Barbados - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 86

placed his rod in position and turned slowly round, holding the rod and the handkerchief, and slowly fol-
lowed Costa's motion, swinging gently back when he doubled in his course, then forward again as he
went straight on. Joan, leaving a book in his hands, went through the same process with the same results;
and I finally gave him a belt, retreated a quarter of a mile away, and hid behind a long thicket of sea-
grape; waving to Joan and Costa through a gap, so that Mr. Branch could place his instrument and bring
it into play. He turned slowly round and halted facing my hiding-place. I began to move slowly behind
the cover, watching him through the leaves veer round into line, and then, as I ran at full speed in the
opposite direction, gently follow the arc of my movements. I changed direction again and again, stopped,
started again, and each time the distant figure moved in exact harmony with me as though we were two
points on the same radius; he at the centre and I at the circumference. It was so unerring that I felt that
he was almost commanding my movements. I returned slowly, moving round him in a circle three times,
and three times dragging him right round. As I approached, walking barefoot and on tiptoe on the sand, I
heard the blindfold figure saying: 'Very close now, very close indeed.' He held out the belt as I tiptoed up
to him and undid the bandage and said: 'I think it's about my turn to dig again.' He bade us good-bye and
walked towards the treasure-seekers' cavern. As we left, his masked head was just disappearing below
the water level.
Anne drove us on with the feeling that we had seen something very close indeed to magic. We asked
her, when we left, to let us know at once if they struck anything. But there has been no word so far.
These western strands of Barbados have a quality of reclusion and quietness that distinguishes them
from the rest of the island. The woods of palm and casuarina enclose a scattering of solitary and beautiful
houses which are a notable afterthought to the existing architectural achievement of the island. For these
houses are new, though the coral rock of which they are built possesses, from the moment it is hewn, an
almost miraculous patina, and the expanses of grass that surround them, though they may not have been
planted a decade, appear to have been the preoccupation of gardeners for generations. They reflect, even
more clearly than the old Barbadian houses, European nostalgia and allegiances. Sir Edward Cunard's
house, lying aloof at the end of a tree-shaded vista of lawn whose confines are marked by pillared urns
of the most Italianate and Augustan implication, authentically echoes the sobriety and the elegance of the
Dutch seventeenth century. The tropical trees and the flowering shrubs that surround this beautiful build-
ing seem less a paradox than a docile approximation of nature to the feathery convention of landscape
painters three centuries ago. At the bottom of the garden, a few hundred yards away among two mango
trees by the seashore, the small pavilion of Caprarola rears its semi-circular arches over a balcony that
opens as fittingly on these dark leaves and a panorama of tropical sea as upon the Roman Campagna.
Poised on their plinth, on either side of the entrance, stone Cupids wrestle in the Caribbean afternoon.
Farther south, along the same deserted shore, not far from the friend's house from which we used to
bathe, stood the half-built carcase of Mr. Tree's house. This, too, was assembling in an architectural for-
mula alien to the island, but which, by the same brilliant conjuring trick, seemed astonishingly appro-
priate and harmonious. For it was in the style of Palladio, suggesting the palace-villas of the Venetian
plain: the Malcontenta, and still more, Maser. Owing to the porous texture of the coral, the great Vitruvi-
an columns and pediment in the centre, and the two spreading wings arbitrarily but successfully warped
into a shallow and colonnaded crescent, appear so antique and weathered that the building looks less like
a house under construction than a Piranesi ruin. But instead of a minute three-corner-hatted figure point-
ing out to a companion an inscription with his malacca cane, a Barbadian fisherman, standing among his
lobster-pots and the melancholy sea-grape at the water's edge, gazes up with wonder at the scaffolded