Guadeloupe - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 11

We dined in dressing-gowns, in the middle of the big central room of this rambling one-storeyed build-
ing, after warming ourselves with several glasses of punch martinicais that Raoul prepared with consid-
erable care. This drink is made of rum and syrup with a sliver of lime or lemon peel, and sometimes a
sprinkling of nutmeg. In bars, only the syrup is paid for. The rum itself is free, and left on the table as
indifferently as though it were water. The mixture is stirred up with a white swizzle stick called a Lélé
that is sometimes two feet long, cut from an island tree and ending in a wheel of amputated concentric
twigs.
Raoul, who is a Martinican, was lonely in Guadeloupe, and eager to talk of the life in his own island,
where all, he maintained, was gayer, more established, more civilized. We spent the evening listening
to tales of house parties from plantation to plantation, races, picnics, cock-fights, duels, old love affairs,
Negro celebrations and contests between mongooses and snakes. Guadeloupe is free of poisonous snakes,
but the woods in Martinique teem with a terrible reptile called the trigonocéphale or, in Créole, fer de
lance, that lurks in the long grass, or lies along the branches of trees, to shoot through the air like a javelin
when its prey approaches. Many theories have been put forward to explain the presence of this snake in
Martinique, for it is unknown in the neighbouring islands to north and south. The most likely explanation
is that the ancestors of this wicked swarm were carried on floating timber down the Orinoco from the
Venezuelan hinterland (where they are very common) out into the Atlantic with the rest of the alluvia
of the river, washed northwards by the currents and finally cast ashore on Martinique. To counteract this
menace, mongooses were imported, and the struggle continued in the bush for decades. The ranks of the
fer de lance were thinned, but the mongoose multiplied at such a pace that it, too, has become a problem.
An uncle of Raoul's has the rare gift of handling snakes with complete immunity, and this attribute has
surrounded him with the fame and the awe of a sorcerer. Some years ago he inherited an estate in Trin-
idad (where, during the French Revolution, many Royalist families escaped from the Jacobin ferocity of
Victor Hugues). He now lives there alone in the high-woods in a house where snakes circulate as freely
as kittens.
Under the mosquito net in a big shadowy bedroom, I fell asleep looking through old photograph al-
bums by the light of an oil-lamp. The pictures had faded to a pale khaki, in which one could just make
out the Martinican seigneurs in straw boaters, the Créole beauties in their feathers and their sweeping
Boldini hats. Many of the photographs recorded picnics under palms or shady mango trees. Negroes in
livery in the background carved cold fowls or drew the corks from bottles, while the horses waited pa-
tiently between the shafts of the assembled victorias. What remote and Elysian scenes!
A cat crept under the netting and curled up on the pillow. The rain rattled on the roof without ceasing,
and from time to time lightning zigzagged through the rain, followed by thunderclaps that seemed to blow
the night in half.
La Sainte Marie de la Garde, the tiny skiff that we found waiting for us next morning at the beach of St.
François, looked disturbingly small. She was manned by two elderly Negroes wearing odd Chinese hats
like the tops of toadstools. The weather had cleared up magically and a strong wind sent us skimming in
the direction of the Désirade.
Many of the Antilles are hemmed in by a nimbus of coral reefs that lie from a furlong to several miles
out to sea. We crossed the smooth, sheltered waters to a ruffling causeway in this barrier, and the mo-
ment we had emerged, felt the boat tossing and pitching with a sharper motion. The shore became a del-
icate green line, and the misty quadrilateral of the Désirade began to appear in greater detail. The boat