Two Years in the French West Indies Part 24

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Pere 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 mult.i.tude," 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 ma.s.sive 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 _pet.i.ts-bois_ (little woods), in contradistinction to the grands-bois, or high woods.

Mult.i.tudes 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 gra.s.ses 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 cutla.s.ses 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 mult.i.tude 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 pet.i.ts-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 _razie_: 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 etang,--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 k.n.o.bs. 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 circ.u.mference 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 circ.u.mference at something over 300 paces. As we find it, the etang, 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 sh.o.r.e last season. At present there is only one narrow patch of gra.s.sy 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sing over us in great slow whirls. Some are white and half-transparent; others opaque and dark gray;--a dark cloud pa.s.sing through; a white one looks like a goblin. Gaining the opposite sh.o.r.e, 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 cus.h.i.+on 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 gra.s.ses, 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 ma.s.ses: 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 b.u.t.tressing 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 etang we have just left: it is also of more irregular outline. This is called the _etang 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 pa.s.sing 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 Abbe Lespina.s.se 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 etang 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 ma.s.s of green coral: it is a gigantic moss. _Cabane-Jesus_ ("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 sh.e.l.l. A solitary humming-bird pa.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the All-nouris.h.i.+ng 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 Pelee, 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 Pere 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 lat.i.tude. 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 alt.i.tude 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 Pere 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 pa.s.sionate 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 sh.o.r.e 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 mult.i.tude of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,--telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the pa.s.sionless 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]

CHAPTER VIII. 'TI CANOTIe

I.

One might almost say that commercial time in St. Pierre is measured by cannon-shots,--by the signal-guns of steamers. Every such report announces an event of extreme importance to the whole population. To the merchant it is a notification that mails, money, and goods have arrived;--to consuls and Government officials it gives notice of fees and dues to be collected;--for the host of lightermen, longsh.o.r.emen, port laborers of all cla.s.ses, it promises work and pay;--for all it signifies the arrival of food. The island does not feed itself: cattle, salt meats, hams, lard, flour, cheese, dried fish, all come from abroad,--particularly from America. And in the minds of the colored population the American steamer is so intimately a.s.sociated with the idea of those great tin cans in which food-stuffs are brought from the United States, that the onomatope applied to the can, because of the sound outgiven by it when tapped,--_bom!_--is also applied to the s.h.i.+p itself. The English or French or Belgian steamer, however large, is only known as _packett-a_, _batiment-la_; but the American steamer is always the "bom-s.h.i.+p"--_batiment-bom-a_, or, the "food-s.h.i.+p"--_batiment-mange-a_.... You hear women and men asking each other, as the shock of the gun flaps through all the town, "_Mi! gade ca qui la, che?_" And if the answer be, "_Mais c'est bom-la, che,--bom-mange-a ka rive_" (Why, it is the bom, dear,--the food-bom that has come), great is the exultation.

Again, because of the sound of her whistle, we find a steamer called in this same picturesque idiom, _batiment-cone_,--"the horn-s.h.i.+p." There is even a song, of which the refrain is:--

"Bom-la rive, che.-Batiment-cone-la rive."

... But of all the various cla.s.ses of citizens, those most joyously excited by the coming of a great steamer, whether she be a "bom" or not,--are the _'ti canotie_, who swarm out immediately in little canoes of their own manufacture to dive for coins which pa.s.sengers gladly throw into the water for the pleasure of witnessing the graceful spectacle.

No sooner does a steamer drop anchor--unless the water be very rough indeed--than she is surrounded by a fleet of the funniest little boats imaginable, full of naked urchins screaming creole.

These _'ti canotie_--these little canoe-boys and professional divers--are, for the most part, sons of boatmen of color, the real _canotiers_. I cannot find who first invented the _'ti canot_: the shape and dimensions of the little canoe are fixed according to a tradition several generations old; and no improvements upon the original model seem to have ever been attempted, with the sole exception of a tiny water-tight box contrived sometimes at one end, in which the _palettes_, or miniature paddles, and various other trifles may be stowed away.

The actual cost of material for a canoe of this kind seldom exceeds twenty-five or thirty cents; and, nevertheless, the number of canoes is not very large--I doubt if there be more than fifteen in the harbor;--as the families of Martinique boatmen are all so poor that twenty-five sous are difficult to spare, in spite of the certainty that the little son can earn fifty times the amount within a month after owning a canoe.

For the manufacture of a Canoe an American lard-box or kerosene-oil box is preferred by reason of its shape; but any well-constructed s.h.i.+pping-case of small size would serve the purpose. The top is removed; the sides and the corners of the bottom are sawn out at certain angles; and the pieces removed are utilized for the sides of the bow and stern,--sometimes also in making the little box for the paddles, or palettes, which are simply thin pieces of tough wood about the form and size of a cigar-box lid. Then the little boat is tarred and varnished: it cannot sink,--though it is quite easily upset. There are no seats.

The boys (there are usually two to each canot) simply squat down in the bottom,--facing each other, they can paddle with surprising swiftness over a smooth sea; and it is a very pretty sight to witness one of their prize contests in racing,--which take place every 14th of July....

[Ill.u.s.tration: 'TI CANOT.]

... It was five o'clock in the afternoon: the horizon beyond the harbor was turning lemon-color;--and a thin warm wind began to come in weak puffs from the south-west,--the first breaths to break the immobility of the tropical air. Sails of vessels becalmed at the entrance of the bay commenced to flap lazily: they might belly after sundown.

The _La Guayra_ was in port, lying well out: her mountainous iron ma.s.s rising high above the modest sailing craft moored in her vicinity,--barks and brigantines and brigs and schooners and barkentines. She had lain before the town the whole afternoon, surrounded by the entire squadron of _'ti canots_; and the boys were still circling about her flanks, although she had got up steam and was lifting her anchor. They had been very lucky, indeed, that afternoon,--all the little canotiers;--and even many yellow lads, not fortunate enough to own canoes, had swum out to her in hope of sharing the silver shower falling from her saloon-deck. Some of these, tired out, were resting themselves by sitting on the slanting cables of neighboring s.h.i.+ps. Perched naked thus,--balancing in the sun, against the blue of sky or water, their slender bodies took such orange from the mellowing light as to seem made of some self-luminous substance,--flesh of sea-fairies....

Suddenly the _La Guayra_ opened her steam-throat and uttered such a moo that all the mornes cried out for at least a minute after;--and the little fellows perched on the cables of the sailing craft tumbled into the sea at the sound and struck out for sh.o.r.e. Then the water all at once burst backward in immense frothing swirls from beneath the stern of the steamer; and there arose such a heaving as made all the little canoes dance. The _La Guayra_ was moving. She moved slowly at first, making a great fuss as she turned round: then she began to settle down to her journey very majestically,--just making the water pitch a little behind her, as the hem of a woman's robe tosses lightly at her heels while she walks.

And, contrary to custom, some of the canoes followed after her. A dark handsome man, wearing an immense Panama hat, and jewelled rings upon his hands, was still throwing money; and still the boys dived for it. But only one of each crew now plunged; for, though the _La Guayra_ was yet moving slowly, it was a severe strain to follow her, and there was no time to be lost.