Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grenada, St. Lucia, Antigua, St. Kitts
WE left Trinidad, for some reason, in the small hours of the morning; driving, half asleep, to the aerodrome
at Cocorite, through caverns of bamboo that the headlights summoned out of the darkness. There we waited
a long time in the empty white halls, nodding among coffee cups until the unearthly voice from the loud-
speaker roused us. Sleepy officials loaded us and our luggage into the plane, where we fell into a sleep
whose surface was only ruffled now and then by the jolt of an air pocket. The ninety miles of flight into
the north, the landing in Grenada and climbing, as dawn broke, into a motor, were incidents that affected
us as remotely as though we had been sleep-walkers, and it was only in the middle of some mountains that
we really woke up.
Nothing can be more mysterious and, in their sinister fashion, beautiful than these tarns in the craters of
dead volcanoes. Here was another, lying high in the windy folds of the watershed; the water, in this early
morning light, stagnant and smooth and steel grey. But the Grand Etang was even more unearthly than the
bottomless lake of Dominica, because the forest, as it waded into the lake, seemed to have fallen under a
curse which had killed it dead. The far bank was an unearthly wood of skeleton mahogany trees as white
and exsanguine as though every single one had been separately struck by lightning and frozen in the mo-
ment of death into a demonstrative posture of horror. It was a forest in its agony, the pale, cold scaffolding
of a wood, and as we watched the reflections of the trees in the lake they vanished. The surface of the water
was broken up into millions of pockmarks as the rain began.
Dark green woods glimmered through the tracks of the raindrops across the window-panes after we left
this deserted place. Steep hills rose and fell and rose again in a final eminence before sinking into the sea.
Among the trees of the last apex a great Regency building appeared: Government House, the driver told us.
Remembering a letter of introduction that Mrs. Napier had given us, we dug it out and left it in the hands
of a splendid-looking white uniformed servant who was standing among brass cannon under the portico,
and drove downhill towards the sea and the outskirts of St. George's.
The capital of Grenada and the pinnacled belfries under the rain, the steep streets and the wet stone
columns and fanlights of Adam houses, the glimpses along the lanes of a grey and turbulent sea—all this
resembled a beautiful eighteenth-century Devonshire town in mid-winter. The car drove into the yard of
a small hotel that might have been a coaching inn. Dashing indoors through the downpour, we expected
to plunge into a world of crops, goloshes, toby-jugs, superannuated advertisements for Apollinaris Water,
and copies of Pears' Cyclopædia; which was, indeed, more or less what we found.
By the time we woke up, the rain had stopped and the little capital wore a different, but no less charming,
aspect. How dissimilar everything in Grenada was from the immensity, the trams and the ugliness of Port
of Spain! The change in atmosphere, tempo, mood and scenery was complete.
Like Roseau, St. George's is a large village that has evolved easily and slowly into a small county town,
but the houses, instead of wood and lattice and shingle, are built of stone: fine, solid dwellings, with grace-
ful balustraded staircases running up to pilastered doorways supporting fanlights and pediments. The burn-
ished knockers and door-knobs and letter-boxes reflect the morning sunlight. So steep is the hillside on
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