Guadeloupe - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 4

of wood and painted yellow and grey and with a gracious flight of columns and a triangular Greek pedi-
ment. A crocodile of school children was emerging from the Cathedral under the care of a beautiful black
nun. This neo-Gothic building is made of iron, and riveted together against earthquakes by nuts and bolts
and staples, inspiring one with the feeling of being inside a boiler, or a vast religious tramp steamer. We
found ourselves in the outskirts of the town in a maze of shacks with the architecture, and almost the size,
of derelict confessional boxes. The streets and the cabins grew smaller and more broken down as we ad-
vanced, and the population more ragged, dirtier, more miserable and shambling; a kind of Tobacco Road.
' Eh bien ,' a young woman shouted, ' qu'est que vous regardez par ici? Vous êtes blancs et nous sommes
noirs. Et alors?'
A few minutes after this we lost our way. Deep in the speculations that this Negro woman had opened
up, we had passed a large white hospital, and, continuing along a grass footpath, found ourselves all at
once in the heart of a tropical forest. No buildings were in sight, and we were surrounded by wooded
hills. The change from town to country had been as sudden as if Pointe-à-Pitre had been lifted up and
carried away by a team of djinns. The hills succeeded each other in a soft interlock of curves and all the
outlines were blurred by the shapes of trees. Palms and bananas opened their heavy fans overhead, and
here and there tall, thin, bare and twisting trunks wavered upwards, to balance in mid-air small blobs
of leaves. These low hills are called mornes in the French islands, and as we advanced farther among
them, isolated huts appeared in clearings on their flanks. Small cream-coloured cows grazed near them
on patches of grass that looked softer and richer than velvet, and in the undergrowth black pigs rootled;
long, swart creatures armed with snouts that were almost incipient trunks and almost two-dimensional in
their leanness. Sugar-cane rustled round these huts, giving way, now and then, to patches of yam and cas-
sava plant with their tendrils trained up bean-poles. Reed-fringed swamps were covered with a mantle of
lilac flowers over which great butterflies beat their yellow wings. The grass tracks were vaulted by giant
rushes. Breadfruit trees were everywhere, their leaves growing like spatulate hands joined at the wrists
and opening in splays of fingers that hide in their shadow the soft round loaves. Under fleshy cartwheels
of leaves the fruit of the paw-paw clustered round the perpendicular trunks as thickly and symmetrically
as the breasts of Diana of the Ephesians. Funereal mangoes spread their dark, ilex-like and evergreen
curves with the ampleness of oaks, and the pathway was carpeted with sensitive plants which shrank and
closed with the slightest pressure, so that a footfall touched an entire miniature landscape into motion.
The African desert has the property of dwarfing everything. A figure only a hundred yards away is an
insect lost in an overwhelming immensity. The rolling mornes achieve the opposite effect. It is as if this
damp atmosphere acted as a lens that abolished all feeling of distance. We looked back from a hilltop and
watched a Negro crossing a sloping green glade about a mile away. He was wearing a broad-brimmed
straw hat, and held in his hand a bare cutlass, and appeared as distinct and out of proportion as a figure in
the background of an early Italian picture. This giant strode slowly across the grass and disappeared into
the sugar-cane. There was a note of momentousness about the immediacy and magnitude of this distant
figure.
These green slopes, hemmed in by their Garden of Eden forests, have an almost miraculous beauty.
In the extending shadows of the late-afternoon sunlight they appeared as idyllic and eternal as the clear-
ings in a rather sad heaven. Purple shadows collected on the grass under the mangoes, and the infinity of
greens was broken in places by the pale golden showers of cassia, or by the crimson of hibiscus. Some-
where, lost among the opposite line of hills, a solitary Negro practised the trombone, and the gloomy,
inexpert notes reached our ears through the heavy air with a grotesque and almost delphic solemnity.