Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 61

schooners and dug-out canoes, and, in the outskirts of the town, I discovered the cigar factory of a
firm called Hillsborough, and bought a box of fifty from an old Spaniard there for what seemed almost
nothing. In a side-street an undertaker advertised coffins, both ready-made and to measure, at cut-throat
prices.
The central street climbed past a Catholic cathedral and a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, whose Gothic
masonry towered above the wooden roofs and the tree-tops like the freestone towers of Westgate. An
Anglican church, built in the style of the Regency, slumbered on the airy hill-top opposite a massive
whitewashed police barracks: an old French fort, whose walls are pierced with breaches for cannon and
musket. White uniformed convicts worked in the grounds, and from the white battlements and ravelins,
cannon cast with the crowned ciphers of the earlier Georges aimed their stoppered mouths over the fall-
ing tree-tops and the white-sailed fishing boats that were skimming across the bay. Farther on, tall iron
railings, a flagstaff with another Union Jack, and a sentry-box guarded the leafy expanses of grass at the
end of which lay the grey bulk of Government House. On a headland over the bay the Free Library stood,
a large, airy, balconied building. Two young Negroes sat in the reading room, deep in the Bystander and
Horse and Hound . In the garden a giant banyan tree overshadowed, with its deep foliage and manifold
stems and falling cables, an elegant and romantic fountain of painted metal.
The gathering of buildings on this hill-top, the clean white-washed walls and the trees, the flags and
towers, and the few acres of the roofs of Roseau possessed an engaging and a rather disarming quality.
Altogether, the capital was scarcely more than a village, an Antillean Cranford clustering gracefully on
the edge of a blazing extent of water, and overshadowed by steep and enormous hills fleecy with every
excess of tropical vegetation. If they escape the gloom and the ungainliness which is so often their lot,
there is something delightfully comic about many of these little Caribbean towns. The fact that there is a
town at all, especially an almost European town, in the middle of such violence of flora and the elements,
seems as unnatural an effect as a swimmer remaining for long periods under water.
A shady road, running along a wall like that of an English park, led out of the town for about half
a mile in the direction of the hills, and a gate opened into the most beautiful botanical gardens I have
ever seen. Lawns as perfect as the most ancient and august in England rolled in gentle slopes shaded by
clumps of enormous and, for me, still unknown trees, except for another banyan under whose convolu-
tions I lay for an hour or two and watched my cigar smoke drifting through its many trunks. Next to it
a huge cannon-ball tree every now and then loosed off its ammunition, which fell with a dull thud upon
the grass. It was a casual and empty paradise, with no other purpose, it seemed, than to furnish a solitary
refuge for the Marvellian reveries of the wisely recumbent gardeners and me.
Returning to the lower town, I wandered into the High Court, near Government House. It was in full ses-
sion and, in spite of the fans, so hot that everybody was mopping their brows. An old peasant woman was
being tried for murdering her husband with a hoe. As I came in, a court official was holding the weapon
out for the inspection of the jury. As she spoke only Créole, all her evidence had to be given through an
interpreter. Under the Royal Arms, two ancient drums and a panoply of banners sat the Puisne Judge of
the Windward Islands in his scarlet robe and bands and wig, while the barristers, in spite of the heat, were
as heavily gowned and perruqued as they would have been at the Old Bailey. The white vault echoed with
legal coughs. 'But m'lud …' the defending counsel was beginning in the rarified tones of Balliol and the
Inner Temple. It was a dignified and majestic scene. The strange garb of the law-courts always reminds
me of the illustrations of Alice in Wonderland , and here the dreamlike atmosphere was heightened by the