IV.
It was a long, hot walk, that climb, in spite of the good breeze and the white umbrella’s shade, and we stopped a number of times on the way up to cool ourselves, and, incidentally, to envy the carriage of the brisk and leathery old women, who came striding past us up the hill, with great water-cans on their heads and water-jugs in their hands, stolidly indifferent to the hot sun and the heavy burdens they were carrying. It comes to me now that I did not see a young negress in the whole town, but this was explained on our return to the ship.
It was next to impossible to be keen enough to appreciate fully the remarkable vegetation and flowers and animal life all about us. The flowers seemed hung at the wrong end, and all the vegetable world strange and topsy-turvy; even some insects that we saw seemed quite outlandish. For a long time, as I sat between two rusty old cannon, dangling my feet with most awful irreverence over Bluebeard’s fortress wall, I kept my eye on an old bumblebee—a black and yellow pirate that bumbled of the peaceful present and the strenuous past; but even the every-day bumblebee was twice as big as he had any right to be, and he had the deep-drawn drone of a sleepy country parson. Then, just as the bumblebee hummed himself out of sight into the heart of a deep red hibiscus nodding its heavy head at me from the top of the wall, out of the mouth of one of Bluebeard’s piratical cannon there peeped two shining, yellow eyes in a little green body, and they stared at me, and I stared at them, each most curious about the other, until the inspection became rather embarrassing, and I rapped on the rusty, weather-worn old murderer, and away scampered Mr. Eyes, back with the ghosts and memories—all dying together. A little green lizard, with life for a wee bit of awhile; an ancient cannon of curious shape, rusting, but outliving a little longer; a great gray rock underneath, disintegrating piece by piece, going back again into the universe; and an immortal soul in a human body; are we all part and parcel of the same cosmic dust?
Twenty cannons dropped into the heavy embrasured masonry of Bluebeard’s wall looked down with grim irony upon a pious, self-complacent, twentieth-century gunboat, entering thus unchallenged their own waters. Whether it was the lizard rustling among the grasses inside the cannon, or whether it was a reawakened pirate’s ghost, I shall not venture to assert; but there certainly came to me a whisper which translated itself into the most disdainful reproach of our much-vaunted humanitarianism. I tried to explain to this little voice that nowadays we had reduced the killing of men to a science; that it was less painful to be blown to pieces by dynamite shells from a torpedo-boat than to be hacked to pieces by a pirate’s cutlass, therefore, more honourable, and that fighting was still necessary because diplomacy was too young to be weaned. But from certain mysterious sounds, very like the chucklings of an old man, I thought best to beat a retreat. Besides there were Daddy and the little girls waving to me from the top of the sturdy old watch-tower, so I gathered my umbrella, hat, and basket, and put to flight the flock of geese which had been examining my umbrella with long-necked curiosity. They, little caring for the sanctity of my far-reaching thoughts, went hissing and squawking down the hill in a most irate humour. I took a long breath, pinched myself to get awake, and started up the steep tower steps.
From the top of this tower of “Bluebeard’s Castle” (kept in repair by the Italian consul, whose residence is here), one could look out across the pretty town to the rival fastness of old “Blackbeard,” crowning another hill of surpassing beauty. A road, white and smooth and shaded with palms, clung caressingly about the white-crested bay, and I longed to follow it. Yonder another road struggled up a hillside, through sugar-cane and fruit-trees, and tumbled off somewhere on the other side. I longed to follow that one, too. Another, white and edged with tamarinds and oranges, wandered off somewhere else, and I wanted to go there. But the last carriage had clattered off, and it was too hot to walk “over the hills and far away;” so, after a long quiet feast of the glory about us, we leisurely made the descent, and were again among the cannon crowning the ancient parapet. We strolled along down the steep winding highway, stopping now to trim our hats with flowers, gathered with much difficulty from behind a prickly hedge, and then to look with rapture upon the scene below, and again to talk about it all. The sun beat down upon our heads, but we did not mind that, for the cooling breeze came up from the sea, sweetly and gently, as if it loved us, and the mountains and the earth were oh, so richly clad, and the eyes so content with seeing and the nostrils so glad with the fragrant air!