Two Years in the French West Indies Part 5

... Morning: still steaming south, through a vast blue day. The azure of the heaven always seems to be growing deeper. There is a bluish-white glow in the horizon,--almost too bright to look at. An indigo sea....

There are no clouds; and the splendor endures until sunset.

Then another night, very luminous and calm. The Southern constellations burn whitely.... We are nearing the great shallows of the South American coast.

XXIV.

... It is the morning of the third day since we left Barbadoes, and for the first time since entering tropic waters all things seem changed.

The atmosphere is heavy with strange mists; and the light of an orange-colored sun, immensely magnified by vapors, illuminates a greenish-yellow sea,--foul and opaque, as if stagnant.... I remember just such a sunrise over the Louisiana gulf-coast.

We are in the shallows, moving very slowly. The line-caster keeps calling, at regular intervals: "Quarter less five, sir!" "And a half four, sir!"... There is little variation in his soundings--a quarter of a fathom or half a fathom difference. The warm air has a sickly heaviness, like the air of a swamp; the water shows olive and ochreous tones alternately;--the foam is yellow in our wake. These might be the colors of a fresh-water inundation....

A fellow-traveller tells me, as we lean over the rail, that this same viscous, glaucous sea washes the great penal colony of Cayenne--which he visited. When a convict dies there, the corpse, sewn up in a sack, is borne to the water, and a great bell tolled. Then the still surface is suddenly broken by fins innumerable--black fins of sharks rushing to the hideous funeral: they know the Bell!...

There is land in sight--very low land,--a thin dark line suggesting marshiness; and the nauseous color of the water always deepens.

As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical appearance. The sombre green line brightens color, I sharpens into a splendid fringe of fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling with palm crests. Then a mossy sea-wall comes into sight--dull gray stone--work, green-lined at all its joints. There is a fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a queer echo, and the cannon-shot once reverberated--only once: there are no mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and more ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. Vessels becalmed everywhere speck the gla.s.s-level of the sea, like insects sticking upon a mirror.

It begins, all of a sudden, to rain torrentially; and through the white storm of falling drops nothing is discernible.

XXV.

At Georgetown, steamers entering the river can lie close to the wharf;--we can enter the Government warehouses without getting wet. In fifteen minutes the shower ceases; and we leave the warehouses to find ourselves in a broad, palm-bordered street illuminated by the most prodigious day that yet shone upon our voyage. The rain has cleared the air and dissolved the mists; and the light is wondrous.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STREET IN GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA.]

My own memory of Demerara will always be a memory of enormous light. The radiance has an indescribable dazzling force that conveys the idea of electric fire;--the horizon blinds like a motionless sheet of lightning; and you dare not look at the zenith.... The brightest summer-day in the North is a gloaming to this. Men walk only under umbrellas, or with their eyes down--and the pavements, already dry, flare almost unbearably.

... Georgetown has an exotic aspect peculiar to itself,--different from that of any West Indian city we have seen; and this is chiefly due to the presence of palm-trees. For the edifices, the plan, the general idea of the town, are modern; the white streets, laid out very broad to the sweep of the sea-breeze, and drained by ca.n.a.ls running through their centres, with bridges at cross-streets, display the value of nineteenth-century knowledge regarding house-building with a view to coolness as well as to beauty. The architecture might be described as a tropicalized Swiss style--Swiss eaves are developed into veranda roofs, and Swiss porches prolonged and lengthened into beautiful piazzas and balconies. The men who devised these large cool halls, these admirably ventilated rooms, these latticed windows opening to the ceiling, may have lived in India; but the physiognomy of the town also reveals a fine sense of beauty in the designers: all that is strange and beautiful in the vegetation of the tropics has had a place contrived for it, a home prepared for it. Each dwelling has its garden; each garden blazes with singular and lovely color; but everywhere and always tower the palms.

There are colonnades of palms, clumps of palms, groves of palms-sago and cabbage and cocoa and fan palms. You can see that the palm is cherished here, is loved for its beauty, like a woman. Everywhere you find palms, in all stages of development, from the first sheaf of tender green plumes rising above the soil to the wonderful colossus that holds its head a hundred feet above the roofs; palms border the garden walks in colonnades; they are grouped in exquisite poise about the basins of fountains; they stand like magnificent pillars at either side of gates; they look into the highest windows of public buildings and hotels.

... For miles and miles and miles we drive along avenues of palms--avenues leading to opulent cane-fields, traversing queer coolie villages. Rising on either side of the road to the same level, the palms present the vista of a long unbroken double colonnade of dead-silver trunks, shining tall pillars with deep green plume-tufted summits, almost touching, almost forming something like the dream of an interminable Moresque arcade. Sometimes for a full mile the trees are only about thirty or forty feet high; then, turning into an older alley, we drive for half a league between giants nearly a hundred feet in alt.i.tude. The double perspective lines of their crests, meeting before us and behind us in a bronze-green darkness, betray only at long intervals any variation of color, where some dead leaf droops like an immense yellow feather.

