III.
YOU are not at first undeceived;—the disillusion is long
delayed. Doubtless you have read the delicious idyl of Bernardin
de Saint-Pierre (this is not Mauritius, but the old life of
Mauritius was wellnigh the same); and you look for idyllic
personages among the beautiful humanity about you,—for idyllic
scenes among the mornes shadowed by primeval forest, and the
valleys threaded by a hundred brooks. I know not whether the
faces and forms that you seek will be revealed to you;—but you
will not be able to complain for the lack of idyllic loveliness
in the commonest landscape. Whatever artistic knowledge you
possess will merely teach you the more to wonder at the luxuriant
purple of the sea, the violet opulence of the sky, the violent
beauty of foliage greens, the lilac tints of evening, and the
color-enchantments distance gives in an atmosphere full of
iridescent power,—the amethysts and agates, the pearls and
ghostly golds, of far mountainings. Never, you imagine, never
could one tire of wandering through those marvellous valleys,—of
climbing the silent roads under emeraldine shadow to heights from
which the city seems but a few inches long, and the moored ships
tinier than gnats that cling to a mirror,—or of swimming in
that blue bay whose clear flood stays warm through all the
year. *
Or, standing alone, in some aisle of colossal palms, where
humming-birds are flashing
and shooting like a showering of jewel-fires,
you feel how weak the skill of poet or painter to fix the sensation
of that white-pillared imperial splendor;—and you think you know why
creoles exiled by necessity to colder lands may sicken for love of their
own,—die of home-yearning, as did many a one in far Louisiana,
after the political tragedies of 1848. …
… But you are not a creole, and must pay tribute of suffering
to the climate of the tropics. You will have to learn that a
temperature of 90° Fahr. in the tropics is by no means the same
thing as 90° Fahr. in Europe or the United States;—that the
mornes cannot be climbed with safety during the hotter hours of
the afternoon;—that by taking a long walk you incur serious
danger of catching a fever;—that to enter the high woods, a path
must be hewn with the cutlass through the creepers and vines and
undergrowth,—among snakes, venomous insects, venomous plants,
and malarial exhalations;—that the finest blown dust is full of
irritant and invisible enemies;—that it is folly to seek repose
on a sward, or in the shade of trees,—particularly under
tamarinds. Only after you have by experience become well
convinced of these facts can you begin to comprehend something
general in regard to West Indian conditions of life.
[_]
* Rufz remarks that
the first effect of this climate of the
Antilles is a sort of general physical excitement, an exaltation,
a sense of unaccustomed strength,—which begets the desire of
immediate action to discharge the surplus of nervous force. "Then
all distances seem brief;—the greatest fatigues are braved
without hesitation."— Études.
