And simultaneously with the return of force, you may wonder whether this sickness has not sharpened your senses in some extraordinary way,—especially hearing, sight, and smell. Once well enough to be removed without danger, you will be taken up into the mountains somewhere,—for change of air; and there it will seem to you, perhaps, that never before did you feel so acutely the pleasure of perfumes,—of color-tones,—of the timbre of voices. You have simply been acclimated.... And suddenly the old fascination of tropic Nature seizes you again,—more strongly than in the first days;—the frisson of delight returns; the joy of it thrills through all your blood,—making a great fulness at your heart as of unutterable desire to give thanks....
VII
... My friend Felicien had come to the colony fresh from the region of the Vosges, with the muscles and energies of a mountaineer, and cheeks pink as a French country-girl's;—he had never seemed to me physically adapted for acclimation; and I feared much for him on hearing of his first serious illness. Then the news of his convalescence came to me as a grateful surprise. But I did not feel reassured by his appearance the first evening I called at the little house to which he had been removed, on the brow of a green height overlooking the town. I found him seated in a berceuse on the veranda. How wan he was, and how spectral his smile of welcome,—as he held out to me a hand that seemed all of bone!
... We chatted there a while. It had been one of those tropic days whose charm interpenetrates and blends with all the subtler life of sensation, and becomes a luminous part of it forever,—steeping all after-dreams of ideal peace in supernal glory of color,—transfiguring all fancies of the pure joy of being. Azure to the sea-line the sky had remained since morning; and the trade-wind, warm as a caress, never brought even one gauzy cloud to veil the naked beauty of the peaks.
And the sun was yellowing,—as only over the tropics he yellows to his death. Lilac tones slowly spread through sea and heaven from the west;—mornes facing the light began to take wondrous glowing color,—a tone of green so fiery that it looked as though all the rich sap of their woods were phosphorescing. Shadows blued;—far peaks took tinting that scarcely seemed of earth,—iridescent violets and purples interchanging through vapor of gold.... Such the colors of the carangue, when the beautiful tropic fish is turned in the light, and its gem-greens shift to rich azure and prism-purple.
Reclining in our chairs, we watched the strange splendor from the veranda of the little cottage,—saw the peaked land slowly steep itself in the aureate glow,—the changing color of the verdured mornes, and of the sweep of circling sea. Tiny birds, bosomed with fire, were shooting by in long curves, like embers flung by invisible hands. From far below, the murmur of the city rose to us,—a stormy hum. So motionless we remained that the green and gray lizards were putting out their heads from behind the columns of the veranda to stare at us,—as if wondering whether we were really alive. I turned my head suddenly to look at two queer butterflies; and all the lizards hid themselves again. Papillon-lanmò,—Death's butterflies,—these were called in the speech of the people: their broad wings were black like blackest velvet;—as they fluttered against the yellow light, they looked like silhouettes of butterflies. Always through my memory of that wondrous evening,—when I little thought I was seeing my friend's face for the last time,—there slowly passes the black palpitation of those wings....
... I had been chatting with Felicien about various things which I thought might have a cheerful interest for him; and more than once I had been happy to see him smile.... But our converse waned. The ever-magnifying splendor before us had been mesmerizing our senses,—slowly overpowering our wills with the amazement of its beauty. Then, as the sun's disk—enormous,—blinding gold—touched the lilac flood, and the stupendous orange glow flamed up to the very zenith, we found ourselyes awed at last into silence.
The orange in the west deepened into vermilion. Softly and very swiftly night rose like an indigo exhalation from the land,—filling the valleys, flooding the gorges, blackening the woods, leaving only the points of the peaks a while to catch the crimson glow. Forests and fields began to utter a rushing sound as of torrents, always deepening,—made up of the instrumentation and the voices of numberless little beings: clangings as of hammered iron, ringings as of dropping silver upon a stone, the dry bleatings of the cabritt-bois, and the chirruping of tree-frogs, and the k-i-i-i-i-i-i of crickets. Immense trembling sparks began to rise and fall among the shadows,—twinkling out and disappearing all mysteriously: these were the fire-flies awakening. Then about the branches of the bois-canon black shapes began to hover, which were not birds—shapes flitting processionally without any noise; each one in turn resting a moment as to nibble something at the end of a bough;—then yielding place to another, and circling away, to return again from the other side...the guimbos, the great bats.
But we were silent, with the emotion of sunset still upon us: that ghostly emotion which is the transmitted experience of a race,—the sum of ancestral experiences innumerable,—the mingled joy and pain of a million years.... Suddenly a sweet voice pierced the stillness,—pleading:—
—"Pa combiné, chè!—pa combiné conm ça!" (Do not think, dear!—do not think like that!)