Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 222

The other Maroons of Accompong, however, in the south of the Cockpit Country, had taken no part
in the revolt and were still, I learnt with astonishment, living in their free mountain kingdom, under the
dispensation laid down in the 1738 treaty between Old Cudjoe and George II. Realizing the implications
of this, we began packing almost immediately.
These days among the Maroons were one of the pleasantest of our sojourns in the Caribbean. What a sin-
gular community they are! The constitution of the mountain hegemony has scarcely changed since Old
Cudjoe's day. He was succeeded as the treaty laid down, by the eldest of his surviving captains and then
by a long sequence of elected rulers until the present day.
The chieftainship had now devolved upon Colonel Rowe, a dignified and charming old man of eighty-
three, with the appearance, strength and alertness of a very much younger man. Indeed, only his grizzled
hair gives any hint of his age. There is no hint of it in his dark and energetic features.
'What's your job?' the Colonel asked me out of the blue. It was so sudden that I had to think hard
before answering, 'I'm a writer.'
'Shorthand?'
'No, longhand, unfortunately.'
'Ah. That's hard work.'
Although, compared to the peaks of the Blue Mountains, Accompong lies at no very great height, I had
the feeling that the Maroons lived on a raft sailing high above the dark river-bed of Jamaican life. And
looking out of the window of the shanty in the early morning at the descending layers of mist that were
entangled in the millions of leaves, a whole world seemed to separate us from the plains. Maroon life
unfolds in an airy floating world of its own that has no particular link with any definite place or century.
Old men of amazing age and robustness sat in their doorways and shouted a greeting as we passed, and
the Colonel and the school-master took us on a sort of state visit to the little school. The pupils jumped
to their feet as we came in, and subsided again at a wave from the Colonel, who questioned them about
their lessons with a stern benignity. We sat down for a while and listened to the children reading aloud
from their history books: 'Ethelred the Unready,' a small girl read, 'was a weak king. He attempted to
keep the Danes out of his kingdom, not by going to war with them, but by giving them money. This was
known as the Danegeld….' The children were intelligent and prompt, and, perhaps because of the Colon-
el's presence, magically well-behaved. When the bell rang for the end of the class, they pelted out in the
sunlight and began wrestling and chasing each other over the grass, climbing into the branches of a ceiba
tree, or swinging through the air on the ropes of a primitive merry-go-round. They were, like nearly all
Negro children, engagingly active and lithe and extremely pretty. It was pleasant to learn that the Maroon
population is slightly on the increase.
Leaving the Colonel to his official duties, we set off for the Cockpit Country with his brother, Em-
manuel Rowe.
A ravine swallowed us up. After a mile or two it grew narrower and then so dense with vegetation
that it seemed to close entirely. It was only by scaling the tree-covered rocks through a spider's web of
liana and convolvulus that we could go any farther. Dripping with sweat, we emerged at last into a glade
at the bottom of a circle of precipices. Escarpments of limestone jutted through the trees, which throve
on every root-hold. A beautiful place, but ghostly and forbidding in its windless hush. Not a leaf moved.