XXVI.

In the marvellous light, which brings out all the rings of their bark, these palms sometimes produce a singular impression of subtle, fleshy, sentient life,--seem to move with a slowly stealthy motion as you ride or drive past them. The longer you watch them, the stronger this idea becomes,--the more they seem alive,--the more their long silver-gray articulated bodies seem to poise, undulate, stretch.... Certainly the palms of a Demerara country-road evoke no such real emotion as that produced by the stupendous palms of the Jardin des Plantes in Martinique. That beautiful, solemn, silent life up-reaching through tropical forest to the sun for warmth, for color, for power,--filled me, I remember, with a sensation of awe different from anything which I had ever experienced.... But even here in Guiana, standing alone under the sky, the palm still seems a creature rather than a tree,--gives you the idea of personality;--you could almost believe each lithe shape animated by a thinking force,--believe that all are watching you with such pa.s.sionless calm as legend lends to beings super-natural.... And I wonder if some kindred fancy might not have inspired the name given by the French colonists to the male palmiste,--_angelin_....

[Ill.u.s.tration: AVENUE IN GEORGETOWN, DEMERARA.]

Very wonderful is the botanical garden here. It is new; and there are no groves, no heavy timber, no shade; but the finely laid-out grounds,--alternations of lawn and flower-bed,--offer everywhere surprising sights. You observe curious orange-colored shrubs; plants speckled with four different colors; plants that look like wigs of green hair; plants with enormous broad leaves that seem made of colored crystal; plants that do not look like natural growths, but like idealizations of plants,--those beautiful fantasticalities imagined by sculptors. All these we see in glimpses from a carriage-window,--yellow, indigo, black, and crimson plants.... We draw rein only to observe in the ponds the green navies of the Victoria Regia,--the monster among water-lilies. It covers all the ponds and many of the ca.n.a.ls. Close to sh.o.r.e the leaves are not extraordinarily large; but they increase in breadth as they float farther out, as if gaining bulk proportionately to the depth of water. A few yards off, they are large as soup-plates; farther out, they are broad as dinner-trays; in the centre of the pond or ca.n.a.l they have surface large as tea-tables. And all have an up-turned edge, a perpendicular rim. Here and there you see the imperial flower,--towering above the leaves.... Perhaps, if your hired driver be a good guide, he will show you the snake-nut,--the fruit of an extraordinary tree native to the Guiana forests. This swart nut--shaped almost like a clam-sh.e.l.l, and halving in the same way along its sharp edges--encloses something almost incredible. There is a pale envelope about the kernel; remove it, and you find between your fingers a little viper, triangular-headed, coiled thrice upon itself, perfect in every detail of form from head to tail. Was this marvellous mockery evolved for a protective end? It is no eccentricity: in every nut the serpent-kernel lies coiled the same.

... Yet in spite of a hundred such novel impressions, what a delight it is to turn again cityward through the avenues of palms, and to feel once more the sensation of being watched, without love or hate, by all those lithe, tall, silent, gracious shapes!

XXVII.

Hindoos; coolies; men, women, and children-standing, walking, or sitting in the sun, under the shadowing of the palms. Men squatting, with hands clasped over their black knees, are watching us from under their white turbans-very steadily, with a slight scowl. All these Indian faces have the same set, stern expression, the same knitting of the brows; and the keen gaze is not altogether pleasant. It borders upon hostility; it is the look of measurement--measurement physical and moral. In the mighty swarming of India these have learned the full meaning and force of life's law as we Occidentals rarely learn it. Under the dark fixed frown eye glitters like a serpent's.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VICTORIA REGIA IN THE Ca.n.a.l AT GEORGETOWN]

Nearly all wear the same Indian dress; the thickly folded turban, usually white, white drawers reaching but half-way down the thigh, leaving the knees and the legs bare, and white jacket. A few don long blue robes, and wear a colored head-dress: these are babagees-priests.

Most of the men look tall; they are slender and small-boned, but the limbs are well turned. They are grave--talk in low tones, and seldom smile. Those you see heavy black beards are probably Mussulmans: I am told they have their mosques here, and that the muezzein's call to prayer is chanted three times daily on many plantations. Others shave, but the Mohammedans allow all the beard to grow.... Very comely some of the women are in their close-clinging soft brief robes and tantalizing veils--a costume leaving shoulders, arms, and ankles bare. The dark arm is always tapered and rounded; the silver-circled ankle always elegantly knit to the light straight foot. Many slim girls, whether standing or walking or in repose, offer remarkable studies of grace; their att.i.tude when erect always suggests lightness and suppleness, like the poise of a dancer.

