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sters in Florence. Steep lanes of steps led us past the white walls of little gardens over which fell showers
of bougainvillia, up and down the semicircle of the bay to Bluebeard's castle. There, in an atmosphere
laden with the smell of syringa, visitors on the terrace of the buccaneers' stronghold drank their highballs
with apposite emotions. Other lanes led through undeveloped parts of the town, where old Danish houses,
built over white arches of great depth and span, lay back in the starlight behind palisades of wrought iron.
The evening of our arrival ended in a bar on the water-front, where, in a setting of vaults, chintz cur-
tains and indirect lighting, a number of sailors were clustered in silent homage round a jukebox. It was
the first time I had seen one of these wonderful machines. The barman called it a Wurlitzer Nickelodeum.
It was a shrine of steel and bakelite and glass, six feet high, and a queue of sailors were waiting to insert
their nickels. At the drop of a coin, an unerring steel hand inside this tabernacle grasped the chosen record
from the shelf and placed it on a disc that rose like a magic carpet. A needle-bearing arm descended and
unleashed a muted throbbing and the voice of a crooner. The air was filled with an etherialized treacle.
Glass panels were illuminated in shades of mauve and pink, and liquids that must have been orangeade
and Chartreuse and Grenadine syrup bubbled and glowed softly through a maze of decorative glass-pip-
ing with the intention of attuning the listener's bloodstream to the mood of the music. Sailor after sailor
slipped their coins into this engine, their eyes becoming every second mistier with Sehnsucht and Heim-
weh . The Nickelodeum is in its infancy. When it is perfected it is to be armed with slowly turning rollers
of satin and fur and plush for the palms of the hands, and a battery of little scent sprays, while, from
a bakelite orifice, an inch of barley sugar or Turkish delight, antiseptically sheathed in cellophane, will
emerge, in order that all five senses, and not only two, may be simultaneously gratified.
BRIDGE PASSAGE
THE enormous bulk of Puerto Rico on the western horizon had less the appearance of an island, as we
had come to understand the word—an infinitesimal star in a straggling constellation—than of the begin-
nings of a new continent. We gazed at it almost with consternation. Everything had suddenly begun to
change at high speed.
Except for the remote haven of Jamaica, the friendly world of sterling and francs was behind us for
good, and only a precarious lifeline of dollars separated us from poverty. We were approaching an ali-
en universe: the first outpost of Spanish America. We had seen the last of the small islands, with their
easy and familiar values, and the emerging peaks of the submarine cordillera were slipping out of con-
trol, swelling into the Greater Antilles—islands comparable in size to Wales or Ireland, or even England,
independent republics, some of them, whose populations are reckoned in millions—preparing to expand,
after the ultimate giant of Cuba, into the mass of the American continent. It was a sobering notion, a
caesura, a fundamental break in our journeys; a time to take stock of where we were and whither we were
flying.
For once I was glad to be suspended in mid-air, and to observe, Dædalus-like, the scission of the two
worlds; for the contrast of Culebra, Vieques and the retreating swarm of the Virgin Islands with the solit-
ary approaching volume of Puerto Rico aptly epitomized the change-over.
The Yunque, the low, anvil-shaped mountain beyond our propeller, was, several million years ago, not
only the eastern cape of Puerto Rico, but of a colossal island of which the four Great Antilles—Puerto
Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Cuba—were the mountain-tops; the valleys, some time ago, merely be-
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