Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 95

of the Indian peninsula. In grocers' shops and eating-hells in the tram-haunted Chinese quarter, flags
bearing the Kuomintang star and portraits of Chiang Kai Shek hang on the walls, and Chinese shopkeep-
ers, seated on chairs underneath hanging signs which are painted all over with beautiful white ideograms,
chirrup to each other across the street. Guttural voices from Syria and the Lebanon haggle in the glooms
of grocers' and drapers' shops, and Venezuelans with side-whiskers and narrow moustaches along their
upper lips, covertly peer at the reflection of their profiles in the windows of tailors' shops. Dummies
in tweed with nymph-like waists and Herculean shoulders posture back at them through the plate glass.
Vestidos elegantissimos , the labels announce, por los caballeros . The atmosphere of this part of the town
is pleasantly raffish.
But the tram carried us away from this region and across the Savannah to the mournful elegance
of the residential district. The enormous expanse of the Savannah is girdled not only by a race-track,
but by an electric tramline, 'affording,' as one guide book says, 'a pleasant evening drive.' Round and
round the vehicles go, glowing, as evening falls more enticingly every second. Inside this magic circle
lie cricket pitches and football grounds, a cemetery, a bandstand, tall clumps of palmistes, and a mo-
numental monkey-pot-tree whose radiation of root crawls outwards from the great bole, and still above
the ground, for over an acre. On the southern extremity lies the Queen's Park Hotel, a large and slightly
dilapidated block of white plaster and nickel plumbing with faintly cubistic affinities. On the evening of
our arrival, with its neon lighting beginning to prevail over the dusk, and with all its fittings a-glitter, it
seemed to dominate this town-locked prairie like a giant dentist's chair for the painless extraction of dol-
lars. The houses which surround the rest of the Savannah—except for the bleak Prince's Building, which
was built in honour of an expected visit, in 1861, of Queen Marie of Roumania's father (which never
happened)—are some of the most remarkable architectural phenomena in the world. The essential skelet-
on of these villas is the high-gabled, acute-angled, ginger-bread house of the witch in Hansel and Gretel,
bristling with pinnacles and weathercocks, spiked and frilled along the coping like a stickleback, and with
eaves that drip, as though they overhung the grey dwelling-place of the Norns, with icicles and stalactites
of painted wood and tin. Pillars and caryatids from the Parthenon or Ankor buttress the fabric, and the
mosaic of Byzantium, or turquoise-green majolica, or glazed porcelain tiles of panniered shepherdesses
leading beribboned lambs, are framed in beams and half-timbering that pay silent tribute to Stratford-on-
Avon. Georgian bow-windows, roofed like Chinese pagodas, suddenly bulge from the walls, and from
the steep roofs grow the spires of Hohenschwangau, the turrets of Azay-le-Rideau and the domes and
cupolas of Kiev. William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti triumph over other influences in the stained
glass of the windows. There, among giant celery, blessèd damozels dream in the poppy fields, and storks
balance themselves on one leg among the petals of water-lily and lotus. Many of these houses were closed
and silent. But in one of them, detectable through the brightly lit windows, a party of which the guests
were drawn from Spain, France, Portugal, Corsica, Africa and England was brilliantly evolving among
cocktail cabinets, fringed and tasselled lamp shades, pierrot-dolls, and the black and orange wall-paper of
the Jazz and Vorticist periods. For long minutes, on this first voyage of discovery through Port of Spain,
we remained spellbound, as every newcomer must, spellbound and riveted to the pavement by the ter-
rible beauty of these buildings; turning at last reluctantly to the shadows of the giant cotton-trees and the
tramline that carried us past the dark world of the Botanic Gardens and Government House to the fores-
ted hills where the suburbs evaporate. Descending into the sweltering dampness of the night, we walked
to our small hotel. It was perched among the mosquitoes and fireflies of the hillside like a hunting lodge
of the Emperor Franz Josef in the Tyrol. Here we were confronted by our first Trinidadian meal, with