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natural grace by horrible white silk or cotton dresses and worse hats, and high-heeled shoes that seem
as long and pointed as skis; all their charm is turned into prinked-up leggy awkwardness. Negro women
ought always to wear bright colours and compact, dashingly tied turbans. Mulatto girls should affect a
sort of Italo-Iberian swank.
The male counterparts of the splendid old women of these islands wear dull black clothes, awkward
butter-fly collars and straw boaters or trilbies, and often metal-rimmed spectacles. Their dark, wrinkled
faces and white hair make them look gentle and benevolent, but they seldom achieve the grand air of
their wives. The young men are nearly all beautifully built, and look their best when they are working
without their shirts, and displaying magnificent shoulders and torsos that taper down to flat stomachs and
phenomenally narrow waists. Their bodies have the symmetry and perfection of machines. Muscles and
joints melt smoothly into each other under skin which shines like a seal's or an otter's. But when they put
on their best clothes, all this gracefulness vanishes. They suddenly acquire a clumsy, gangling look, and
their wrists seem too long or their sleeves too short. Their hands hang purposelessly swinging, and under
these garments the ease and looseness of their gait degenerates into a shuffle. We had to wait till Trinidad
to see the right way for Negroes to dress.
A hundred years ago, the women wore practically the same clothes as those I have described, except
that their turbans on great feast days were often rigid cylinders two feet high with enormous bows down
the front. Père Labat, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, remarks that any money the slaves
could save was spent on apparel for Sundays and holidays. This, for the men, would consist of tight white
knee-breeches and a white shirt. Round their waists they tied like a kilt a length of brightly coloured cloth
that came to the upper curve of the knee. This was secured on either hip with bunches of coloured rib-
bons. Their torsos were encased in a tight-fitting bolero, that reached half-way down the back. Between
this and the kilt-like cloth, the shirt puffed out. At the wrists and throat they would attach silver buttons,
coloured stones, or bright tufts of ribbon, and if they wore a hat it would be a new straw sombrero. In rich
houses the clothes of the slaves were basically the same, but carried out in the colours of the household
livery, and the jackets would be covered with gold lace. Gold pendants hung in their ears, and, round their
necks, emblazoned silver plaques. A large and dazzling turban was the crowning touch to this magnifi-
cence.
Guadeloupe is composed of two triangles of land linked by a narrow isthmus through which winds a
sinuous and sluggish limb of sea called the Rivière Sallée. The western part, la Basse Terre, is, unexpec-
tedly, an intractable, precipitous and forested country climbing up into the clouds where the volcano of La
Souffrière hides its cone, while the eastern part, la Grande Terre, is a low, rolling country of cane-fields
and pasture-land. Driving across it from Pointe-à-Pitre, we passed through an undulation of
mornes
into
a wide savannah, where the cattle grazed under the bread-fruit trees; on, through the village of Abymes
and the meadows and sugar-cane and banana plantations to the town of Moule.
The afternoon was baking and shadowless, and the town seemed only with an effort to remain upright
among its thorough-fares of dust. It was as empty as a sarcophagus. The French guide-book describes
it as a great centre of elegant Créole life in the past, hinting at routs and cavalcades and banquets of
unparalleled sumptuousness. Acts of God must have fallen upon it with really purposeful vindictive-
ness, for not by the most violent man-handling of the imagination could one associate a chandelier or a
powdered wig with this collection of hovels. Not even a dog was to be seen. But behind a tall crucifix
stood a cemetery of such dimensions—Père Lachaise and the Campo Santo gone mad—that, opening
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