Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 189

In the late afternoon the blank limestone mountains came rolling towards us. Their foothills were
clothed with serried lines of maguey or sisal, from which fibre for rope-making is extracted, and whose
roots, pulped and fermented, supply the Mexican Indians with their fiery liquor, tequila. The plant springs
from the ground like a pine-apple, and from its summit radiates a panoply of stiff blue-green spikes.
Sheaves of bayonets, they resembled, or wickedly destructive obstacles against cavalry. A small-gauge
railway curled in to join us on the other side, and, a little later, the sea, and as we entered the even dustier
wilderness of the Artibonite, my neighbour, who had buttoned his fighting-cock into the bosom of his
shirt so that only its hateful little cropped head appeared, began to discourse of religion. He had repudi-
ated Voodoo, he said, and along with it (as though it was a subdivision of Voodoo), Catholicism. All that
idolatry! The Lwas, the saints, the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, he'd finished with all that. 'I only believe
in the Old Testament,' he surprisingly went on; all the rest was rubbish. He was, he maintained, a convert
to Wesleyan Methodism. 'No more idols!' he said, and fell asleep. An empty rum bottle fell from his lap
and rolled about the floor. The head of the cock, oscillating with the jolts of the bus, fixed me with a
severe and bloodshot eye, which plainly stated that the same sentiments went for him too. The sun set,
and a mood of depression, closely resembling despair, overcame me.
This cheerless region of the Artibonite saw much of the fighting in the Caco Revolt in 1918, when,
armed with obsolete weapons, a force of Haitian guerrillas engaged the invading American marines. It
was a savage campaign of which the most memorable event was the betrayal to the enemy, at Petite
Rivière de l'Artibonite, of the guerrilla leader Charlemagne Péralte. He was stripped naked, and then, as
a warning to others, crucified to the door of the American headquarters. The funeral of Péralte in Cap
Haitien is one of the best and most celebrated pictures of Philomée Obin.
The headlights, plunging ahead into the night and illuminating the stunted acacia trees at the side of
the road, invested our itinerary with the appearance of an interminable journey up the drive of a country
house. Between sleeping and waking, we pretended that the welcoming light of a château would soon
appear, with the doors flung open to reveal a glowing interior richly equipped with food and drink and
the Pickwickian silhouette of our host with arms outstretched: the Comte de Limonade…. But the road
went on and on. Every bone seemed to be navigating loose in our dust-caked frames, and all that our sore
eyes encountered was an occasional village where not a light glimmered, and the sudden flash of a pair
of dog's eyes in the road was the only evidence of life.
We woke up at last in the moonlit town of Gonaïves. It appeared wonderfully empty and noble. Not a
figure moved under the high silver tiers of colonnades and the deep velvet of architectural shadows. We
walked through the warm dust like somnambulists, dazedly registering the moonlight along the boles of
the palm trees, and a painted statue of St. George spearing a newt-like dragon in the coping of a wall. We
seemed to be the sole inhabitants of a deserted and planetary city.
A Negress unbolted the door of the hotel, and, scarcely less solicitous than the imaginary count,
cooked us a meal of Wiener Schnitzel and black beans and rice, and miraculously produced a bottle of
Chianti. Black beans and rice are a Haitian staple. Haitian food, if one escapes the peasant horror of salt
fish, is not at all bad. We remembered as, in a trance, we dined, the delicious conch, lambi flambé au
rhum , and the biscuits de manioc , the brittle discs of cassava, which we had eaten at the Rodmans' the
night before. Drugged with sleep and wine, we were led upstairs by our kindly guardian, who tucked the
mosquito nets round us in our little wooden partitions, turned down the wicks of the lamps and opened
the shutters to let in the moonlight.