Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 214

the P.N.P.—is talked about all day. What a curious, dreamy and lotus-eating life they lead! Their exist-
ence consists exclusively of dodging the police, singing songs in praise of a monarch who knows nothing
about them, planning the downfall of the white world, drinking rum, throwing dice and smoking reefers.
I must have been there several hours. The street lamps were growing brighter as the dusk fell round
this pseudo-Ethiopian wilderness. Candles appeared in the flimsy little huts, making them appear more
than ever like card-houses that a breath of wind could demolish. The outlandish banners fluttered in the
evening breeze.
A group of bearded Dungle-men, a really abominable-looking gang, were heading for the town on
some dubious errand. Their passing reminded me to ask Fernandez about the beards.
'We grow the beard,' he said, 'to look like our Emperor.'
'But why haven't you got a beard?'
I wished I had not said it, as he was all at once utterly downcast. He caught hold of my hand and ran it
across his smooth cheek.
'I can't grow no beard,' he said sadly. 'But, boy! I'm beardminded.'
The road climbed higher and higher round the flank of Mount Diabolo through the Blue Mountains into
a world of cool and gentle valleys, which, by a recurring miracle which is not infrequent in the tropics,
but which is nevertheless always a surprise, resemble the most lyrical English countryside. It is a region
of ghostly English pasture harnessed by a network of lanes and as velvety and green as any in Devon-
shire or Somerset. Trees grow in the meadows as spaciously and as aloofly as English oaks, and cast their
shadows over hollows where the sleek northern cattle slowly graze from shade to shade.
Ancient writers assess the numbers of Arawaks that inhabited the four Greater Antilles at two million,
and it is agreeable to think of the gentle and tractable creatures inhabiting these regions. Their life was
one of blessed indolence. Dancing and singing, to the accompaniment of a drum and a small timbrel, and
a game called bato , played with an elastic ball, were their passions. One can easily picture them lying in
hammocks strung between these shady trees, talking to their tame parrots and smoking through branching
calumets, or wandering into the woods with their bows and arrows, their alco at their heels: 'that little
mute dog,' writes John Cutting, the friend of Dallas, 'caressing and sequacious, which, once loved and
cherished by its poor Indian masters, is now like them, exterminated.' Their dwellings were beehives of
timber and wild cane clustering among the trees. The floor was strewn with palm leaves. Sometimes the
houses were surrounded by a little garden, and the hut of the cacique would slightly overtop those of his
neighbours. They never quarrelled among themselves, and the Spaniards, when they arrived, found them
pathetically docile. Their life in these dreamy hills and savannahs must have been akin to that of our first
ancestors in the Garden of Eden, a prelapsarian existence evolving without land-mark or history until the
steel-clad Christians, with their armoured horses and fire-breathing culverins, strong in the authority of
Pope Alexander VI Borgia, suddenly irrupted into this private paradise. For this part of Jamaica, Saint
Ann's Parish, is precisely where the Spaniards first landed: the first messengers (for there were no pois-
onous serpents in the island) of the Fall.
Here, then, the Arawaks throve among the woods of ceiba, lignum vitae, silk-cotton and pimento. The
forests were shared by monkeys, parrots, macaws, humming birds—'hovering atoms of emerald, and
amethyst and ruby'—parakeets and mocking birds. The trees rang with the cooing of doves and ring-
tailed pigeons, and in October myriads of ortolans flew southwards from the Carolinas. An abundance of
wild fowl challenged their skill as archers, and the fens of Westmoreland were scarlet with the plumage