Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 194

The mountains rushed steeply up into the forest behind the cemetery, and under the trees an assortment
of headstones, crosses and coffins were enclosed in the fence of a humble undertaker's establishment. A
signboard advertised the identity of the owner. At the top was painted a little white tortoise, and at the
bottom a death's head. Between them were the words Enterrements. E. La Tortue , and then, in larger let-
ters, L'ami des morts .
After a steep ride through the sodden woods, we emerged into blinding sunlight and the Citadel appeared
before us above the treetops.
I was prepared for something remarkable, but not quite for this formidable Bastille. The forest wavered
some distance up the peak of the Bonnet d'Evêque, and then ceased. The rock continued the line of ascent
until the main bastion sailed up into the air, aiming at the only approach a sharp angle like the bows of
a great stone ship. It soared into the sky to a very great height; to such a height indeed that gazing up at
the battlements momentarily filled us with vertigo. It is difficult to believe that anything so essentially
a part of the Dark Ages could have been built during the last century, for no castle on the Rhine or the
Danube or Calabrian fortress of the Hohenstaufen is so uncompromisingly feudal, stern or precipitous.
The weathered rock of the blank walls and the colossal perpendicular bastions look as though they had
stood there for a millennium. The vast size of the thing, its brooding impregnability and its atmosphere
of inviolable strength quite literally, and for some time, rob the beholder of speech.
After the sunlight, the inside of the fortress, isolated by walls ten feet thick and a hundred feet high,
was piercingly cold and dank, and, until the eyes became used to the shadows, almost totally dark. Our
footsteps raised echoes along the gloom of the cellars and the dungeons. Looking down into cylindrical
cavities, we could see thousands of cannon-balls faintly glowing like kegs full of caviar. Dungeon fol-
lowed dungeon, and the tiers of galleries, thirty feet wide and a hundred and fifty in length, commanded
through their embrasures a landscape that grew smaller in detail and more distant with every mounting
step. Broad flights of stone ascended from tier to tier until we came out on to a roof that seemed to be
hoisted into the heart of the wind and the flying clouds. We were on the edge of a large aerial parade
ground which, considering its lack of any surrounding wall, must have been a frightening place for mil-
itary exercises. A Haitian student sitting on a cannon told us that it was Christophe's custom to drill pla-
toons of his troops here. To test their discipline, he marched them now and then clean over the edge. I
have found no written verification of this extraordinary tale, but, apocryphal or not, it is an illustration of
the type of myth that surrounds this figure. Over they went, the student said, and a twirl of his forefinger
illustrated the descending arc of the uniformed insects as they spun down into the gulf.
But Henri Christophe needs no rhetorical gift to supplement his biography. Everything he did was on
the same exaggerated and titanic scale. A giant himself and possessed of enormous physical strength, he
proved a very capable and quite fearless general throughout the War of Independence. The destruction
of Cap Haitien (where, as a young slave, he had been a waiter in an hotel) gives an idea of the lines on
which his mind worked. He sprinkled his kingdom with palaces, many of which, including the palace
with three hundred and sixty-five doors, were never completed. During the building of the citadel, the
people of the north were, temporarily, virtually re-enslaved, and it is a popular saying in the island that
each of the great blocks which they hauled across the mountains was paid for by a human life. It was built
2,500 feet above the sea, as a stronghold against the return of the Napoleonic armies, and the castle was
capable of garrisoning ten thousand troops. Hundreds of cannon were mounted. Storerooms for food and