Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 75

of the scrub of the estuary and another slender suspension bridge, we ascended a pathway that climbed
due westwards away from the coast up the sides of a tremendous canyon towards the central watershed
of Dominica. One or two forest villages dropped behind us, and as the hours passed, the forest turned
into something quite different from anything we had so far seen. The trees grew to enormous heights and
locked us into a dank and desolate tube of a pathway cut on a narrow shelf out of the tufa. Everything
dripped and rotted. Breaks in the trees revealed nothing but towering wooded mountainsides and rolling
hollows and gorges roofed with millions of leaves. The green was only broken by hibiscus and convolvu-
lus and the silver grey trunks of the Trumpet-Wood tree. This is a beautiful and delicate thing with thin
silver boughs all curling up from the stem at the identically-spaced points in semicircles like the branches
of Jewish candelabra, ending in sparsely growing leaves the same shape as those of the fig tree, but much
larger; grey green on one side and on the other, silver white. In Creole it is called Bois Canon , because,
according to one porter, its trunk, when broken, makes a report like a gun firing. The second said it was
because it explodes if it is used as fuel, while the third maintained that it owes its name merely to its
hollowness, which suggests the barrel of a cannon. This botanic argument carried us for an hour or two
through the awe-inspiring high woods. The only person we met was a wild-looking Negro sitting on a
rock with a flintlock across his knees, the perfect image of a runaway maroon in the seventeenth century.
He showed us his pouch full of lead shot, an antique powder horn on a bandolier, and a set of spare flints
beautifully shaped to fit between the screw-jaws of the hammer. He declared he was out after blue par-
rots. When we had left him behind, Antony, the tallest of the porters who sang charmingly most of the
way in Créole, said he was a very bad man indeed, but would not enlarge on it. We saw none of these blue
parrots, though we were eternally peering up into the branches. The only bird we heard all day was the
Siffleur Montagne, which piped long lugubrious sounds, usually on one note, but occasionally on two,
every few minutes; a noise so melancholy that it seemed the perfect emanation of these sad and beautiful
forests. It haunts the high woods of Dominica and nowhere else in the world.
About noon the forest thinned and vanished, and the steep slopes were covered with low shrubs. The
valley fell away for miles, sinking and winding down to the distant mouth of the river at Rosalie, which
was just visible on the faint edge of the sea. The full force of the Trade Winds seemed to blow us and
our little mounts up the last steep zig-zag of the mountain, and over the lip of a crater into an enormous
windless punchbowl that was filled with clouds.
They cleared as we descended. At the bottom of this hollow lay a large pool, a cold and secret-looking
stretch of water winding its irregular shape through water plants and weeds. Fragments of cloud lingered
in the branches of the forest. The place was disturbingly still and impressive. It is, understandably, re-
garded by the islanders with superstitious awe. Oldmixon, the early eighteenth-century traveller, has set
down a legend, current in his time, of a serpent that dwelt at the bottom of the Freshwater Lake, whose
head enclosed a sparkling jewel of inestimable price. The jewel was usually concealed by a membrane
“like that of a Man's Eyelid, and when it went to drink or sported itself in the deep Bottom, it fully dis-
covered it, and the Rocks all about received a wonderful lustre from the Fire issuing out of that Precious
Gem.” Other legends say that it is inhabited by a Lorelei that drags unwary travellers, Hylas-like, down
to her underwater palaces. Sir Algernon records yet another tradition of a Carib chief who dived into
the bottomless lake, and then, after swimming for miles through the dark entrails of Dominica, appeared
again in the sea to the south west of the island.
When we climbed through the western edge of the crater, a different world confronted us. It was a
clear, sunny, Arcadian land of falling wooded slopes and valleys and forested vistas that had none of the