visible,--far slopes of low hill and plain the highest curving line, the ridge of the island, bears a row of cocoa-palms, They are so far that their stems diminish almost to invisibility: only the crests are clearly distinguishable,--like spiders hanging between land and sky. But there are no forests: the land is a naked unshadowed green far as the eye can reach beyond the coast-line. There is no waste s.p.a.ce in Barbadoes: it is perhaps one of the most densely-peopled places on the globe--(one thousand and thirty-five inhabitants to the square mile)--.and it sends black laborers by thousands to the other British colonies every year,--the surplus of its population.

... The city of Bridgetown disappoints the stranger who expects to find any exotic features of architecture or custom,--disappoints more, perhaps, than any other tropical port in this respect. Its princ.i.p.al streets give you the impression of walking through an English town,--not an old-time town, but a new one, plain almost to commonplaceness, in spite of Nelson's monument. Even the palms are powerless to lend the place a really tropical look;--the streets are narrow without being picturesque, white as lime roads and full of glare;--the manners, the costumes, the style of living, the system of business are thoroughly English;--the population lacks visible originality; and its extraordinary activity, so oddly at variance with the quiet indolence of other West Indian peoples, seems almost unnatural. Pressure of numbers has largely contributed to this characteristic; but Barbadoes would be in any event, by reason of position alone, a busy colony. As the most windward of the West Indies it has naturally become not only the chief port, but also the chief emporium of the Antilles. It has railroads, telephones, street-cars, fire and life insurance companies, good hotels, libraries and reading-rooms, and excellent public schools. Its annual export trade figures for nearly $6,000,000.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INNER BASIN, BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES.]

The fact which seems most curious to the stranger, on his first acquaintance with the city, is that most of this business activity is represented by black men--black merchants, shopkeepers, clerks. Indeed, the Barbadian population, as a ma.s.s, strikes one as the darkest in the West Indies. Black regiments march through the street to the sound of English music,--uniformed as Zouaves; black police, in white helmets and white duck uniforms, maintain order; black postmen distribute the mails; black cabmen wait for customers at a shilling an hour. It is by no means an attractive population, physically,--rather the reverse, and frankly brutal as well--different as possible from the colored race of Martinique; but it has immense energy, and speaks excellent English. One is almost startled on hearing Barbadian negroes speaking English with a strong Old Country accent Without seeing the speaker, you could scarcely believe such English uttered by black lips; and the commonest negro laborer about the port p.r.o.nounces as well as a Londoner. The purity of Barbadian English is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that, unlike most of the other islands, Barbadoes has always remained in the possession of Great Britain. Even as far back as 1676 Barbadoes was in a very different condition of prosperity from that of the other colonies, and offered a totally different social aspect--having a white population of 50,000. At that time the island could muster 20,000 infantry and 3000 horse; there were 80,000 slaves; there were 1500 houses in Bridgetown and an immense number of shops; and not less than two hundred ships were required to export the annual sugar crop alone.

But Barbadoes differs also from most of the Antilles geologically; and there can be no question that the nature of its soil has considerably influenced the physical character of its inhabitants. Although Barbadoes is now known to be also of volcanic origin,--a fact which its low undulating surface could enable no unscientific observer to suppose,--it is superficially a calcareous formation; and the remarkable effect of limestone soil upon the bodily development of a people is not less marked in this lat.i.tude than elsewhere. In most of the Antilles the white race degenerates and dwarfs under the influence of climate and environment; but the Barbadian creole--tall, muscular, large of bone--preserves and perpetuates in the tropics the strength and st.u.r.diness of his English forefathers.

XXIII.

... Night: steaming for British Guiana;--we shall touch at no port before reaching Demerara.... A strong warm gale, that compels the taking in of every awning and wind-sail. Driving tepid rain; and an intense darkness, broken only by the phosph.o.r.escence of the sea, which to-night displays extraordinary radiance.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TRAFALGAR SQUARE, BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOES.]

The steamer's wake is a great broad, seething river of fire,--white like strong moonshine: the glow is bright enough to read by. At its centre the trail is brightest;--towards either edge it pales off cloudily,--curling like smoke of phosphorus. Great sharp lights burst up momentarily through it like meteors. Weirder than this strange wake are the long slow fires that keep burning at a distance, out in the dark.

Nebulous incandescences mount up from the depths, change form, and pa.s.s;--serpentine flames wriggle by;--there are long billowing crests of fire. These seem to be formed of millions of tiny sparks, that light up all at the same time, glow for a while, disappear, reappear, and swirl away in a prolonged smouldering.

There are warm gales and heavy rain each night,--it is the hurricane season;--and it seems these become more violent the farther south we sail. But we are nearing those equinoctial regions where the calm of nature is never disturbed by storms.