IV.
AT five o'clock of a September morning, warm and starry, I leave
St. Pierre in a carriage with several friends, to make the ascent
by the shortest route of all,—that of the Morne St. Martin, one
of Pelée's western counterforts. We drive north along the shore
for about half an hour; then, leaving the coast behind, pursue a
winding mountain road, leading to the upper plantations, between
leagues of cane. The sky begins to brighten as we ascend, and a
steely glow announces that day has begun on the other side of the island. Miles up, the crest of the volcano cuts sharp as a saw-edge
against the growing light: there is not a cloud visible.
Then the light slowly yellows behind the vast cone; and one of
the most beautiful dawns I ever saw reveals on our right an
immense valley through which three rivers flow. This deepens
very quickly as we drive; the mornes about St. Pierre, beginning
to catch the light, sink below us in distance; and above them,
southwardly, an amazing silouette begins to rise,—all blue,—a
mountain wall capped with cusps and cones, seeming high as Pelée
itself in the middle, but sinking down to the sea-level westward.
There are a number of extraordinary acuminations; but the most
impressive shape is the nearest,—a tremendous conoidal mass
crowned with a group of peaks, of which two, taller than the
rest, tell their name at once by the beauty of their forms,—
the Pitons of Carbet.
They wear their girdles of cloud, though
Pelée is naked to-day. All this is blue: the growing light only
deepens the color, does not dissipate it;—but in the nearer valleys
gleams of tender yellowish green begin to appear. Still the sun has
not been able to show himself;—it will take him some time yet to
climb Pelée.
Reaching the last plantation, we draw rein in a village of small wooden
cottages,—the quarters of the field hands,—and receive from the
proprietor, a personal friend of my friends, the kindest welcome. At
his house we change clothing and prepare for the journey;—he provides
for our horses, and secures experienced guides for us,—two young colored
men belonging to the plantation. Then we begin the ascent. The
guides walk before, barefoot, each carrying a cutlass in his hand
and a package on his head—our provisions, photographic
instruments, etc.
The mountain is cultivated in spots up to twenty-five hundred
feet; and for three-quarters of an hour after leaving the
planter's residence we still traverse fields of cane and of
manioc. The light is now strong in the valley; but we are in the
shadow of Pelée. Cultivated fields end at last; the ascending
path is through wild cane, wild guavas, guinea-grass run mad, and
other tough growths, some bearing pretty pink blossoms. The
forest is before us. Startled by our approach, a tiny fer-de-
lance glides out from a bunch of dead wild-cane, almost under the
bare feet of our foremost guide, who as instantly decapitates it
with a touch of his cutlass. It is not quite fifteen inches
long, and almost the color of the yellowish leaves under which it
had been hiding. … The conversation turns on snakes as we make
our first halt at the verge of the woods.
Hundreds may be hiding around us; but a snake never shows
himself by daylight except under the pressure of sudden alarm.
We are not likely, in the opinion of
all present, to meet with another.
Every one in the party, except myself, has some curious experience to
relate. I hear for the first time, about the alleged inability of the
trigonocephalus to wound except at a distance from his enemy of
not less than one-third of his length;—about M. A—, a former
director of the Jardin des Plantes, who used to boldly thrust his
arm into holes where he knew snakes were, and pull them out,—
catching them just behind the head and wrapping the tail round
his arm,—and place them alive in a cage without ever getting
bitten;—about M. B—, who, while hunting one day, tripped in the
coils of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his
fright that the serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite
him;—about M. C—, who could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail,
and "crack it like a whip" until the head would fly off ;—about
an old white man living in the Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-meat,
and who always kept in his ajoupa "a keg of salted serpents"
(
yon ka sèpent-salé);—about a monster eight feet long which
killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles Fabre's white cat, but was
also killed by the cat after she had been caught in the folds of
the reptile;—about the value of snakes as protectors of the
sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats;—about an unsuccessful
effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe, to introduce
the fer-de-lance there;—about the alleged power of a monstrous
toad, the
crapaud-ladre, to cause the death of the snake that
swallows it;—and, finally, about the total absence of the
idyllic and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to
the presence of reptiles everywhere. "Even the flora and fauna
of the country remain to a large extent unknown,"—adds the last
speaker, an amiable old physician of St. Pierre,—"because the
existence of the fer-de-lance renders all serious research
dangerous in the extreme."
My own experiences do not justify my taking part in such a
conversation;—I never saw alive but two very small specimens of
the trigonocephalus. People who have passed even a considerable
time in Martinique may have never seen a fer-de-lance except in a
jar of alcohol, or as exhibited by negro snake-catchers, tied
fast to a bamboo, But this is only because strangers rarely
travel much in the interior of the country, or find themselves on
country roads after sundown. It is not correct to suppose that
snakes are uncommon even in the neighborhood of St. Pierre: they
are often killed on the bulwarks behind the city and on the verge
of the Savane; they have been often washed into the streets by
heavy rains; and many washer-women at the Roxelane have been
bitten by them. It is considered very dangerous to walk about
the bulwarks after dark;—for the snakes, which travel only at
night, then descend from the mornes towards the river, The Jardin
des Plantes shelters great numbers of the reptiles; and only a
few days prior to the writing of these lines a colored laborer in
the garden was stricken and killed by a fer-de-lance measuring
one metre and sixty-seven centimetres in length. In the interior
much larger reptiles are sometimes seen: I saw one freshly killed
measuring six feet five inches, and thick as a man's leg in the
middle. There are few planters in the island who have not some of
their hands bitten during the cane-cutting and cocoa-gathering
seasons;—the average annual mortality among the class of
travailleurs from serpent bite alone is probably
fifty, *
—always fine young men or women in the prime of life. Even
among the wealthy whites deaths from this cause are less rare
than might be supposed: I know one gentleman, a rich citizen of
St, Pierre,
who in ten years lost three relatives by the
trigonocephalus,—the wound having in each case been received in
the neighborhood of a vein. When the vein has been pierced, cure
is impossible.
[_]
* "De la piqure du serpent de la Martinique," par Auguste
Charriez, Medecin de la Marine. Paris: Moquet, 1875]