Lafcadio Hearn

“ As the land draws near, it reveals a beautiful tropical appearance. The sombre green line brightens color, sharpens into a splendid fringe of fantastic evergreen fronds, bristling with palm crests. Then a mossy sea-wall comes into sight—dull gray stone-work, green-lined at all its joints. There is a fort. The steamer's whistle is exactly mocked by a queer echo, and the cannon-shot once reverberated—only once: there are no mountains here to multiply a sound. And all the while the water becomes a thicker and more turbid green; the wake looks more and more ochreous, the foam ropier and yellower. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a sense of spring in the wind to-day,—something that makes one think of the bourgeoning of Northern woods, when naked trees first cover themselves with a mist of tender green,—something that recalls the first bird-songs, the first climbings of sap to sun, and gives a sense of vital plenitude.
... Evening fills the west with aureate woolly clouds,—the wool of the Fleece of Gold. Then Hesperus beams like another moon, and the stars burn very brightly. Still the ship bends under the even pressure of the warm wind in her sails; and her wake becomes a trail of fire. ”

“ For I have seen you cutting cane on peak slopes above the clouds;—I have seen you climbing from plantation to plantation with your cutlass in your hand, watching for snakes as you wander to look for work, when starvation forces you to obey a master, though born with the resentment of centuries against all masters;—I have seen you prefer to carry two hundred-weight of bananas twenty miles to market, rather than labor in the fields;—I have seen you ascending through serpent-swarming woods to some dead crater to find a cabbage-palm,—and always hungry,—and always shiftless! ”

“ But it is only for a little while that we are thus befogged: a wind comes, blows the clouds over us, lifts them up and folds them like a drapery, and slowly whirls them away northward. And for the first time the view is clear over the intervening gorge,—now spanned by the rocket-leap of a perfect rainbow.
... Valleys and mornes, peaks and ravines,—succeeding each other swiftly as surge succeeds surge in a storm,—a weirdly tossed world, but beautiful as it is weird: all green the foreground, with all tints of green, shadowing off to billowy distances of purest blue. ”

“ Another sunset like the conflagration of a world, as we steam away from Guiana;—another unclouded night; and morning brings back to us that bright blue in the sea-water which we missed for the first time on our approach to the main-land. There is a long swell all day, and tepid winds. But towards evening the water once more shifts its hue—takes olive tint—the mighty flood of the Orinoco is near.
Over the rim of the sea rise shapes faint pink, faint gray-misty shapes that grow and lengthen as we advance. We are nearing Trinidad. ”

“ How gray seem the words of poets in the presence is Nature!... The enormous silent poem of color and light— (you who know only the North do not know color, do not know light!) —of sea and sky, of the woods and the peaks, so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze it—mocking the language of admiration, defying all power of expression. That is before you which never can be painted or chanted, because there is no cunning of art or speech able to reflect it. Nature realizes your most hopeless ideals of beauty, even as one gives toys to a child. ”

“ Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a perfect luminous dove-color,—the horizon being filled to a great height with greenish-golden haze,—a mist of unspeakably sweet tint, a hue that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an impossibility. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has just risen above them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy level of the flood, bands of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold begin to shoot and quiver and broaden ”

“ Travelling together, the porteuses often walk in silence for hours at a time;—this is when they feel weary. Sometimes they sing,—most often when approaching their destination;—and when they chat, it is in a key so high-pitched that their voices can be heard to a great distance in this land of echoes and elevations. But she who travels alone is rarely silent: she talks to herself or to inanimate things;—you may hear her talking to the trees, to the flowers,—talking to the high clouds and the far peaks of changing color,—talking to the setting sun! ”

“ As we steam closer, the island becomes all verdant from flood to sky; the great dead crater shows its immense wreath of perennial green. On the lower slopes little settlements are sprinkled in white, red, and brown: houses, windmills, sugar-factories, high chimneys are distinguishable;—cane-plantations unfold gold-green surfaces.
We pass away. The island does not seem to sink behind us, but to become a ghost. All its outlines grow shadowy. For a little while it continues green;—but it is a hazy, spectral green, as of colored vapor. ”

“ All this is verdant wherever surfaces catch the sun: you can divine what the frame is only by examining the dark and ponderous rocks of the torrents. And the hundred tints of this verdure do not form the only colorific charms of the landscape. Lovely as the long upreaching slopes of cane are,—and the loftier bands of forest-growths, so far off that they look like belts of moss,—and the more tender-colored masses above, wrinkling and folding together up to the frost-white clouds of the summit,—you will be still more delighted by the shadow-colors,—opulent, diaphanous. ”

“ The swaying circle of the resplendent sea seems to flash its jewel-color to the zenith. Clothing feels now almost too heavy to endure; and the warm wind brings a languor with it as of temptation.... One feels an irresistible desire to drowse on deck—the rushing speech of waves, the long rocking of the ship, the lukewarm caress of the wind, urge to slumber—but the light is too vast to permit of sleep. Its blue power compels wakefulness. And the brain is wearied at last by this duplicated azure splendor of sky and sea. ”

“ The transfiguration of all things by the stupendous light and the strange vapors of the West Indian sea,—the interorbing of flood and sky in blinding azure,—the sudden spirings of gem-tinted coast from the ocean,—the iris-colors and astounding shapes of the hills,—the unimaginable magnificence of palms,—the high woods veiled and swathed in vines that blaze like emerald: all remind you in some queer way of things half forgotten,—the fables of enchantment. Enchantment it is indeed—but only the enchantment of that Great Wizard, the Sun, whose power you are scarcely beginning to know. ”