... A coolie mother pa.s.ses, carrying at her hip a very pretty naked baby. It has exquisite delicacy of limb: its tiny ankles are circled by thin bright silver rings; it looks like a little bronze statuette, a statuette of Kama, the Indian Eros. The mother's arms are covered from elbow to wrist with silver bracelets,--some flat and decorated; others coa.r.s.e, round, smooth, with ends hammered into the form of viper-heads.

She has large flowers of gold in her ears, a small gold flower in her very delicate little nose. This nose ornament does not seem absurd; on these dark skins the effect is almost as pleasing as it is bizarre.

This jewellery is pure metal;--it is thus the coolies carry their savings,--melting down silver or gold coin, and recasting it into bracelets, ear-rings, and nose ornaments.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DEMERARA COOLIE GIRL.]

... Evening is brief: all this time the days have been growing shorter: it will be black at 6 P.M. One does not regret it;--the glory of such a tropical day as this is almost too much to endure for twelve hours.

The sun is already low, and yellow with a tinge of orange: as he falls between the palms his stare colors the world with a strange hue--such a phantasmal light as might be given by a nearly burnt-out sun. The air is full of unfamiliar odors. We pa.s.s a flame-colored bush; and an extraordinary perfume--strange, rich, sweet--envelops us like a caress: the soul of a red jasmine....

... What a tropical sunset is this-within two days' steam-journey of the equator! Almost to the zenith the sky flames up from the sea,--one tremendous orange incandescence, rapidly deepening to vermilion as the sun dips. The indescribable intensity of this mighty burning makes one totally unprepared for the spectacle of its sudden pa.s.sing: a seeming drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light....

Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with vapor; frogs commence to make a queer bubbling noise; and some unknown creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, keen, as of a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents, aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees of our hotel I hear a continuous dripping sound; the drops fall heavily, like bodies of clumsy insects. But it is not dew, nor insects; it is a thick, transparent jelly--a fleshy liquor that falls in immense drops.... The night grows chill with dews, with vegetable breath; and we sleep with windows nearly closed.

XXVIII.

... Another sunset like the conflagration of a world, as we steam away from Guiana;--another unclouded night; and morning brings back to us that bright blue in the sea-water which we missed for the first time on our approach to the main-land. There is a long swell all day, and tepid winds. But towards evening the water once more shifts its hue--takes olive tint--the mighty flood of the Orinoco is near.

Over the rim of the sea rise shapes faint pink, faint gray-misty shapes that grow and lengthen as we advance. We are nearing Trinidad.

It first takes definite form as a prolonged, undulating, pale gray mountain chain,--the outline of a sierra. Approaching nearer, we discern other hill summits rounding up and shouldering away behind the chain itself. Then the nearest heights begin to turn faint green--very slowly.

Right before the outermost spur of cliff, fantastic shapes of rock are rising sheer from the water: partly green, partly reddish-gray where the surface remains unclothed by creepers and shrubs. Between them the sea leaps and whitens.

... And we begin to steam along a magnificent tropical coast,--before a billowing of hills wrapped in forest from sea to summit,--astonishing forest, dense, sombre, impervious to sun--every gap a blackness as of ink. Giant palms here and there overtop the denser foliage; and queer monster trees rise above the forest-level against the blue,--spreading out huge flat crests from which ma.s.ses of lianas stream down. This forest-front has the apparent solidity of a wall, and forty-five miles of it undulate uninterruptedly by us-rising by terraces, or projecting like turret-lines, or shooting up into semblance of cathedral forms or suggestions of castellated architecture.... But the secrets of these woods have not been unexplored;--one of the n.o.blest writers of our time has so beautifully and fully written of them as to leave little for anyone else to say. He who knows Charles Kingsley's "At Last" probably knows the woods of Trinidad far better than many who pa.s.s them daily.

Even as observed from the steamer's deck, the mountains and forests of Trinidad have an aspect very different from those of the other Antilles.

The heights are less lofty,--less jagged and abrupt,--with rounded summits; the peaks of Martinique or Dominica rise fully two thousand feet higher. The land itself is a totally different formation,--anciently being a portion of the continent; and its flora and fauna are of South America.

... There comes a great cool whiff of wind,--another and another;--then a mighty breath begins to blow steadily upon us,--the breath of the Orinoco.... It grows dark before we pa.s.s through the Ape's Mouth, to anchor in one of the calmest harbors in the world,--never disturbed by hurricanes. Over unruffled water the lights of Port-of-Spain shoot long still yellow beams. The night grows chill;--the air is made frigid by the breath of the enormous river and the vapors of the great woods.

XXIX.