Two Years in the French West Indies | Page 9

a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor.
The sea today looks almost black: the south- west wind has filled the
day with luminous mist; and the phantom of Nevis melts in the vast
glow, dissolves utterly.... Once more we are out of sight of land,--in the
centre of a blue-black circle of sea. The water-line cuts blackly against

the immense light of the horizon,--a huge white glory that flames up
very high before it fades and melts into the eternal blue.

X.
Then a high white shape like a cloud appears before us,--on the
purplish-dark edge of the sea. The cloud-shape enlarges, heightens
without changing contour. It is not a cloud, but an island! Its outlines
begin to sharpen,--with faintest pencillings of color. Shadowy valleys
appear, spectral hollows, phantom slopes of pallid blue or green. The
apparition is so like a mirage that it is difficult to persuade oneself one
is looking at real land,--that it is not a dream. It seems to have shaped
itself all suddenly out of the glowing haze. We pass many miles beyond
it; and it vanishes into mist again.
... Another and a larger ghost; but we steam straight upon it until it
materializes,--Montserrat. It bears a family likeness to the islands we
have already passed--one dominant height, with massing of bright
crater shapes about it, and ranges of green hills linked together by low
valleys. About its highest summit also hovers a flock of clouds. At the
foot of the vast hill nestles the little white and red town of Plymouth.
The single salute of our gun is answered by a stupendous broadside of
echoes.
Plymouth is more than half hidden in the rich foliage that fringes the
wonderfully wrinkled green of the hills at their base;--it has a curtain of
palms before it. Approaching, you discern only one or two façades
above the sea-wall, and the long wharf projecting through an opening
ing in the masonry, over which young palms stand thick as canes on a
sugar plantation. But on reaching the street that descends towards the
heavily bowldered shore you find yourself in a delightfully drowsy
little burgh,--a miniature tropical town,--with very narrow paved ways,
--steep, irregular, full of odd curves and angles,--and likewise of tiny
courts everywhere sending up jets of palm-plumes, or displaying above
their stone enclosures great candelabra-shapes of cacti. All is
old-fashioned and quiet and queer and small. Even the palms are

diminutive,--slim and delicate; there is a something in their poise and
slenderness like the charm of young girls who have not yet ceased to be
children, though soon to become women....
There is a glorious sunset,--a fervid orange splendor, shading starward
into delicate roses and greens. Then black boatmen come astern and
quarrel furiously for the privilege of carrying one passenger ashore; and
as they scream and gesticulate, half naked, their silhouettes against the
sunset seem forms of great black apes.
... Under steam and sail we are making south again, with a warm wind
blowing south-east,--a wind very moist, very powerful, and soporific.
Facing it, one feels almost cool; but the moment one is sheltered from it
profuse perspiration bursts out. The ship rocks over immense swells;
night falls very black; and there are surprising displays of
phosphorescence.

XI.
... Morning. A gold sunrise over an indigo sea. The wind is a great
warm caress; the sky a spotless blue. We are steaming on
Dominica,--the loftiest of the lesser Antilles. While the silhouette is yet
all violet in distance nothing more solemnly beautiful can well be
imagined: a vast cathedral shape, whose spires are mountain peaks,
towering in the horizon, sheer up from the sea.
We stay at Roseau only long enough to land the mails, and wonder at
the loveliness of the island. A beautifully wrinkled mass of green and
blue and gray;--a strangely abrupt peaking and heaping of the land.
Behind the green heights loom the blues; behind these the grays--all
pinnacled against the sky-glow-thrusting up through gaps or behind
promontories. Indescribably exquisite the foldings and hollowings of
the emerald coast. In glen and vale the color of cane-fields shines like a
pooling of fluid bronze, as if the luminous essence of the hill tints had
been dripping down and clarifying there. Far to our left, a bright green
spur pierces into the now turquoise sea; and beyond it, a beautiful

mountain form, blue and curved like a hip, slopes seaward, showing
lighted wrinkles here and there, of green. And from the foreground,
against the blue of the softly outlined shape, cocoa- palms are
curving,--all sharp and shining in the sun.
... Another hour; and Martinique looms before us. At first it appears all
gray, a vapory gray; then it becomes bluish-gray; then all green.
It is another of the beautiful volcanic