20,2
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 alimentary plants, the best forage, the flowers of the gardens, 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 distance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not of Africa : that strange fascination which has given to the island its poetic Creole 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 sugarmill, 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 to make a dash for the beach ; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and running along the