LA GUIABLESSE. Two Years in the French West Indies | ||
I.
NIGHT in all countries brings with it vaguenesses and illusions which terrify certain imaginations;—but in the tropics it produces effects peculiarly impressive and peculiarly sinister. Shapes of vegetation that startle even while the sun shines upon them assume, after his setting, a grimness,—a grotesquery,—a suggestiveness for which there is no name. … In the North a tree is simply a tree;—here it is a personality that makes itself felt; it has a vague physiognomy, an indefinable Me: it is an Individual (with a capital I); it is a Being (with a capital B).
From the high woods, as the moon mounts, fantastic darknesses descend into the roads,—black distortions, mockeries, bad dreams,—an endless procession of goblins. Least startling are the shadows flung down by the various forms of palm, because instantly recognizable;—yet these take the semblance of giant fingers opening and closing over the way, or a black crawling of unutterable spiders. …
Nevertheless, these phasma seldom alarm the solitary and belated Bitaco: the darknesses that creep stealthily along the path have no frightful signification for him,—do not appeal to his imagination;—if he suddenly starts and stops and stares, it is not because of such shapes, but because he has perceived two specks of orange light,
And it is partly, perhaps, because of these conditions that the coming of the dawn does not dissipate all fears of the supernatural. I ni pè zombi mênm gran'-jou (he is afraid of ghosts even in broad daylight) is a phrase which does not sound exaggerated in these latitudes,—not, at least, to anyone knowing something of the conditions that nourish or inspire weird beliefs. In the awful peace of tropical day, in the hush of the woods, the solemn silence of the hills (broken only by torrent voices that cannot make themselves heard at night), even in the amazing luminosity, there is a something apparitional and weird, —something that seems to weigh upon the world like a measureless haunting. So still all Nature's chambers are that a loud utterance jars upon the ear brutally, like a burst of laughter in a sanctuary. With all its luxuriance of color, with all its violence of light, this tropical day has its ghostliness and its ghosts. Among the people of color there are many who believe that even at noon—when the boulevards behind the city are most deserted—the zombis will show themselves to solitary loiterers.
LA GUIABLESSE. Two Years in the French West Indies | ||