THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE
CHAPTER XI
THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE
In the streets of Kingston I had frequently seen companies of one or other of the brilliant West Indian Regiments swinging along to the music of their drums, and on dance and dinner nights I had noticed Artillery officers lounging about the terraces of my hotel. I had seen a couple of Service Corps men trying their polo ponies, and afar off, among a sparkling group of bejewelled women, I once caught sight of a glittering aide-de-camp. But of our friend Tommy of the line I had seen nothing. A friendly Artilleryman assured me that some of the British Line were on the island. I met him in the Kingston High Street, and he pointed towards the mountain chain which overhangs the town. “They’re up there,” he said. Following his direction, I saw a few white specks faintly showing through the summit haze of a mountain peak. The white specks, I discovered, were the cantonments of Newcastle, the military hill station of Jamaica.
The next morning we started at nine, and drove along shaded lanes and dusty, open roads, flanked by gardens and plantations, banana trees, pines, and cocoanuts. Around us the air was transparently clear, above us a sky of the deepest blue, and everywhere—above, below and around—we felt the sun. For two miles we had the level road, and then we reached the mountains.
A rushing mountain torrent crashing through a deep chasm filled almost to the brim with giant boulders, on which trees and plants and creeping flowers had found abundant soil; a road twisting like a tangled thread up and along the face of the mountain, and then lost in the mists of the summit; a heavy scent of tropical flowers; a vast sea of flashing colour—these things marked the beginning of the mountains. Slowly we crawled along a road just wide enough to contain our buggy. On one side the mountain walled us in; on the other a precipice deepened as we ascended. The valley below and the walls around were clothed in yellow grass and thickly set with trees; cotton and pine and cocoanut, banana, orange, and a hundred others grew in clumps and groves and lines, just as their father-seed had fallen or casual native had chanced to plant. Sometimes we passed a mile or so of level stretch, and there we found plantations and nigger huts. Below us we could see coffee mills and sugar estates; halfway up another peak a little church appeared amidst a tiny hamlet; but far above we made out Newcastle and the upper heights, bare and frowning amidst the gloom of the mountain mists. Soon the climate changed. In place of fruit and flowers, we found brown scrub and English gorse. Rainbows became common as trees. Then the sun disappeared,