Guadeloupe continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 16

leaves ten feet long and the shape of Zulu shields. Tall, smooth palm trees overtopped the denser jungle
growth, and, most beautiful of all, there was an abundance of tree-ferns of great size. The young ones
grow like a sheaf of identical bishops' croziers. But when fully grown, the stem is straight and slender,
and every few feet a corolla of branches expands from it, fanning upwards, outwards and then down in
the most gracious of curves. Each branch is equidistant from its neighbour, and grows to exactly the same
length, and each circle of branches is larger than the one below. The tree is crowned by the largest of all
these circles, a delicious pale green cupola that is symmetrically and perfectly ribbed by a dark spidery
masonry of branches from which, like a network of veins, the twigs thread their ancillary leaf-systems,
curving and drooping and tapering away into points of the tenderest green. These frail umbrellas are as
faultless in detail as an architect's compass-design for the building of a dome, and as light and fluttering
and delicate as a Valentine made of peacock's feathers.
All this vegetation was far overtopped by the acomas, enormous trees that climbed to great heights and
blotted out the sky. The boles, which were larger than any I had ever seen, sprang from roots that seemed
webbed to the trunk by massive membranes of wood projecting like rudders whose apexes diminished
and melted as they gained height, into the huge fabric of the tree. The trunk and the branches were so
overgrown with parasites—by treeferns that had lodged in hollows and opened their green tents in mid-
air, by elephant-ear and by bois d'ananas with its bristling armoury of spikes—that the tree looked like
a dozen different kinds of tree climbing upwards in massive and insane confusion. Cataracts of creep-
er and convolvulus trailed from the branches and spiralled their way down the lianas which, like organ
pipes, clung to the trunk, or hung loose, thicker and softer with moss than the grips of bell-ropes. Lianas
of all diameters were looped and suspended everywhere. Thin strands as tough as bootlaces hung dead
straight from branches one hundred feet overhead, like the solidified trajectories of a downpour of rain.
This huge green underworld was lighted by a sunlight somewhere overhead that only spilt an occasional
beam through the opaque criss-cross of leaves. We did not hear a single bird.
The forest that confined our path on either side was as dense as some green fibre composed of under-
growth and creepers and young trees, and the rotten detritus of old ones. Many of these existed still only
in shape, and would collapse when struck, with a sickly smell of decay.
Raoul had taken his shoes off, and mounted the green slopes with an ease that can only be the result
of his family's three centuries in these forests. His alert and squire-ish figure led our little procession all
the way, past a pool called les Bains Jaunes, and then for a few curious furlongs of stepped and cobbled
pathway laid out here by French sappers in the eighteen-sixties. The way grew steeper and more tortuous,
and Raoul and our guide plied their cutlasses more frequently on the encroaching vegetation. All at once
the forest stopped, and we found ourselves at the foot of an abrupt cone. A fleet of clouds, sailing from
the east on the current of the Trade Winds, hung at anchor, as it were, level with the obstructing crater.
The last part of the ascent was almost as steep, but not nearly as easy, as climbing a ladder. Stunted
trees projected in exclamatory gestures from the rocks, most of them seemingly a kind of magnolia tree,
with shiny, saucer-shaped leaves. Spiky scarlet flowers grew on the ground, and flowers of deep violet,
and plants as angular, hard and porous as coral. The rock was covered with moss of every imaginable
colour, but predominantly marigold or primrose, or of a green as deep as that of submarine foliage. At the
very moment that we hoisted ourselves through the crater's toothy machicolations, bathed with sweat and
with our hearts thumping, a furious blast of wind drove a reek of sulphur up our nostrils, and the clouds
broke from their moorings and obliterated everything.