Trinidad - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 102

waves permitted, up to their necks in the sea and conversing. The water all round us was dotted with these
severed Asiatic heads, whose features appeared delicate and frail after the robuster cast of the Negroes.
We felt that we had wandered by mistake into the middle of a religious ceremony in Benares.
But the rain and, above all, the growing violence of the waves had driven us all helter-skelter to the
shore, and the grey water was left alone to the pelicans. When the sea had been full of human beings, they
had huddled at a safe distance on a rock in earnest conclave, but as the sea emptied of intruders they had
taken to the air one by one, flying across the bay with the unwieldiness of pieces of luggage. They would
suddenly stop dead in mid-air, as though they had applied a brake, and then collapse in a flurried spiral,
to reappear floating serenely over the billows, still looking oddly unlike birds; more like Gladstone bags
on to which badly rolled umbrellas had been strapped.
Trinidad made us understand how scarce birds had been in the other islands. One can travel for hours
in many of the Windward Isles without hearing a twitter. But the reckless Elisée Reclus in his Nouvelle
Géographie Universelle , of 1893, declares that the bird population of Trinidad once amounted to three-
quarters of that of the whole of Europe, which, considering Trinidad is about the size of Lancashire, is
a bewildering thought. But mankind has wrought terrible carnage among them. The chief victims were
the humming-birds after which, in pre-Columbian times, the Caribs baptized the island. No less than fif-
teen thousand of these little creatures, M. Reclus states, were stuffed and exported weekly to the hatters
and dressmakers of Europe; and, when one thinks of the fashions of the 'nineties and of the pictures of
Boldini and Helleu, and of the old hats that one still comes across in cupboards, the number of these
posthumous migrants hardly seems exaggerated.
The heart of the capital rings with the eternal questioning of the Qu'est qu'il dit -Bird, as though the
branches were populated by deaf people at the theatre, and in the suburbs the telegraph wires are often
black with scavengers: ragged, dirty and funereal birds, resembling cartoons of obscurantism and polit-
ical bias. Flamingoes haunt the meanderings of the Caroni river, and the high woods—those wonderful
green labyrinths so well described by Kingsley and Pope-Hennessy, which, alas, I never saw—are pop-
ulous with parrots. Monkeys, whose ancestors survived the mythical plots of the coolie-shippers, still
abound; for the trees and animals and flowers and birds, like Trinidad itself, belong, in a large measure,
to the South American mainland. Green lizards gaze from the rocks with blue eyes of a Scandinavian
depth and integrity, and the forests are inhabited by wild goats and fierce and predatory cats and by a
little deer d'une extrème douceur . Apart from the dangerous cascadura, Trinidadian waters harbour the
hydrocion , one mouthful of which kills the unwary diner stone dead almost before it has passed his lips.
As though to atone for this, another fish puts its head above the waters, and makes a musical sound. Al-
ligators, the descendants of the beasts that alarmed the sailors of Raleigh, are still numerous, and the west
coast teems with timid little creatures, half-fish, half-insect, called Big Eyes. We saw them in quantities
on the way from the south of the island to San Fernando. They are about half an inch long, semi-transpar-
ent, and each equipped with a pair of enormous projecting eyes. Standing motionless on the edge of the
shallow water so that they should get used to us, we watched them gradually advance towards the land,
swimming, leaping and wriggling in little troops, and all gazing upward so piercingly that the Argus-eyed
water seemed fraught with accusation; a sort of fluid conscience. It was gratifying to remember that the
slightest gesture would disperse this hypnotic legion and send them scampering back into the deep water.
Port of Spain, at the time between what the French call 'dog and wolf'—the moment the sun dips, when
werewolves cast their human and don their four-footed nocturnal shape—for a moment resembles the