Good highways, with automobiles scattered along them, climb into the hills, especially to St. Claude, with its suburban dwellings, its big hospital, where boarders in the soundest of health are accepted, and its embracing view of the Caribbean already far below, and the dome of Soufrière almost sheer overhead. Higher still lies Matoubá, where one may bathe in icy streams within half an hour of the tropic and enervating seacoast. But there the highways cease, dwindling away into trails through coffee-groves and verdure-vaulted footpaths which are gradually lost in the great mountain wilderness, so primitive and unexplored that even the map in the governor’s office below shows only a blank space for all the heart of Basse Terre, the inaccessibility of which is typified in the name of its central peak, Mt. Sans Toucher. Other highways partly encircle the rugged half-island, clinging close to the shore, but feasible communication ceases everywhere within a few kilometers of the coast. Thus, though Basse Terre is virgin fertile in almost all its extent, and generously watered by countless springs and many rivers, it produces little for the outside world except a few tons of vanilla.
Like all the West Indies, it has almost no four-footed wild life. The agouti, of about the size of a rabbit and much prized for its savory flesh, is the only indigenous quadruped. The raccoon, brought from our own land long ago, has become acclimated and numerous; the island is infested with an enormous toad that was introduced to kill the rats, but which has prodigiously spread without doing much damage to the rodents. Martinique and Guadeloupe mutually accuse each other of harboring the deadly fer de lance, but neither seems to be able to produce unquestionable proof either of its own innocence or of its rival’s guilt.
There are guaguas also in the French islands, where they are called autos de poste. But there is little room in them compared with the demand for places, and a curt “Pas de place” is almost certain to be the greeting of the would-be traveler who does not buy his ticket at least the day before. Moreover, ticket or no ticket, it behooves him to be on hand at the back of the post-office well before the starting-hour set unless he would see his reserved place squeezed out of existence before he has occupied it or the conveyance gone before he arrives. For the public means of transport in the French West Indies have a mania for starting ahead of time that is little less disconcerting than the mañana temperament of their Spanish neighbors, particularly as their favorite official hour of departure is daybreak.
Once upon a time the governor of Guadeloupe invited the officials of Pointe-à-Pitre to a ball at the capital. They left on a sailboat, the ladies in evening dress. In theory it is a journey of only a few hours, even in a sailing vessel. But this time the wind turned contrary, after the custom of winds, the boat was forced to put to sea, and it turned up six days afterward—in St. Thomas! These unhappy experiences are no longer required of the residents of the two capitals, for to-day a highway equal, except in spots, to those of France connects the two towns, nearly fifty miles apart, and an auto de poste makes the round trip daily. Then, too, as in all the Antilles, there are automobiles for hire to those whose income is not particularly limited.
The tropical night showed no sign of fading when the postal omnibus, its five cross seats packed with travelers of both sexes until its sides groaned, its every available space of running-boards, mud-guards, and bumper piled high with mail-sacks and baggage, rumbled away from the angry group of unsuccessful passengers gathered before the Basse Terre post-office. As we chugged out through the old fortress gate, a thin streak of light suddenly developed on the eastern horizon, widened with the rapidity of a stage effect too quickly timed, wiped out the blue-black dome of sky overhead, and sent the last remnants of night scurrying from their lurking-places like thieves before the gigantic flashlight that sprang above the rim of the earth to the east with unnatural, theatrical swiftness. In the darkness I had taken several of my fellow-passengers to be white. The same slanting sunshine that threw far to the westward the disheveled shadows of the cocoanut-palms betrayed the tell-tale African features of the lightest of them. Behind us spread a fairy panorama as we climbed to Gourbeyre, beyond which another opened out as we descended again through Dolé, with its “summer” homes and its steaming hot-water falls at the very edge of the road. Having cut off the southern nose of the island and regained the coast once more at Trois Rivières, we clung close to this all the rest of the journey, as if any further encroachment upon the rugged domain of Soufrière, its head wrapped in a purple-black mantle of clouds above us, might rouse the slumbering giant to vent his wrath upon puny mankind.