“ Nearly an hour before his death, his light begins to turn tint; and all the horizon yellows to the color of a lemon. Then this hue deepens, through tones of magnificence unspeakable, into orange; and the sea becomes lilac. Orange is the light of the world for a little space; and as the orb sinks, the indigo darkness comes—not descending, but rising, as if from the ground—all within a few minutes. And during those brief minutes peaks and mornes, purpling into richest velvety blackness, appear outlined against passions of fire that rise half-way to the zenith,—enormous furies of vermilion. ”

“ Looking up to the hills, or along sloping streets towards the shore, wonderful variations of foliage-color meet the eye: gold-greens, sap-greens, bluish and metallic greens of many tints, reddish-greens, yellowish-greens. The cane-fields are broad sheets of beautiful gold-green; and nearly as bright are the masses of pomme-cannelle frondescence, the groves of lemon and orange; while tamarind and mahoganies are heavily sombre. Everywhere palm-crests soar above the wood-lines, and tremble with a metallic shimmering in the blue light. ”

“ With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and slumber comes,—a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly; and perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such a numbness, such a torpor, that only by the most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,—all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the night.... ”

“ Light pearled in the east, over the edge of the ocean, ran around the rim of the sky and yellowed: then the sun's brow appeared;—a current of gold gushed rippling across the sea before him;—and all the heaven at once caught blue fire from horizon to zenith. Violet from flood to cloud the vast recumbent form of Pelée loomed far behind,—with long reaches of mountaining: pale grays o'ertopping misty blues. And in the north another lofty shape was towering,—strangely jagged and peaked and beautiful,—the silhouette of Dominica: a sapphire saw!... ”

“ All day the pure sky, the deepening of sea-color, the lukewarm wind. Then comes a superb sunset! There is a painting in the west wrought of cloud-colors,—a dream of high carmine cliffs and rocks outlying in a green sea, which lashes their bases with a foam of gold....
Even after dark the touch of the wind has the warmth of flesh. There is no moon; the sea-circle is black as Acheron; and our phosphor wake reappears quivering across it,—seeming to reach back to the very horizon. ”

“ Here and there, again, are miniature marble chapels built over the dead,—containing white Madonnas and Christs and little angels,—while flowering creepers climb and twine about the pillars. Death seems so luminous here that one thinks of it unconciously as a soft rising from this soft green earth,—like a vapor invisible,—to melt into the prodigious day. Everything is bright and neat and beautiful; the air is sleepy with jasmine scent and odor of white lilies; and the palm—emblem of immortality—lifts its head a hundred feet into the blue light. ”

“ There are bright cloudless days when, even as seen from the city, the ocean-verge has a spectral vagueness; but on any day, in any season, that you ascend to a point dominating the sea by a thousand feet, the rim of the visible world takes a ghostliness that startles,—because the prodigious light gives to all near shapes such intense sharpness of outline and vividness of color. ”

“ Everywhere the weird beauty, the immense melancholy of tropic ruin. Magnificent terraces, once golden with cane, now abandoned to weeds and serpents;—deserted plantation-homes, with trees rooted in the apartments and pushing up through the place of the roofs;—grass-grown alleys ravined by rains;—fruit-trees strangled by lianas;—here and there the stem of some splendid palmiste, brutally decapitated, naked as a mast;—petty frail growths of banana-trees or of bamboo slowly taking the place of century-old forest giants destroyed to make charcoal. ”

“ Then from the morne, over the bulwark, the green host will move down unopposed;—creepers will prepare the way, dislocating the pretty tombs, pulling away the checkered tiling;—then will corne the giants, rooting deeper,—feeling for the dust of hearts, groping among the bones;—and all that love has hidden away shall be restored to Nature,—absorbed into the rich juices of her verdure,—revitalized in her bursts of color,—resurrected in her upliftings of emerald and gold to the great sun.... ”

“ The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the landscape out of vapory blue; the hills all become green-faced, reveal the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails—white, red, yellow,—ripples the water, and turns it green. Little fish begin to leap; they spring and fall in glittering showers like opalescent blown spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled roofs reveal themselves: the city is unveiled—a city full of color, somewhat quaint, somewhat Spanish-looking—a little like St. Pierre, a little like New Orleans in the old quarter ”

“ Beyond all this coast-front long undulations of misty pale, green are visible,—far slopes of low hill and plain the highest curving line, the ridge of the island, bears a row of cocoa-palms, They are so far that their stems diminish almost to invisibility: only the crests are clearly distinguishable,—like spiders hanging between land and sky. But there are no forests: the land is a naked unshadowed green far as the eye can reach beyond the coast-line. ”

“ It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your brain,—that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is piercing somehow into your life,—creating an unfamiliar mental confusion,—blurring out thought.... Is the whole world taking fire?... The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a crucible-glow;—the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some amazing way.... ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the simplicity and solidity of the quaint architecture,—in the eccentricity of bright narrow streets, all aglow with warm coloring,—in the tints of roof and wall, antiquated by streakings and patchings of mould greens and grays,—in the startling absence of window-sashes, glass, gas lamps, and chimneys,—in the blossom-tenderness of the blue heaven, the splendor of tropic light, and the warmth of the tropic wind,—you find less the impression of a scene of to-day than the sensation of something that was and is not. ”

“ Above the road, shadowing the slopes of lofty hills, forests beetle in dizzy precipices of verdure. They are green—burning, flashing green—covered with parasitic green creepers and vines; they show enormous forms, or rather dreams of form, fetichistic and startling. Banana leaves flicker and flutter along the way-side; palms shoot up to vast altitudes, like pillars of white metal; and there is a perpetual shifting of foliage color, from yellow-green to orange, from reddish-green to purple, from emerald-green to black-green. ”