The country was more broken beyond. Pine-trees of moderate size grew beside girlishly slender little palms with fan-shaped leaves. A high bank of blue gravel along a dry river-bed would probably have attracted the attention of a miner or a geologist. In detail the country was not pretty; in the mass it was vastly so. Brown, reddish, and green hills were heaped up on every hand; the play of colors across them, changing at every hour from dawn through blazing noonday into dusk and finally moonlight, made up for the monotony of the near-by landscape. There were almost no signs of humanity, the silence was sometimes complete, though here and there we passed the evidences of former gardens in dry arroyos. Toward sunset we burst suddenly out among banana-groves, starting up a great flock of wild guineas, and at dark rode into Cerca la Source, a more than usually whitewashed little town nestled among real mountains. It was Sunday, and the great weekly cock-fight having just ended at the barrel-stave pit in a corner of the immense open place, the hubbub of settling bets had not yet subsided, and for a half hour afterward scores of negroes with pretty game-cocks under their arms wandered about in the moonlight shouting merry challenges to one another for the ensuing Sabbath.
Beyond Cerca la Source a steep mountain trail climbs for hours through the stillness of pine-forests where birds, except the cawing crows, are rare and almost no human habitations break the vista of tumbled world over which even the native horses make their way with difficulty. A telephone wire known among the marines as the “beer-bottle line,” those being the only insulators to be had when it was constructed by our forces of occupation, is the one dependable guide through the region. Four hours brought us to a score of sorry huts in a little hollow known as La Miel. Even that had its hilltop gendarmerie and prison, commanded by a native sergeant, who had his force drawn up for inspection when we arrived, though he had no warning of the colonel’s approach or any other proof of his official character other than the blouseless uniform he wore. A white rascal owning a marine uniform could play strange tricks in Haiti. Even here there was a big French bell of long ago supported by poles at some distance from the broken-backed church, and Spanish influence of the Dominicans beyond the now not very distant border showed itself in such slight matters as the use of “yo” for “ge” and “buen” instead of “bon.” There followed a not very fertile region, with more pine-trees and long, brown, tough grass, with only here and there a conuco, shut in by the slanted pole fences native to Santo Domingo, planted with weed-grown pois Congo, manioc, and tropical tubers. In mid-afternoon, where the vegetation grew more dense, it began to rain, as we had been warned it would here before our departure from Port au Prince. The first sprinkle increased to a steady downpour by what would probably have been sunset, the trail became toboggans of red mud down which our weary animals skated for long distances, or sloughs so deep and slopes so steep that we were forced to dismount and wade, or climb almost on all fours. Dripping coffee-bushes under higher trees sometimes lined the way, the best information we got from any of the rare passers-by was that our destination was a “little big distance” away. That it remained until we finally slipped and sprawled our way into it.
It rains the year round in the dismal mountain village where we spent the night, until the thatched mud houses are smeared with a reeking slime, and the earth floors are like newly plowed garden patches in the early spring. The place was more than three thousand feet above the sea, and the cold seemed to penetrate to the very marrow even within doors. It was ruled with an iron hand by an “old-timer” who had been so long a sergeant in the Marine Corps that he had come to divide all the world into exact gradations of rank. My companion he unfailingly addressed as “the General,” never by the familiar pronoun “you,” and he took personal charge of everything pertaining to his comfort, even to removing his wet garments and extracting the bones from his chosen portions of chicken. Nothing would induce him to eat before the general had finished or to sit down in his presence. Myself he treated almost as an equal, or as he might have another sergeant who slightly outranked him in length of service, with now and then a hint of scorn at my merely civilian standing. He was probably as small a man as ever broke into our military service, yet the stentorian voice in which he invariably gave his commands to the great hulking negro who served as cook in the unsheltered “kitchen” outside and as general factotum about the hut never failed to cause that person to prance with fear. The natives he addressed in the same tone, and the whole town seemed to spring to attention when he opened the door and bawled out into the night for the mayor to “Report here on the double quick.” How the Haitians managed to understand his English was a mystery, but they lost no time in obeying every order. After the general had retired, the lieutenant, for such was his rank in the gendarmerie, confided to me that he had several books on “creole” and was preparing to learn it. As I had been on the lookout for something of the kind since my arrival in Haiti, hitherto in vain, I expressed a desire to see them. The lieutenant cast aside a soaked tarpaulin and handed me half a dozen French grammars such as are used in our own schools.
The colonel’s clothing was dry and newly pressed when we set out again next morning, though my own was still dripping. “Jim’s” plain clothes were by this time worthy a still more commonplace adjective, for in addition to the mishaps of the trail, he had spent the night in them on the bare earth floor of the gendarme barracks. There came a few more red mud toboggans, then we came out on a vista of half northern Haiti, to which we descended by a rock trail worn horseback deep in the mountain-side and so steep that even “Jim” for once deigned to dismount. The rain ceased a few hundred feet down, though the sky remained dull and overcast, in striking contrast to the speckless blue heavens of southern Haiti, for the seasons are reversed in the two parts of the country. A few hours’ jog across another savanna of denser vegetation than the plateau of St. Michel brought us to the considerable town of Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border, where an automobile bore us away to the west. The great Plaine du Nord, once completely covered with sugar-cane and dotted with French plantation houses and mills, was now a wilderness teeming with blue-legged wild guineas, here and there some bush-grown stone ruins, through which a mud road and a single telephone wire forced their way. We passed the populous towns of Terrier Rouge and Le Trou, famed for their caco sympathies, and Limonade, in the grass-grown old church of which Christophe, Emperor of northern Haiti, was once stricken with apoplexy, and brought up in the mud and darkness at Cap Haïtien.
A corner of Christophe’s Citadel. Its situation is such that it could only be well photographed from an airplane
The ruins of Christophe’s palace of Sans Souci
The mayor, the judge, and the richest man of a Haitian town in the bush