Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'but dey got lovely, lovely hair.' His mouth opened in a large smile as he passed his palm over his own
scalp: 'Not like me.'
The police station where we stayed that night in Castle Bruce was a verandahed bungalow perched on
a smooth lawny hill with an old cannon lying on the grass. A police corporal, trim and martial in his blue
serge and scarlet piped trousers, ran down the steps to meet us as we rode into the village.
The morning's ride brought us at midday to Saint Sauveur, a forest village with an old grey church, a
massive presbytery, and a ruined and overgrown sugar mill. We tied the horses to a mango tree, and, set-
tling among the sea-grape a few yards from the waves, peeled our avocado pears, and watched the chil-
dren playing cricket on the green. The bats were made of the hard end of palm branches, and every now
and then the soft ball would land in our midst, and we would throw it back. A schoolmistress appeared
in the door of the school and blew a whistle, and they all fell into line and trotted along to the benches
under the trees for lessons out of doors. The young schoolmaster took the older boys and girls on one
side, and the schoolmistress led the kindergarten class away to a clump of palm trees at the other end of
the green. Looking out of the windows of the schoolroom into whose empty precincts we ventured for
a moment before we rode away, we listened to the lesson. 'The Police Force was founded by Sir Robert
Peel,' the schoolmaster said, 'and the policemen were colloquially known as peelers.' The air was full
of the scratching of slates. A little girl, just under our window, whose head was covered with little blue
bows, laboured away, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth with concentration. Her slate
pencil traced 'Colokwealy known as pillars.'
All the afternoon, sudden downpours alternated with bright sunshine, and we would halt in clearings
for ten minutes to let our clothes dry during the sunny spells. In the late afternoon the clouds blew away
and the denseness of the forest opened into a loosely connected system of dells and great clumps of creep-
erhung trees, a vague, steaming and antediluvian world. The road was then enclosed once more between
dank wet woods, heavy with melancholy, and full of the sad cooing of wood pigeons. Ropes of convolvu-
lus looped their rainy flowers over our heads, and as we rode underneath them through the soft mud, a
green and black hummingbird, no larger than a dragon-fly, flickered almost motionlessly over the white
trumpets, every few seconds plunging its needle-thin beak inside like a duellist.
The path brought us down again to the roar of the sea, and a long avenue of tall palms leading to
the estuary of a river. The rain began, and our horses broke into a gallop through the slender trunks that
brought us, after a mile, into the green pathway lined with stilted huts that is the main street of Rosalie.
Looking out of the window of the little police station, we saw a strange and wonderful sight. A brilliant
lawn rose from the banks of the river to the forest's edge, where banana and palm, paw-paw, breadfruit
and mango trees were glistening under the raindrops in a score of shades of green. In the middle of this
smooth expanse stood a little grey Norman abbey, its architecture, in the sweeping rain, looking as au-
thentic in detail as Iffley Church or Barfrestone. Sturdy pillars with heavy capitals blossomed into deep
Romanesque arches jagged with herring-bone and dogtooth, as though a team of seraphim had uprooted
it from the yew trees and gravestones of an English village and flown it across the ocean to this tropical
glade. The sun went down and the rain stopped, and the darkness filled with armies of fireflies.
Our ponies had been, all through the journey, a wearisome cause of change and debate and altercation,
and when we set out soon after dawn next morning, only Joan's pony, Jockey Girl, remained from the
original cavalcade. Costa and I mounted two newcomers called Fury and Guzman. After a mile or two
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