II.
FROM St. Pierre, trips to Pelée can be made by several routes;
—the most popular is that by way of Morne Rouge and the
Calebasse; but the summit can be reached in much less time by
making the ascent from different points along the coast-road to
Au Prêcheur,—such as the Morne St. Martin, or a well-known path
further north, passing near the celebrated hot springs (Fontaines
Chaudes). You drive towards Au Prêcheur, and begin the ascent on
foot, through cane-plantations. … The road by which you follow
the north-west coast round the skirts
of Pelée is very
picturesque:—you cross the Roxelane, the Rivière des Pères, the
Rivière Sèche (whose bed is now occupied only by a motionless torrent
of rocks);—passing first by the suburb of Fond-Corré, with its cocoa
groves, and broad beach of iron-gray sand,—a bathing resort;—then
Pointe Prince, and the Fond de Canonville, somnolent villages that
occupy wrinkles in the hem of Pelée's lava robe. The drive ultimately
rises and lowers over the undulations of the cliff, and is well
shadowed along the greater part of its course: you will admire
many huge
fromagers, or silk-cotton trees, various heavy lines of
tamarinds, and groups of
flamboyants with thick dark feathery foliage,
and cassia-trees with long pods pending and blackening from every branch,
and hedges of
campêche, or logwood, and calabash-trees, and multitudes
of the pretty shrubs bearing the fruit called in creole
raisins-bó-lanmè,
or "sea-side grapes." Then you reach Au Prêcheur: a very antiquated village,
which boasts a stone church and a little public square with a fountain
in it. If you have time to cross the Rivière du Prêcheur, a little
further on, you can obtain a fine view of the coast, which, rising suddenly
to a grand altitude, sweeps round in a semicircle over the Village of
the Abysses (
Aux Abymes),—whose name was doubtless suggested by the
immense depth of the sea at that point. … It was under the
shadow of those cliffs that the Confederate cruiser
Alabama
once hid herself, as a fish hides in the shadow of a rock, and
escaped from her pursuer, the
Iroquois. She had long been
blockaded in the harbor of St. Pierre by the Northern man-of-war,—anxiously
awaiting a chance to pounce upon her the instant she
should leave French waters;—and various Yankee vessels in port were
to send up rocket-signals should the
Alabama attempt to escape under
cover of darkness. But one night the privateer took a creole pilot on
board, and steamed out southward, with all her lights masked,
and her
chimneys so arranged that neither smoke nor sparks could betray her to
the enemy in the offing. However, some Yankee vessels near enough to discern
her movements through the darkness at once shot rockets south; and the
Iroquois gave chase. The
Alabama hugged the high
shore as far as Carbet,
remaining quite invisible in the shadow of it: then she suddenly turned and
recrossed the harbor. Again Yankee rockets betrayed her
manreuvre to the
Iroquois; but she gained Aux Abymes, laid
herself close to the enormous black cliff, and there remained
indistinguishable; the
Iroquois steamed by north without seeing
her. Once the Confederate cruiser found her enemy well out of
sight, she put her pilot ashore and escaped into the Dominica
channel. The pilot was a poor mulatto, who thought himself well
paid with five hundred francs!
… The more popular route to Pelée by way of Morne Rouge is
otherwise interesting … Anybody not too much afraid of the
tropic sun must find it a delightful experience to follow the
mountain roads leading to the interior from the city, as all the
mornes traversed by them command landscapes of extraordinary
beauty. According to the zigzags of the way, the scenery shifts
panoramically. At one moment you are looking down into valleys a
thousand feet below, at another, over luminous leagues of meadow
or cane-field, you see some far crowding of cones and cratered
shapes;—sharp as the teeth of a saw, and blue as sapphire,—with
further eminences ranging away through pearline color to high-peaked
remotenesses of vapory gold. As you follow the windings
of such a way as the road of the Morne Labelle, or the Morne
d'Orange, the city disappears and reappears many times,—always
diminishing, till at last it looks no bigger than a chess-board.
Simultaneously distant mountain shapes appear to unfold and
lengthen;—and always, always the sea rises with your rising.
Viewed at first from
the bulwark (
boulevard) commanding the
roofs of the town, its horizon-line seemed straight and keen as
a knife-edge;—but as you mount higher, it elongates, begins to
curve; and gradually the whole azure expanse of water broadens
out roundly like a disk. From certain very lofty summits further
inland you behold the immense blue circle touching the sky all round
you,—except where a still greater altitude, like that of Pelée or
the Pitons, breaks the ring; and this high vision of the sea has a
phantasmal effect hard to describe, and due to vapory conditions of the
atmosphere. There are bright cloudless days when, even as seen
from the city, the ocean-verge has a spectral vagueness; but on
any day, in any season, that you ascend to a point dominating the
sea by a thousand feet, the rim of the visible world takes a
ghostliness that startles,—because the prodigious light gives to
all near shapes such intense sharpness of outline and vividness
of color.
Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain
routes from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to
Morne Rouge surpasses them, notwithstanding that it almost
immediately leaves the city behind, and out of sight. Excepting
only La Trace,—the long route winding over mountain ridges and
between primitive forests south to Fort-de-France,—there is
probably no section of national highway in the island more
remarkable than the Morne Rouge road. Leaving the Grande Rue by
the public conveyance, you drive out through the Savane du Fort,
with its immense mango and tamarind trees, skirting the Roxelane.
