III.
… AS I was saying, the hours of vastest light have their
weirdness here;—and it is of a Something which walketh abroad
under the eye of the sun, even at high noontide, that I desire to
speak, while the impressions of a morning journey to the scene of
Its last alleged apparition yet remains vivid in my recollection.
You follow the mountain road leading from Calebasse over long
meadowed levels two thousand feet above the ocean, into the woods
of La Couresse, where it begins to descend slowly, through deep
green shadowing, by great zigzags. Then, at a turn, you find
yourself unexpectedly looking down upon a planted valley, through
plumy fronds of arborescent fern. The surface below seems almost
like a lake of gold-green water,—especially when long breaths of
mountain-wind set the miles of ripening cane a-ripple from verge
to verge: the illusion is marred only by the road, fringed with
young cocoa-palms, which serpentines across the luminous plain.
East, west, and north the horizon is almost wholly hidden by
surging of hills: those nearest are softly shaped and exquisitely
green; above them loftier undulations take hazier verdancy and
darker shadows; farther yet rise silhouettes of blue or violet
tone, with one beautiful breast-shaped peak thrusting up in the
midst;—while, westward, over all, topping even the Piton, is a
vapory huddling of prodigious shapes—wrinkled, fissured, horned,
fantastically tall. … Such at least are the tints of the
morning. … Here and there, between
gaps in the volcanic chain,
the land hollows into gorges, slopes down into ravines;—and the
sea's vast disk of turquoise flames up through the interval.
Southwardly those deep woods, through which the way winds down,
shut in the view. … You do not see the plantation buildings
till you have advanced some distance into the valley;—they are
hidden by a fold of the land, and stand in a little hollow where
the road turns: a great quadrangle of low gray antiquated
edifices, heavily walled and buttressed, and roofed with red
tiles. The court they form opens upon the main route by an
immense archway. Farther along ajoupas begin to line the way,—
the dwellings of the field hands,—tiny cottages built with
trunks of the arborescent fern or with stems of bamboo, and
thatched with cane-straw: each in a little garden planted with
bananas, yams, couscous, camanioc, choux-caraibes, or other
things,—and hedged about with roseaux d'Inde and various
flowering shrubs.
Thereafter, only the high whispering wildernesses of cane on
either hand,—the white silent road winding between its swaying
cocoa-trees,—and the tips of hills that seem to glide on before
you as you walk, and that take, with the deepening of the
afternoon light, such amethystine color as if they were going to
become transparent.
