Part 21

Yet wonderful as are the perspective beauties of those mountain routes from which one can keep St. Pierre in view, the road to Morne Rouge surpasses them, notwithstanding that it almost immediately leaves the city behind, and out of sight. Excepting only _La Trace_,--the long routs winding over mountain ridges and between primitive forests south to Fort-de-France,--there is probably no section of national highway in the island more remarkable than the Morne Rouge road. Leaving the Grande Rue by the public conveyance, you drive out through the Savane du Fort, with its immense mango and tamarind trees, skirting the Roxelane. Then reaching the boulevard, you pass high Morne Labelle,--and then the Jardin des Plantes on the right, where white-stemmed palms are lifting their heads two hundred feet,--and beautiful Parnasse, heavily timbered to the top;--while on your left the valley of the Roxelane shallows up, and Pelée shows less and less of its tremendous base. Then you pass through the sleepy, palmy, pretty Village of the Three Bridges (_Trois Ponts_),--where a Fahrenheit thermometer shows already three degrees of temperature lower than at St. Pierre;--and the national road, making a sharp turn to the right, becomes all at once very steep--so steep that the horses can mount only at a walk. Around and between the wooded hills it ascends by zigzags,--occasionally overlooking the sea,--sometimes following the verges of ravines. Now and then you catch glimpses of the road over which you passed half an hour before undulating far below, looking narrow as a tape-line,--and of the gorge of the Roxelane,--and of Pelée always higher, now thrusting out long spurs of green and purple land into the sea. You drive under cool shadowing of mountain woods--under waving bamboos like enormous ostrich feathers dyed green,--and exquisite tree-ferns thirty to forty feet high,--and imposing ceibas, with strangely buttressed trunks,--and all sorts of broadleaved forms: cachibous, balisiers, bananiers.... Then you reach a plateau covered with cane, whose yellow expanse is bounded on the right by a demilune of hills sharply angled as crystals;--on the left it dips seaward; and before you Pelée's head towers over the shoulders of intervening monies. A strong cool wind is blowing; and the horses can trot a while. Twenty minutes, and the road, leaving the plateau, becomes steep again;--you are approaching the volcano over the ridge of a colossal spur. The way turns in a semicircle,--zigzags,--once more touches the edge of a valley,--where the clear fall might be nearly fifteen hundred feet. But narrowing more and more, the valley becomes an ascending gorge; and across its chasm, upon the brow of the opposite cliff, you catch sight of houses and a spire seemingly perched on the verge, like so many birds'-nests,--the village of Morne Rouge. It is two thousand feet above the sea; and Pelée, although looming high over it, looks a trifle less lofty now.

One's first impression of Morne Rouge is that of a single straggling street of gray-painted cottages and shops (or rather booths), dominated by a plain church, with four pursy-bodied palmistes facing the main porch. Nevertheless, Morne Rouge is not a small place, considering its situation;--there are nearly five thousand inhabitants; but in order to find out where they live, you must leave the public road, which is on a ridge, and explore the high-hedged lanes leading down from it on either side. Then you will find a veritable city of little wooden cottages,--each screened about with banana-trees, Indian-reeds, and _pommiers-roses._ You will also see a number of handsome private residences--country-houses of wealthy merchants; and you will find that the church, though uninteresting exteriorly, is rich and impressive within: it is a famous shrine, where miracles are alleged to have been wrought. Immense processions periodically wend their way to it from St. Pierre,--starting at three or four o'clock in the morning, so as to arrive before the sun is well up.... But there are no woods here,--only fields. An odd tone is given to the lanes by a local custom of planting hedges of what are termed _roseaux d'Inde_, having a dark-red foliage; and there is a visible fondness for ornamental plants with crimson leaves. Otherwise the mountain summit is somewhat bare; trees have a scrubby aspect. You must have noticed while ascending that the palmistes became smaller as they were situated higher: at Morne Rouge they are dwarfed,--having a short stature, and very thick trunks.

In spite of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray tint of the buildings,--very melancholy by comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray is the only color which can resist the climate of Morne Rouge, where people are literally dwelling in the clouds. Rolling down like white smoke from Pelée, these often create a dismal fog; and Morne Rouge is certainly one of the rainiest places in the world. When it is dry everywhere else, it rains at Morne Rouge. It rains at least three hundred and sixty days and three hundred and sixty nights of the year. It rains almost invariably once in every twenty-four hours; but oftener five or six times. The dampness is phenomenal. All mirrors become patchy; linen moulds in one day; leather turns white; woollen goods feel as if saturated with moisture; new brass becomes green; steel crumbles into red powder: wood-work rots with astonishing rapidity; salt is quickly transformed into brine; and matches, unless kept in a very warm place, refuse to light. Everything moulders and peels and decomposes; even the frescos of the church-interior lump out in immense blisters; and a microscopic vegetation, green or brown, attacks all exposed surfaces of timber or stone. At night it is often really cold;--and it is hard to understand how, with all this dampness and coolness and mouldiness, Morne Rouge can be a healthy place. But it is so, beyond any question: it is the great Martinique resort for invalids; strangers debilitated by the climate of Trinidad or Cayenne come to it for recuperation.

Leaving the village by the still uprising road, you will be surprised, after a walk of twenty minutes northward, by a magnificent view,--the vast valley of the Champ-Flore, watered by many torrents, and bounded south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of mountains,--mountains broken, peaked, tormented-looking, and tinted (_irisées_, as the creoles say) with all those gem-tones distance gives in a West Indian atmosphere. Particularly impressive is the beauty of one purple cone in the midst of this many-colored chain: the Piton Gélé. All the valley-expanse of rich land is checkered with alternations of meadow and cane and cacao,--except northwestwardly, where woods billow out of sight beyond a curve. Facing this landscape, on your left, are mornes of various heights,--among which you will notice La Calebasse, overtopping everything but Pelée shadowing behind it;--and a grass-grown road leads up westward from the national highway towards the volcano. This is the Calebasse route to Pelée.