The “Rue Gerville-Réache” in which we halted a moment to exchange mail-sacks recalled the fact that the native of Guadeloupe best known to the outside world is a woman, as is the case with Martinique. Villas hidden away in the dense greenery gave way to little bay-like cane-fields, some of them so large as to boast tiny railroads, while here and there a buttress of the volcano above forced us out to the edge of the surf. In the offing Guadeloupe’s smallest dependencies, a cluster of islands named Les Saintes because Columbus discovered them on All Saints’ Day, stood forth from the sea like the domes of Oriental fantasy. Now and again the chauffeur or his assistant snatched at a letter held out by some countryman, indifferent to his shout of protest if they missed it, for they deigned to stop only before the town post-offices. The demand for seats was continuous, but those who had won them showed no inclination to descend. A score of times we sped past some lady of color all dressed up in her most resplendent turban, foulard, and ample, flower-printed calico gown, who had hoped to go to town that day, the chauffeur indicating by a disdainful wave of the hand across his body that there was “nothing doing.” Veritable riots of words assailed him at each halt, as if he might have produced new seats, magician-like, from his sleeve. One by one several male passengers took to displaying their fancied knowledge of English for my benefit; once a burly schooner-captain with just enough negro blood in his veins to make his hair curl, next a darker pair of graduates of the Sorbonne, who, once having impressed their fellow-passengers with their extraordinary learning, dropped back into French again, a French more precise and chosen than that of Paris, as soon as they found I understood it.
Even in the thatched huts along the way there was considerable more commodité than in those of Haiti. The old semispherical sugar-kettles one finds scattered throughout the West Indies were here enclosed in stones and mortar and used as outdoor ovens. At Petit Bourg we came out on the edge of the open sea again, with a view across the bay to Pointe-à-Pitre, and behind it flat, unscenic Grande Terre, without even a hill to enliven its horizon. Soon we dropped down into a dreary level country utterly unlike the rolling cane-covered land swelling into mountains behind us, and sped through mangrove swamps that burdened the air with their rotting, salty smell, rumbled across the stagnant Rivière Salée, six miles long and some fifteen feet deep, which divides Guadeloupe into two islands, and turned into a broad, white, dusty road that not long after became the main street of “La Pointe.”
Pointe-à-Pitre is said to have taken its name from the fact that the “point” on which it was founded a century later than Basse Terre belonged to a Dutchman named Peters. Many refugees of this nationality settled in the French islands after the Portuguese drove them out of Brazil. The commercial capital is situated at the mouth of the Salt River, in one of the hottest and most uninviting spots in the West Indies. Across the bay Guadeloupe proper, piled up in its labyrinth of mountains veiled in the blue haze of distance, seems to invite the perspiring inhabitants to cease their bargainings and retire to the cool heights. Young as it is, “the Point” has long since outgrown Basse Terre in size and importance. It is a deadly flat town, with wide, right-angled streets, fairly well paved in a kind of crude concrete, with here and there a corner that recalls Paris, as do the street names. Its gray plaster houses have heavy wooden shutters and door-sized blinds that give them a curiously furtive air. Except for the turbans and calicos of the negresses, and the gamut of complexions, it is rather a colorless town, even the “cathedral” being of the prevailing gray, unpainted tint, though set off by a slight square tower in flaming red. The narrow entrance to its capacious bay is flanked by cocoanut-palms that stretch far around and finally envelop it, the view from the sea having little to attract the eye. The central square pulsates from dawn until the sun is high overhead with ceaselessly chattering market-women dressed in the hectic cotton garb peculiar to the French islands. Down by the wharves surges another market where fishermen in immense round hats come with their boatloads of fish and sundry sea-foods, including the langouste, a clawless lobster unsurpassed for quality and quantity of flesh and selling for the equivalent of a quarter.
There are suggestions of Parisian street life in Pointe-à-Pitre, interlarded with tropical touches of its own. Frenchmen whose faces give evidence that they have not left their cuisine and wine-cellars behind cling tenaciously to those white pith helmets without which no man of their race thinks he can endure the tropics. Soldiers and ex-soldiers with varying degrees of African complexions stalk about in their horizon-blue or colonial khaki, a string of medals gleaming on their chests. Negroes in Napoleon III beards stroll along the shaded edge of the streets with a certain Latin dignity befitting such adornment, even when it is accompanied by bare feet. Humped oxen, yoked sometimes on the neck, more often on the horns, saunter through town with their cumbersome carts. The town-criers, two men in uniform, the one beating a-drum and the other reading aloud an official notice on each corner, carry the thoughts back to medieval France. Cafés with awning-shaded tables, monopolizing the sidewalks, notices exceedingly French not only in wording, but in general appearance, posted on house and shop walls, even the rather run-down aspect of the buildings, give the place a decidedly French atmosphere. If other proof of its nationality were needed, there are the crowds of wilted, yet patient, people packed about the wickets of post-office, telegraph station, and all other points where the public and the ambitionless, red-tape-ridden mortals whom France appoints to minor government office come into contact.