Guadeloupe continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 15

CHAPTER TWO
Guadeloupe continued
AS the faded photographs in Raoul's albums had hinted, picnics are an essential part of Créole life, and
their technique has become highly specialized. Raoul was continually improvising them at a second's no-
tice, and of these one in particular stands out. After an hour in the sea, we had run on tiptoe across the fine
grey sand—the sun heats it at midday to an intolerable temperature—to the shelter of the forest's edge.
Up above, the branches climbed the mountainside in a wild, unbroken amphitheatre of green. We were
encamped among dark, shady rocks. Drinks lay on a large slab of ice, and Raoul was cooking on a little
fire. First we ate a delicious fish, then a chicken cooked with rice in the Créole way, and then mangoes,
avocadoes and paw-paws. Coffee followed punch, wine and liqueurs. Half asleep, Costa asked the name
of the beautiful and exceptionally shady tree under which we were reclining. 'Ah,' Raoul said, 'I meant to
tell you. It's called the manchineel. One drop of its juice on the skin is almost certain death….'
I woke up to find two pairs of eyes gazing down at me. Two young Negroes, naked except for a cloth
round their middles, were standing under the branches with their backs to the sun. They were as lean and
hollow-cheeked as Solomon islanders. Each wore a naked cutlass at his side and held in his hand a prim-
itive crossbow, strung with a dozen twisted thongs cut from the inner tubing of a motor-car, and a long
fiercely barbed harpoon. Home-made goggles for underwater fishing hung round their necks. They accep-
ted cigarettes and smoked them in silence, then, saying good-bye, ran over the sand and into the water, and
were soon swimming out of sight into the next combe, leaving the beach as bare once more as the shore of
Robinson Crusoe's island.
On the way back we passed through Bouillante, on the western roots of the Souffrière, whose crest had
so far remained obstinately hidden in cloud. Boiling water wells out of the sea here in little geysers, and
the shore is pock-marked with grey circles of boiling mud. Many of them are covered with a brittle crust,
but a poke with a walking-stick stirs up an angry bubbling noise, and a stench of sulphur fills the air. These
places are scattered round the volcano like sores. The surrounding country is peppered with lumps of ig-
neous rock, some of them many tons in weight, black and infernal-looking missiles nestling in green beds
of forest and creeper, which have shot from the centre of the earth and landed among the trees after miles
of flight through the air.
My growing aversion for tropical flora would be confirmed or exorcized, I knew, by climbing to the top of
the Souffrière, and as the ascent began I started to feel, with the slight pang that always accompanies the
surrender of a prejudice, that it would be the latter.
The tunnel of the pathway swung up the forested side of the volcano in long loops, roofed in by a green
arcade of great height and of such denseness that the sky was often invisible. Under this high ceiling, our
progress resembled the ascent of a shallow winding staircase through wavering and aqueous gloom, of-
ten illumined by only a single slanting shaft of sunlight. Scarlet and pink and purple hibiscus cascaded
from the forest walls on either side, and yellow cassia and the fragile papery white bugles of datura. The
mangoes and paw-paw of the lower slopes were replaced, as the path mounted, by thickets of bamboo and
elephant-ear, chou sauvage, and the balisier plant with its long thin stems ending in ribbed and spatulate