The very longest West Indian day is but twelve hours fifty-six minutes;—perhaps your first dissatisfaction was evoked by the brevity of the days. There is no twilight whatever; and all activity ceases with sundown: there is no going outside of the city after dark, because of snakes;—club life here ends at the hour it only begins abroad;—there is no visiting of evenings; after the seven o'clock dinner, everyone prepares to retire. And the foreigner, accustomed to make evening a time for social intercourse, finds no small difficulty in resigning himself to this habit of early retiring. The natural activity of a European or American mind requires some intellectual exercise,—at least some interchange of ideas with sympathetic natures; the hours during the suspension of business after noon, or those following the closing of offices at sunset, are the only ones in which busy men may find time for such relaxation; and these very hours have been always devoted to restorative sleep by the native population ever since the colony began. Naturally, therefore, the stranger dreads the coming of the darkness, the inevitable isolation of long sleepless hours. And if he seek those solaces for loneliness which he was wont to seek at home,—reading, study,—he is made to comprehend, as never before, what the absence of all libraries, lack of books, inaccessibility of all reading-matter, means for the man of the nineteenth century. One must send abroad to obtain even a review, and wait months for its coming. And this mental starvation gnaws at the brain more and more as one feels less inclination and less capacity for effort, and as that single enjoyment, which at first rendered a man indifferent to other pleasures,—the delight of being alone with tropical Nature,—becomes more difficult to indulge. When lethargy has totally mastered habit and purpose, and you must at last confess yourself resigned to view Nature from your chamber, or at best from a carriage window,—then, indeed, the want of all literature proves a positive torture. It is not a consolation to discover that you are an almost solitary sufferer,—from climate as well as from mental hunger. With amazement and envy you see young girls passing to walk right across the island and back before sunset, under burdens difficult for a strong man to lift to his shoulder;—the same journey on horseback would now weary you for days. You wonder of what flesh and blood can these people be made,—what wonderful vitality lies in those slender woman-bodies, which, under the terrible sun, and despite their astounding expenditure of force, remain cool to the sight and touch as bodies of lizards and serpents! And contrasting this savage strength with your own weakness, you begin to understand better how mighty the working of those powers which temper races and shape race habits in accordance with environment.
... Ultimately, if destined for acclimatation, you will cease to suffer from these special conditions; but ere this can be, a long period of nervous irritability must be endured; and fevers must thin the blood, soften the muscles, transform the Northern tint of health to a dead brown. You will have to learn that intellectual pursuits can be persisted in only at risk of life;—that in this part of the world there is nothing to do but to plant cane and cocoa, and make rum, and cultivate tobacco,—or open a magazine for the sale of Madras handkerchiefs and foulards,—and eat, drink, sleep, perspire. You will understand why the tropics settled by European races produce no sciences, arts, or literature,—why the habits and the thoughts of other centuries still prevail where Time itself moves slowly as though enfeebled by the heat.
And with the compulsory indolence of your life, the long exacerbation of the nervous system, will come the first pain of nostalgia,—the first weariness of the tropics. It is not that Nature can become ever less lovely to your sight; but that the tantalization of her dangerous beauty, which you may enjoy only at a safe distance, exasperates at last. The colors that at first bewitched will vex your eyes by their violence;—the creole life that appeared so simple, so gentle, will reveal dulnesses and discomforts undreamed of. You will ask yourself how much longer can you endure the prodigious light, and the furnace heat of blinding blue days, and the void misery of sleepless nights, and the curse of insects, and the sound of the mandibles of enormous roaches devouring the few books in your possession. You will grow weary of the grace of the palms, of the gemmy colors of the ever-clouded peaks, of the sight of the high woods made impenetrable by lianas and vines and serpents. You will weary even of the tepid sea, because to enjoy it as a swimmer you must rise and go out at hours while the morning air is still chill and heavy with miasma;—you will weary, above all, of tropic fruits, and feel that you would gladly pay a hundred francs for the momentary pleasure of biting into one rosy juicy Northern apple.
VI
—But if you believe this disillusion perpetual,—if you fancy the old bewitchment has spent all its force upon you,—you do not know this Nature. She is not done with you yet: she has only torpefied your energies a little. Of your willingness to obey her, she takes no cognizance;—she ignores human purposes, knows only molecules and their combinations; and the blind blood in your veins,—thick with Northern heat and habit,—is still in dumb desperate rebellion against her.
Perhaps she will quell this revolt forever,—thus:—
One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never known before: a sudden weird fear of the light.
It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your brain,—that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is piercing somehow into your life,—creating an unfamiliar mental confusion,—blurring out thought.... Is the whole world taking fire?... The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a crucible-glow;—the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some amazing way.... Then dizziness inexpressible: you grope with eyes shut fast—afraid to open them again in that stupefying torrefaction,—moving automatically,—vaguely knowing you must get out of the flaring and flashing,—somewhere, anywhere away from the white wrath of the sun, and the green fire of the hills, and the monstrous color of the sea.... Then, remembering nothing, you find yourself in bed,—with an insupportable sense of weight at the back of the head,—a pulse beating furiously,—and a strange sharp pain at intervals stinging through your eyes.... And the pain grows, expands,—fills all the skull,—forces you to cry out, replaces all other sensations except a weak consciousness, vanishing and recurring, that you are very sick, more sick than ever before in all your life.
... And with the tedious ebbing of the long fierce fever, all the heat seems to pass from your veins. You can no longer imagine, as before, that it would be delicious to die of cold;—you shiver even with all the windows closed;—you feel currents of air,—imperceptible to nerves in a natural condition,—which shock like a dash of cold water, whenever doors are opened and closed; the very moisture upon your forehead is icy. What you now wish for are stimulants and warmth. Your blood has been changed;—tropic Nature has been good to you: she is preparing you to dwell with her.
... Gradually, under the kind nursing of those colored people,—among whom, as a stranger, your lot will probably be cast,—you recover strength; and perhaps it will seem to you that the pain of lying a while in the Shadow of Death is more than compensated by this rare and touching experience of human goodness. How tirelessly watchful,—how naïvely sympathetic,—how utterly self-sacrificing these women-natures are! Patiently, through weeks of stifling days and sleepless nights,—cruelly unnatural to them, for their life is in the open air,—they struggle to save without one murmur of fatigue, without heed of their most ordinary physical wants, without a thought of recompense;—trusting to their own skill when the physician abandons hope,—climbing to the woods for herbs when medicines prove, without avail. The dream of angels holds nothing sweeter than this reality of woman's tenderness.