Then reaching the boulevard, you pass high Morne Labelle,—and
then the Jardin des Plantes on the right, where white-stemmed
palms are lifting their heads two hundred feet,—and beautiful
Parnasse, heavily timbered to the top;—while on your left the
valley of the Roxelane shallows up, and Pelée shows less and less
of its tremendous
base. Then you pass through the sleepy, palmy,
pretty Village of the Three Bridges (
Trois Ponts),—where a Fahrenheit
thermometer shows already three degrees of temperature lower than
at St. Pierre;—and the national road, making a sharp turn to the
right, becomes all at once very steep—so steep that the horses
can mount only at a walk. Around and between the wooded hills it
ascends by zigzags,—occasionally overlooking the sea,—sometimes
following the verges of ravines. Now and then you catch glimpses
of the road over which you passed half an hour before undulating far
below, looking narrow as a tape-line,—and of the gorge of the
Roxelane,—and of Pelée, always higher, now thrusting out long spurs
of green and purple land into the sea. You drive under cool shadowing
of mountain woods—under waving bamboos like enormous ostrich feathers
dyed green,—and exquisite tree-ferns thirty to forty feet high,—and
imposing ceibas, with strangely buttressed trunks,—and all
sorts of broad-leaved forms: cachibous, balisiers, bananiers. …
Then you reach a plateau covered with cane, whose yellow expanse
is bounded on the right by a demilune of hills sharply angled as
crystals;—on the left it dips seaward; and before you Pelée's
head towers over the shoulders of intervening mornes. A strong
cool wind is blowing; and the horses can trot a while. Twenty
minutes, and the road, leaving the plateau, becomes steep again;
—you are approaching the volcano over the ridge of a colossal
spur. The way turns in a semicircle,—zigzags,—once more
touches the edge of a valley,—where the clear fall might be
nearly fifteen hundred feet. But narrowing more and more, the
valley becomes an ascending gorge; and across its chasm, upon the
brow of the opposite cliff, you catch sight of houses and a spire
seemingly perched on the verge, like so many birds'-nests,—the
village of Morne Rouge. It is two thousand feet above the sea;
and Pelée, although looming high over it, looks a trifle less
lofty now.
One's first impression of Morne Rouge is that of a single
straggling street of gray-painted cottages and shops (or rather
booths), dominated by a plain church, with four pursy-bodied
palmistes facing the main porch. Nevertheless, Morne Rouge is not
a small place, considering its situation;—there are nearly five
thousand inhabitants; but in order to find out where they live,
you must leave the public road, which is on a ridge, and explore
the high-hedged lanes leading down from it on either side. Then
you will find a veritable city of little wooden cottages,—each
screened about with banana-trees, Indian-reeds, and pommiers-roses.
You will also see a number of handsome private
residences—country-houses of wealthy merchants; and you will
find that the church, though uninteresting exteriorly, is rich
and impressive within: it is a famous shrine, where miracles are
alleged to have been wrought. Immense processions periodically
wend their way to it from St. Pierre,—starting at three or four
o'clock in the morning, so as to arrive before the sun is well
up. … But there are no woods here,—only fields. An odd tone
is given to the lanes by a local custom of planting hedges of
what are termed roseaux d' Inde, having a dark-red foliage; and
there is a visible fondness for ornamental plants with crimson
leaves. Otherwise the mountain summit is somewhat bare; trees
have a scrubby aspect. You must have noticed while ascending
that the palmistes became smaller as they were situated higher:
at Morne Rouge they are dwarfed,—having a short stature, and
very thick trunks.
In spite of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights,
and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place
has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the
universal slate-gray tint of
the buildings,—very melancholy by
comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls
of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray is the only color which
can resist the climate of Morne Rouge, where people are literally
dwelling in the clouds. Rolling down like white smoke from Pelée,
these often create a dismal fog; and Morne Rouge is certainly one
of the rainiest places in the world. When it is dry everywhere else,
it rains at Morne Rouge. It rains at least three hundred and sixty
days and three hundred and sixty nights of the year. It rains almost
invariably once in every twenty-four hours; but oftener five or
six times. The dampness is phenomenal. All mirrors become
patchy; linen moulds in one day; leather turns while woollen
goods feel as if saturated with moisture; new brass becomes
green; steel crumbles into red powder; wood-work rots with
astonishing rapidity; salt is quickly transformed into brine; and
matches, unless kept in a very warm place, refuse to light.
Everything moulders and peels and decomposes; even the frescos of
the church-interior lump out in immense blisters; and a
microscopic vegetation, green or brown, attacks all exposed
surfaces of timber or stone. At night it is often really cold;—
and it is hard to understand how, with all this dampness and
coolness and mouldiness, Morne Rouge can be a healthy place. But
it is so, beyond any question: it is the great Martinique resort
for invalids; strangers debilitated by the climate of Trinidad or
Cayenne come to it for recuperation.
Leaving the village by the still uprising road, you will be
surprised, after a walk of twenty minutes northward, by a
magnificent view,—the vast valley of the Champ-Flore, watered
by many torrents, and bounded south and west by double, triple,
and quadruple surging of mountains,—mountains broken, peaked,
tormented-looking, and tinted (irisées, as the creoles say) with
all those gem-tones
distance gives in a West Indian atmosphere.
Particularly impressive is the beauty of one purple cone in the
midst of this many-colored chain: the Piton Gélé. All the valley-expanse
of rich land is checkered with alternations of meadow and
cane and cacao,—except northwestwardly, where woods billow out of
sight beyond a curve. Facing this landscape, on your left, are mornes
of various heights,—among which you will notice La Calebasse,
overtopping everything but Pelée shadowing behind it;—and a
grass-grown road leads up westward from the national highway
towards the volcano. This is the Calebasse route to Pelée.
