Two Years in the French West Indies | Page 8

and then
melts into the horizon-light like a mirage.
Another yellow sunset, made weird by extraordinary black, dense,
fantastic shapes of cloud. Night darkens, , and again the Southern Cross
glimmers before our prow, and the two Milky Ways reveal
themselves,--that of the Cosmos and that ghostlier one which stretches
over the black deep behind us. This alternately broadens and narrows at
regular intervals, concomitantly with the rhythmical swing of the
steamer, Before us the bows spout: fire; behind us there is a flaming
and roaring as of Phlegethon; and the voices of wind and sea become so
loud that we cannot talk to one another,--cannot make our words heard
even by shouting.

IX.
Early morning: the eighth day. Moored in another blue harbor,-- a great
semicircular basin, bounded by a high billowing of hills all green from

the fringe of yellow beach up to their loftiest clouded summit. The land
has that up-tossed look which tells a volcanic origin. There are
curiously scalloped heights, which, though emerald from base to crest,
still retain all the physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must be
lava under that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of bright
green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray-stretches a long chain
of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these elevations are
interunited by their curving hollows of land or by filaments--very low
valleys. And as they grade away in varying color through distance,
these hill-chains take a curious segmented, jointed appearance, like
insect forms, enormous ant- bodies.... This is St. Kitt's.
We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long
wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the town of
Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people.
It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted. There
are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many
bread-fruit trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes, and
unfamiliar things the negroes call by incomprehensible
names,--"sap-saps," "dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less
reflection of light than in Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness; no
Spanish buildings, no canary-colored arcades. All the narrow streets are
gray or neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen tone. Most of the
dwellings are timber, resting on brick props, or elevated upon blocks of
lava rock. It seems almost as if some breath from the enormous and
always clouded mountain overlooking the town had begrimed
everything, darkening even the colors of vegetation.
The population is not picturesque. The costumes are commonplace; the
tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and sombre blues and grays
are commoner than pinks, yellows, and violets. Occasionally you
observe a fine half-breed type--some tall brown girl walking by with a
swaying grace like that of a sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not
frequent. Most of those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many
stores are kept by yellow men with intensely black hair and eyes,--men
who do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine

buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer the
visitor is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and its palms, its
monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees, and its beautiful little
mountains. From some of these trees a peculiar tillandsia streams down,
much like our Spanish moss,--but it is black!
... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the island
look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones, all very green,
and connected by strips of valley-land so low that the edge of the
sea-circle on the other side of the island can be seen through the gaps.
We steam past truncated hills, past heights that have the look of the
stumps of peaks cut half down, --ancient fire-mouths choked by
tropical verdure.
Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other
volcanic forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like clouds.
Those are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the subterranean
fires.
It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great mountain flanked
by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest, with clouds packed high
upon it, still seems to smoke;--the second highest displays the most
symmetrical crater-form I have yet seen. All are still grayish-blue or
gray. Gradually through the blues break long high gleams of green.
As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky;
the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On
the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red, and
brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are
distinguishable;--cane-plantations unfold gold- green surfaces.
We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to
become a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it
continues green;--but it is