The ceiba on the wide savannah has endless room in which to spread. It is perfect in form, like a mammoth gray and green umbrella, and reaches out its immense branches toward every side in perfect symmetry. And such branches! They alone are as large as our forest oaks, and they throw themselves out from the trunk horizontally, in stupendous strength. Its foliage is rather thin; the power of the tree seems to be spent in trunk and branch. Its bark is like an elephant’s hide, and its trunk has a strange way of buttressing out its side in huge wings. It is even said to be the worshipped tree of the superstitious black natives—a mysterious sort of fetich, the mighty, silk-cotton ceiba.
IV.
Fine residences skirt the savannah, each garden a marvel of beauty, in palms and trees whose names we do not know. Each little villa, has its English name plastered upon the gateway. This part of the city is clean, and the road is fine, so we will try to forgive and forget the shabby appearance of the lower town. We pass countless gardens, and then the houses grow fewer, and the gardens turn into banana patches, and the people begin to look different; the negroes disappear, and we are in the beginning of the “Coolie Village,” where a row of thatched roofs, supported by bamboo poles, ranges on either side of a long street, which disappears under an avenue of palms and breadfruit-trees, quite out of sight.
And here are the Hindoo men and women,—quiet, serious people, displaying very little curiosity about us, going on with their work, just as if we were not near them. What a relief from the hideous faces of the negro are these straight-featured, well-poised East Indians!
The men dress in white and are not overly clean. It does not look to me as if shirt and turban were often washed, but as their artisans work sitting on the ground, there is really small chance for immaculate linen. It is upon the women that the Hindoo displays his sensuous love for colour and jewels. She is his savings-bank. Every bit of silver or gold earned is taken to the jeweller to be fashioned into ornaments for her.
Let us leave the carriage and wander about among these interesting, silent people. Little Blue Ribbons would like to carry away one of those curious silver bracelets the women wear, and as if our thoughts are divined, we are in no time surrounded by a lot of girls who are simply covered with silver and gold. They wear as many as twenty bracelets on each arm, of different designs, some very beautifully twisted into serpents’ coils and heads, others engraved with intricate arabesques, others merely crude bands, with a few ornamental lines. Every part of the body, where a ring can hang, is covered with ornaments; head, ears, nose, fingers, arms, waist, ankles, toes. And some of the dear little brown babies, from two to five years old, were dressed only in pretty silver whistles, tied about the waist with a black string.
We examine many bracelets. The arms held out are more beautiful than any bits of silver about them, and the women have low, sweet voices, and their eyes are brilliant, and their skin is lustrous, and the fascination of the Orient is about them. The Hindoo women may have a hard time of it in some ways, perhaps, off in East India where the missionaries are, but here in Trinidad they have every appearance of being well cared for.
Daddy is the one who buys the trinkets. He has a way of finding always the most curious and the most beautiful things, and the Hindoo women crowding about him, and the little girls, too, seem to have suspected his talent. After examining the wealth of a dozen arms, two silver bands are selected, which, after being carefully washed by a very particular Daddy, are snapped about the white wrists of the expectant girlies. He has not only a way with him for finding beautiful curios, but, alas! I must confess he has a decided talent also for discovering beautiful women. My only consolation in the matter is his catholicity of taste, for he shows no preference, as a rule. His is a universal admiration, the simple homage to beauty of an artistic soul, and that comforts me. There is safety in numbers!
So it did not surprise me, while we are prowling around back of the huts, in search of some Hindoo needlework, to return and discover him chatting in a one-sided conversation with a little girl, about the age of Little Blue Ribbons. She was leaning in a dreamy attitude in the doorway of a shop—the most prosperous one in the village.