He could, to the extent of laboriously and all but illegibly penciling his name, to which I added his address, a tiny hamlet up in the mountains. I explained the situation to him briefly in words of one syllable. He seemed to follow me. At least he answered “Yes, sir” at the end of each sentence.
“You will take the horse to the police-station in Grand Bay,” I specified, having gathered from my map and his monosyllables that this was the next town. “I will tell the police there what to do with him, and I will leave five shillings with them to give you if you bring horse, saddle and bridle, and do not try to ride him on the way.”
“Yes sir,” he replied, taking the reins I held out to him, and I turned and fled into the swiftly descending night.
I have climbed many mountains in my day, but none that were as wearying as that endless succession of lofty ridges up the stony sides of which I stumbled hour after hour in a darkness as black as the bottom of a well, only to plunge instantly down again into another mighty, invisible ravine. Several times I lost the trail; how I kept it at all is a mystery. As I strained forward with every ounce of strength within me I caught myself thanking fortune, or whoever has my particular case on his books, that I had been a tramp all my days and had kept myself fit for such an ordeal. Now and then I passed through a “town,” that is, what voices told me was a scattered collection of huts hidden in the vegetation and the night on either side of the trail, for a hundred yards or two, along which a few ghostlike figures of negroes in white garments dodged aside at sound of my shod footsteps, each time soon giving way again to the deep stillness of an uninhabited wilderness, broken only by the monotonous chorus of jungle insects. Which of these places was Grand Bay I had no time to inquire, much less batter my head against the native stupidity for sufficient time to find the police-station and make known my case to slow-witted black officials. I would think up some other way of meeting my obligations when I had accomplished the more pressing mission on hand.
Once the trail came out on the very edge of the sea, crawling along under the face of a sheer towering cliff, the spray dashing up to my very feet; a dozen times it climbed what seemed almost perpendicularly into the invisible, starless sky above for what appeared to my wasting strength to be hours. I had eaten a hasty breakfast on board early that morning. Four bananas was the sum total of food I had been able to get along the way. My thighs trembled like the legs of a foundering horse; more than once my wobbling knees seemed on the very point of giving way beneath me. The rain had kindly held off all afternoon, an unusual boon in Dominica, but the pace I was forced to set had so drenched me in perspiration that it dripped in almost a stream from the end of my leather belt.
Then all at once, at the top of an ascent I had told myself a score of times I could never make, the lights of Roseau burst upon me, far below yet seemingly no great distance away. There were a few lights in what seemed to be the harbor, but not enough of them to be sure they were those of a passenger-steamer. Yet hope suddenly stiffened my legs as starch does a wilted collar. The town quickly disappeared again as I plunged down a stony but wide highway that had suddenly grown up under my feet. Several times I was convinced it led somewhere else than where I hoped, so incredibly interminable was the descent to the town that had seemed so near. Even when I caught sight of it again, where the road grew suddenly level, it lay far down the coast, as far, it seemed, as it had been from the top of the range. But the steamer was still there. I broke into a feeble run, for it could not possibly have been much short of midnight, but fell back into a walk when my legs had all but crumpled under me. Never had a small town seemed so interminably long. Once I passed a “nighthawk” and shouted a question at him over my shoulder. “About twelve,” he replied, little suspecting the surge of despair his words sent through me. As luck would have it, one boatman had remained at the wharf in hope of a belated shilling. He got two. I had just begun to wring the perspiration out of my coat into my cabin washstand when a long blast of the siren and the chugging of the engines told me that we had gotten under way.
Lest some ungentle reader carry away the impression that I had increased the slight disrepute in which Americans are held in Dominica—for our tourists land there frequently—may I add that I settled in full all my obligations there through the purser of the steamer on its return voyage? But to drop painful subjects and hark back to that other visit to Dominica. Then we left at noon, and Roseau settled back into another week’s sleep. There were several pretty villages tucked away in the greenery along the shore, some of them with wide cobbled streets, though hardly a yard of level ground, and each with a church just peering above the fronds of the cocoanuts. A highway crawled as far as it was able along the coast beside us, but soon gave it up where the steep hills, looking like green plush, became precipitous mountains falling sheer into the sea, yet with low forests clinging everywhere to the face of them. Bit by bit the loveliest of the Caribbees, the most unbrokenly mountainous of the West Indies, shrunk away behind us. Tiny fishing boats with ludicrous little pocket-handkerchief sails ventured far out, now standing forth against the horizon on the crest of a wave, now completely lost from sight in a trough of the sea. But by this time Martinique was looming large on the port bow, and we were straining our eyes for the first glimpse of ruined St. Pierre.
St. Lucia, largest of the British Windward Islands and a bare twenty-five miles south of Martinique, is the only one of the Lesser Antilles where the steamer ties up at the wharf. Castries, the capital, is situated on the edge of what was once a volcano crater, but presents little else of interest to those who have seen its replica in several of the other islands. Like all the group to which it belongs politically, it was once French and still speaks a “creole” jargon in preference to English. It, too, is mountainous, with a Soufrière that rises four thousand feet into the sky, and despite its thirty-five by twelve miles of extent, its population is as scanty and as unprogressive as that of Dominica. The most striking of its sights are the two pitons at the southern end of the island, cone-shaped peaks rising more than 2500 feet sheer out of the sea, as if they were the surviving summits of a Himalayan range that sank beneath the waves before the dawn of recorded history.