“Hi, Hi, Hi! You there in the boat! come back! come back! Hi! think you to escape us? Ha! Ha! Hi! Fishing, wheeling! calling! O the weariness, the blueness, the waves, the wind, the sun. They are ours and they are yours forever—forever—forever. Hi!”
CHAPTER XV
THE MAGIC TOWN
He was awakened next morning by the roar of the anchor-chain through the hawse-pipe.
Five minutes later he was on deck.
La Belle Arlésienne, steered by magic hands during the night, had raised some magic horizon and passed it to anchor in paradise. So it seemed to him as his eyes travelled from the cloud turban of Mont Pelée coloured by the dawn, and followed the tumbling woods, the cascades of leaping foliage high, far off, dark in shadow, falling to the hillside city; and the city breaking from the woods, falling street by street to the harbour’s edge; palm-tops peeping above the red-tiled roofs; houses, shadows, palms; tracery of gardens, squares, step flights from street to street; old moss-grown flights of steps, old gardens and scraps of gardens giving shelter to the grenadilla and the fleur d’amour; old houses, heavy-built and lightly coloured, all stretching from the great high woods to the very edge of the shadowy harbour in whose depths the blue of night still lay.
The blue of night—though the sky above Pelée was ablaze with the morning blue. Over on the east of the island at Grande Anse the morning was already full and splendid, but here the shadow of peak and morn held everything in magical chiara oscuro. The city, seen as though through a vague veil of gauze, seemed asleep, yet it was burning with early morning life, and Gaspard, as he watched, could see the moving figures of people, forms trickling down the steep flights of steps leading from street to street, and swarming by the sea-steps and harbour side.
Held, just for a moment, in this curious twilight lingering in the shadow of Pelée, whilst all the sea world beyond flashed to the sun-blaze of the tropics, the old sea-city of St. Pierre hanging, literally, between sky and sea, between dawn and night, between the present and the past, shewed to the mind those pictures of suggestion which lie in tapestry and verse.
Gaspard had never seen anything at all like this. He had seen many a tropic town where the galvanized tin roof of the trader, or the rigid outlines of the Methodist meeting house broke crudely through the beauty of palmiste and orange. But St. Pierre lay before him beautiful, absolutely beautiful, like a dream city set in Wonderland.