Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
As if to disprove this libel, he came running down the sand with the beer a few seconds later. We
thanked him and, glaring icily at his detractors, ostentatiously gave him a shilling. He was off like a bul-
let, and back beside us in a few moments with another bottle for himself. Lying on the sand, thoughtfully
smoking and drinking his beer, he continued his discourse. You could not make a career in Soufrière.
'That's a nice shirt,' he said, pointing to one I had bought in Trinidad, covered with agricultural scenes.
'A real saga-shirt.' He lay back and nostalgically sang us a song with a chorus about 'The two-coloured
shoes, sir, the saga-pants, and the bim-bim coat.' When he had finished he said, 'But you can't be a saga-
boy here, sir. Too poor. They put you in custody, sure bet.' After a moment of reverie, he said, 'Would
you like to have a bath?' He explained that he did not mean the sea, but a real hot bath. Following him
through the village, and a little way uphill into the forest, we came to the domesticated little crater of
the Soufrière: a few patches of boiling mud among grey rocks. He threw some stones into the biggest
cauldron, and stirred it up with a long stick to its hissing maximum of ferocity. Then he took a shilling,
and buried it in the mud; when he dug it up again, the fumes had turned it black. 'There you are, madam,'
he said. 'It's no Vesuvius, but that's all we got in Soufrière.'
The baths were a row of stone troughs in a wooden enclosure in the thick of the woods. Herbert roused
an old man from his sleep in a little hut, who stopped up the holes in the trough with plugs of banana
leaf. They filled up with warm sulphurous water, and we were able to recline in the leafy shade and con-
verse at our leisure, with the craters hissing gently below us. These delightful baths were installed by a
grant of Louis XVI, seven years before the taking of the Bastille. The
Médecins du Roi
, summoned from
Martinique by the Baron de Labordie, the French Governor of the island, had examined the waters and
pronounced them to be sovereign for rheumatic complaints and full of every kind of health-giving prop-
erty; and the baths were duly built for the benefit of the royal troops in the Antilles. Lying in the warm
water and looking up at the sky through a dozen strata of different-shaped leaves was so luxurious and
agreeable that it was an effort to get out. When we climbed into our boat again we felt that we had accu-
mulated considerable strength.
One of the children, a detestable sneak, asked us, in a loud voice, if Herbert wasn't wrong to smoke.
'That kid's right,' Herbert said, 'I got to cut down. Too dear. There's no money about.'
Our boat edged its way through a little fleet of incoming canoes, several of which, furnished with out-
riggers to keep their balance, were carrying enormous polygonal lobster cages. As we headed northwards
towards the distant capital we looked back at the Pitons, and the diminishing silhouette of Herbert with
his hat raised above his head in a grave valedictory posture. Like the grove of cauliflower-clouds along
the horizon, the setting sun had washed the two rocky prongs a wonderful love-sick pink. The water was
streaked with green and lilac, and every few yards there was the sound of a multitude of small splashes,
as shoals of sprats leapt out of the sea in flight from our keel. It was quite dark when, three hours later,
we sailed down the gulf towards the lights of Castries.
Architecturally speaking, Castries seems to be the victim of a curse. It is always catching fire and being
burnt to the ground. The last holocaust had taken place in 1927, and since we left the island it has had
another visitation. It seems to be a magnet for Acts of God, and the ugliness of the town has thus nothing
intentional and perverted about it.
It looked, merely, as if the inhabitants, sceptical of the permanence of their handiwork, had got tired
of building it up again. It is a brisk and shoddy piece of work and there is little more to be said about it.
The Church of the Immaculate Conception may, as reference books aver, have been built by a student of
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