Travel Reference
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where de snow lay dinted,' they went on, 'Heat was in de very sod where de Saint had printed….' Of
course! the snow. We descended again into the hot night. The tops of tropical trees appeared above the
roofs. How many conversations I had recently had about snow!
'Yes, but what's it like?'
'Well, it's light, like confetti. It falls out of the sky and blows about in the wind. It's terribly cold, and
when it settles it resembles cassava or mashed potatoes. Your feet leave marks on it as though you were
treading on sand, and you can make balls of it, or even snowmen. It is so heavy it sometimes breaks the
branches of trees. It's deep and crisp and even …'
'I'm sorry, I don't get it, maan. I don't get it at all. Not what it's
really
like….'
The Christmas carols reminded us how quickly the time was passing. We determined all at once upon
a drastic burst of speed through the Leeward Islands, in order to dawdle and still to have a little money
left over in the Greater Antilles. This sudden rush meant travelling by air most of the time, and, for some
reason which I have forgotten, cutting out St. Vincent. Anyway, we thought, as we sailed up into the air
over Grenada, we will be able to see it from above. We peered down through the dawn at the vanishing
coast of Grenada. Carriacou paddled after it into the southern haze like an abandoned puppy.
As the air cleared, the entire archipelago of the Grenadines appeared: innumerable islets scattered
across the sea from horizon to horizon, and seeming, as they slid slowly southwards, to writhe and change
shape and turn over: violoncellos, scissors, earwigs, pairs of braces, old boots, cogwheels, armadillos,
palettes, wishbones, oak leaves, boomerangs and bowler hats, all of them hanging mysteriously in a blue
dimensionless dream. Haloed at the surface with pale green water, their pedestals, visible until they were
obscured by darkness, sank sharply to the bottom of the sea. Solitary cones rose portentously through the
penumbra, but no little wreaths of foam surrounded their crests; only a few yards of water separated them
from the water-level. Pathetically, after so much uphill work, they had just missed being islands—'Well
tried,' one felt like murmuring—and scattered and sharp-toothed reefs combed the winding currents into
parallel skeins of surf. Isolated clouds went bowling past like overblown cherubim, or languished, seraph-
like, above their shadows. Then the clouds assembled in troops, and we were skimming over the summit
of a bulbous mountain of vapour.
Something was going on underneath this great white heap, for the outline of its meeting with the water
was marked by a sprinkling of sailing boats. A little steamer was even trailing its wake into one of the
bulges. 'St. Vincent,' the air hostess murmured.
It was very sad. And it was fantastic, too, that a British Crown Colony, half the size, as Sir Algernon
Aspinall observes, of Middlesex, should be buried somewhere under that colossal tea-cosy. I thought rue-
fully of the hidden towns and villages; the cathedral; the hundred and thirty-three square miles and the
fifty-seven thousand people; the Kingstown and the Aquatic clubs; the mountains and the forests and the
rivers; the bronze chandelier presented by George III; the battlefields of the Brigands' War; the tomb-
stone of Alexander Leith, a hero in that same war, 'The Carib Chief Chattawar falling by his hand'; and
of the Botanical Gardens where Captain Bligh, after his second journey from the South Seas, first planted
the bread-fruit tree. I thought especially of the Soufrière, a volcano over four thousand feet high, whose
eruption in 1902 wiped out two thousand of the islanders, and ash from whose crater had plunged Barba-
dos, ninety-seven miles away, into pitch darkness … all hidden under that big white blob, which, even as
we stared at it, was moving off, still enshrouding its invisible contents. What a miserable way to travel!
There was something thoroughly improper about the whole thing.
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