Guadeloupe - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 5

From the height of the mornes a new world appeared. The fronded landscape curled down to the sea
and expired in a network of mangroves. The outlines of Marie Galante and the islands of the Saints hung
on the horizon, and the blue-green sky was piled with a monumental accumulation of pink clouds. In
their midst, somewhere over the bay towards the sunset, was hidden the peak of la Souffrière, the volcano
that dominates the whole of the west of Guadeloupe. Below us, huddled behind the masts of sailing ves-
sels, Pointe-à-Pitre looked little more than a hamlet. The low tin roofs and the intruding palm trees were
already in shadow, and as we watched, the sunlight died from the white façade of a bank, and then died
from the hill and the air above us. Night descended all in one piece, like a shutter.
We followed a tunnel of leaves downhill to a stagnant pool and a derelict small-gauge railway that ran
through cane-fields into the town. The croaking of millions of frogs and the scraping of crickets seemed
to increase as the darkness grew more intense, and an odd feeling of desolation and remoteness infected
us all. What on earth were we doing here? Sunset in the tropics is one of the most melancholy events in
the world, a moment of sudden and all-pervading sadness.
An electricity strike had condemned the town to darkness. The Place de la Victoire was full of people
promenading, all of them invisible except for the occasional blur of a white suit moving through the
shadows without either head or hands. Cigarettes floated through the air of their own volition, glowed
momentarily brighter in a void under the whites of eyes, then grew dim and sank again in a ghostly para-
bola. Now and then a match was struck, and a black mask would materialize for a few seconds and van-
ish. There was the sound of voices everywhere, and of whistling and humming, and sometimes a clap of
laughter exploded in the dark and the hot air became full of ownerless teeth.
Invisible, too, were the enormous sand-box trees that surround the square. They owe their name—they
are called Sabliers in French—to their seed pods, which, in the eighteenth century, were filled with sand
and used as sprinklers for the blotting of parchment. Three sides of the square are enclosed by buildings
and the fourth is a waterfront where sloops and schooners lie at anchor. During the French Revolution,
the Place de la Victoire was the scene of a battle between the invading English and their French Royalist
allies against Victor Hugues, the envoy of the Convention. The English were defeated, and the Royalists
massacred, and not far from the marble bust of a late nineteenth-century governor—a mild torso on a
pedestal with an imperial beard and huge epaulettes—the Revolutionary guillotine was erected.
The Hôtel des Antilles is a disaffected seminary, a cool, spacious building of wood, whose timbers,
beams, balustrades, pillars and twisting staircases give it the air of an old galleon. The nautical atmo-
sphere was augmented now by the hurricane lanterns that were its only lighting. The owner is a French-
man who retired here from the Vichy Navy, a stout young man with a blond barbe en collier like Count
d'Orsay, and an elaborately carved pipe. The proprietress, a blonde, middle-aged Parisian, complained
bitterly about the way the French West Indies were run, and hinted regretfully that all was far better in the
British possessions, especially with regard to sanitation, roads, public works and discipline. I felt there
was an unspoken corollary that the blacks were 'kept in their place' better in the British possessions, and
that, as a result, all were happier. Her conversation had an undercurrent of disillusionment that was to
become increasingly familiar throughout the Antilles.
The wooden dining-room was sparsely occupied by a handful of French colonials who had been here
too long—engineers, architects, government servants—by a great-grandson of Fromentin, one or two col-
oured lawyers, and a Negro sergeant with a French wife. The heat, the lugubrious acoustics, the sudden