292
Martinique Sketches.
latitude. Directly east is Senegambia : we are well
south of Timbuctoo and the Sahara,—on a line with
southern India. The ocean has cooled the winds; at
this altitude the rarity of the air is northern ; but in the
valleys below the vegetation is African. The best ali-
mentary plants, the best forage, the flowers of the gar-
dens, are of Guinea ;—the graceful date-palms are from
the Atlas region : those tamarinds, whose thick shade
stifles all other vegetal life beneath it, are from Senegal.
Only, in the touch of the air, the vapory colors of dis-
tance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not
of Africa : that strange fascination which has given to
the island its poetic créole name,— le Pays des Revenants.
And the charm is as puissant in our own day as it was
more than two hundred years ago, when Père Dutertre
wrote :—" I have never met one single man, nor one
single woman, of all those who came back therefrom, in
whom I have not remarked a most passionate desire to
return thereunto."
Time and familiarity do not weaken the charm, either
for those born among these scenes who never voyaged
beyond their native island, or for those to whom the
streets of Paris and the streets of St. Pierre are equally
well known. Even at a time when Martinique had been
forsaken by hundreds of her ruined planters, and the
paradise-life of the old days had become only a memory
to embitter exile,—a Creole writes :—
—" Let there suddenly open before you one of those
vistas, or anses, with colonnades of cocoa-palm—at the
end of which you see smoking the chimney of a sugar-
mill, and catch a glimpse of the hamlet of negro cabins
(cases) ;—or merely picture to yourself one of the most
ordinary, most trivial scenes : nets being hauled by two
ranks of fishermen ; a canot waiting for the embellie^
make a dash for the beach ; even a negro bending under
the weight of a basket of fruits, and running along the