Martinique - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 38

The Trade Winds blow here blessedly cool all day and all night. The French name for this wind— Les
Alizées —evokes far better than the English this gentle and zephyrous benison.
The hotel shares the drawback which is possessed by many of the island houses: the room walls, in
order that the inside of the house may catch any breath of wind, stop about a foot short of the ceiling,
so that movement and conversations in the next room, and even several rooms away, are plainly audible;
an arrangement that makes one, willy-nilly, an initiate of half a dozen private lives, and which fills the
watches of the night with sighs and coughs and snores.
Martinique is an important cross-roads of the various air lines of the Antilles and the Americas, and
many of the guests who stayed there a night had come from enormous distances. Once a week a French
transatlantic seaplane called the T.K.R. alighted in the bay, its enormous white bulk making everything
within sight look grotesquely small and out of proportion. Its arrival is an event whose wonder never
stales for the less sophisticated inhabitants of the capital. They assemble on the quays and drink it in for
hours. It has even passed into the island folklore under the name of Gwos gibier . Towards sunset every
day a truckload of pilots and officials arrived, and the air was suddenly full of the clatter of ice in their
punch glasses and of their uninhibited laughter. The food was so outstanding that the bell that announced
mealtimes really did become the soul's tocsin.
The only real disadvantage of this retreat was its distance from the town. It is perched in the heart
of the béké [1] garden-colony which always occupies the coolest region near these West Indian towns.
The villas that lie on either hand as one descends towards the town spring from a wonderful variety of
inspirations. Every house echoes a different architectural style: Kephissia, Sinai, Zamalek, Pierrefonds,
Hamburg, New York, South Carolina, and Anne Hathaway's Cottage. With each descending step, the air
gets hotter, seeming to surge up towards one from the open door of an oven. The villas peter out and the
humbler wooden houses begin with the first Coca-Cola advertisement—outposts of what is to follow. A
glimpse is caught through a window of a congregation of Seventh Day Adventists who always seem to
be in session and singing their hearts out; and then the town is reached.
The wooden houses, perched on the hillside among palms and breadfruit, lean dramatically over the
waters of the two rivers between which, like Baghdad, the town lies: the rivers Monsieur and Madame.
Though there is much in the town that is shabby and squalid, it has infinitely more grace than Pointe-à-
Pitre. There is an iron cathedral built out of Meccano, and fine pillared law courts where tall palms thrust
their feather-dusters up through a cool well of grey masonry. But in the centre of the town something very
imposing occurs: the Savane —not, here, a plain, but an enormous and spacious quadrangle, that at once
calls to mind the maidan of an oriental city. In the centre a statue of Josephine stands, surrounded by a
square of slender palmistes, and the rest of the Savane is shaded by sandbox and tamarind. It is bounded
on its western extremity by the seafront. Here, facing a gesticulating statue of d'Esnambuc, the sloops
and schooners congregate, some of which ply as far afield as Jamaica or Haiti or even the Spanish Main.
A long tongue of land juts from the southern corner of the Savane , the narrow platform on which is piled
a massive old fort that has many times withstood the attacks of the English and the Dutch. It has a dank,
solid appearance. The towers and machicolations are green with creepers and plumed with foliage, and
once inside the gates—no easy accomplishment—a formidable system of flèches, redoubts, moats, glacis
and barbicans appear, woven into an inexpugnable labyrinth possessing all the complexity of an engrav-
ing by Vauban.
An amazing building occupies the opposite corner of the Savane : the Schoelcher library. I often used
to visit it to read memoirs of Martinique by the travellers and settlers of former centuries, and the works