III

One must be very sure of the weather before undertaking the ascent of Pelée; for if one merely selects some particular leisure day in advance, one's chances of seeing anything from the summit are considerably less than an astronomer's chances of being able to make a satisfactory observation of the next transit of Venus. Moreover, if the heights remain even partly clouded, it may not be safe to ascend the Morne de la Croix,--a cone-point above the crater itself, and ordinarily invisible below. And a cloudless afternoon can never be predicted from the aspect of deceitful Pelée: when the crater edges are quite clearly cut against the sky at dawn, you may be tolerably certain there will be bad weather during the day; and when they are all bare at sundown, you have no good reason to believe they will not be hidden next morning. Hundreds of tourists, deluded by such appearances, have made the weary trip in vain,--found themselves obliged to return without having seen anything but a thick white cold fog. The sky may remain perfectly blue for weeks in every other direction, and Pelée's head remain always hidden. In order to make a successful ascent, one must not wait for a period of dry weather,--one might thus wait for years! What one must look for is a certain periodicity in the diurnal rains,--a regular alternation of sun and cloud; such as characterizes a certain portion of the hivernage, or rainy summer season, when mornings and evenings are perfectly limpid, with very heavy sudden rains in the middle of the day. It is of no use to rely on the prospect of a dry spell. There is no really dry weather, notwithstanding there recurs--in books--a _Saison de la Sécheresse._ In fact, there are no distinctly marked seasons in Martinique:--a little less heat and rain from October to July, a little more rain and heat from July to October: that is about all the notable difference! Perhaps the official notification by cannon-shot that the hivernage, the season of heavy rains and hurricanes, begins on July 15th, is no more trustworthy than the contradictory declarations of Martinique authors who have attempted to define the vague and illusive limits of the tropic seasons. Still, the Government report on the subject is more satisfactory than any: according to the "Annuaire," there are these seasons:--

1. _Saison fraîche._ December to March. Rainfall, about 475 millimeters.

2. _Saison chaude et sèche._ April to July. Rainfall, about 140 millimeters.

3. _Saison chaude et pluvieuse._ July to November. Rainfall average, 1121 millimeters.

Other authorities divide the _saison chaude et sèche_ into two periods, of which the latter, beginning about May, is called the _Renouveau_; and it is at least true that at the time indicated there is a great burst of vegetal luxuriance. But there is always rain, there are almost always clouds, there is no possibility of marking and dating the beginnings and the endings of weather in this country where the barometer is almost useless, and the thermometer mounts in the sun to twice the figure it reaches in the shade. Long and patient observation has, however, established the fact that during the hivernage, if the heavy showers have a certain fixed periodicity,--falling at mid-day or in the heated part of the afternoon,--Pelée is likely to be clear early in the morning; and by starting before daylight one can then have good chances of a fine view from the summit.

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 silhouette 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 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[33],--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.

[Footnote 33: "De la piqûre du serpent de la Martinique," par Auguste Charriez, Médecin de la Marine. Paris: Moquet, 1875.]

V

... We look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields, and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding beyond an opening in the west. It has already broadened surprisingly, the sea,--appears to have risen up, not as a horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure precipice: what will it look like when we shall have reached the top? Far down we can distinguish a line of field-hands--the whole _atelier_, as it is called, of a plantation--slowly descending a slope, hewing the canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder (_amarreuse_): she gathers the canes as they are cut down, binds them with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and carries them away on her head;--the men wield their cutlasses so beautifully that it is a delight to watch them. One cannot often enjoy such a spectacle nowadays; for the introduction of the piece-work system has destroyed the picturesqueness of plantation labor throughout the island, with rare exceptions. Formerly the work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an army;--first advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then the amarreuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the _ka_, the drum,--with a paid _crieur_ or _crieuse_ to lead the song;--and lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old days, too, it was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an English corsair on the coast converted this soldiery of labor into veritable military: more than one attack was repelled by the cutlasses of a plantation atelier.

At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though not distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice, powerful as a bugle, rings out,--the voice of the Commandeur: he walks along the line, looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I ask one of our guides what the cry is:--

--"_Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent_," he replies. (He is telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the cutlassers approach the end of their task, the greater the danger: for the reptiles, retreating before them to the last clump of cane, become massed there, and will fight desperately. Regularly as the ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human lives from among the workers. But when one falls, another steps into the vacant place,--perhaps the Commandeur himself: these dark swordsmen never retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as before; there is hardly any emotion; the travailleur is a fatalist....[34]

[Footnote 34: M. Francard Baya delle, overseer of the Presbourg plantation at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment of snakebite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these can be obtained), and the administration of alkali as an internal medicine. He has saved several lives by these methods.

The negro _panseur's_ method is much more elaborate and, to some extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small _couï_, or half-calabash, in lieu of a glass; and then applies cataplasms of herbs,--orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, _chardon-béni, charpentier_, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled together;--this poulticing being continued every day for a month. Meantime the patient is given all sorts of absurd things to drink, in tafia and sour-orange juice--such as old clay pipes ground to powder, or _the head of the fer-de-lance itself_, roasted dry and pounded.... The plantation negro has no faith in any other system of cure but that of the panseur;--he refuses to let the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit to be treated even by an experienced white overseer.]

VI

... We enter the _grands-bois_,--the primitive forest,--the "high woods."