And the violet velvet distances of evening;—and the swaying of palms against the orange-burning,—when all the heaven seems filled with vapors of a molten sun!...
IV
How beautiful the mornes and azure-shadowed hollows in the jewel clearness of this perfect morning! Even Pelée wears only her very lightest head-dress of gauze; and all the wrinklings of her green robe take unfamiliar tenderness of tint from the early sun. All the quaint peaking of the colored town—sprinkling the sweep of blue bay with red and yellow and white-of-cream—takes a sharpness in this limpid light as if seen through a diamond lens; and there above the living green of the familiar hills I can see even the faces of the statues—the black Christ on his white cross, and the White Lady of the Morne d'Orange—among curving palms.... It is all as though the island were donning its utmost possible loveliness, exerting all its witchery,—seeking by supremest charm to win back and hold its wandering child,—Violet-Eyes over there!... She is looking too.
I wonder if she sees the great palms of the Voie du Parnasse,—curving far away as to bid us adieu, like beautiful bending women. I wonder if they are not trying to say something to her; and I try myself to fancy what that something is:—
—"Child, wilt thou indeed abandon all who love thee!... Listen!—'tis a dim grey land thou goest unto,—a land of bitter winds,—a land of strange gods,—a land of hardness and barrenness, where even Nature may not live through half the cycling of the year! Thou wilt never see us there.... And there, when thou shalt sleep thy long sleep, child—that land will have no power to lift thee up;—vast weight of stone will press thee down forever;—until the heavens be no more thou shalt not awake!... But here, darling, our loving roots would seek for thee, would find thee: thou shouldst live again!—we lift, like Aztec priests, the blood of hearts to the Sun."...
V
... It is very hot.... I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan with a design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green bamboo, with a single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a pale blue murky double streak that means the horizon above a sea. That is all. Trivial to my Northern friends this design might seem; but to me it causes a pleasure bordering on pain.... I know so well what the artist means; and they could not know, unless they had seen bamboos,—and bamboos peculiarly situated. As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy heights behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the blended azure of sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across it at the level of my eyes. Nor is this all;—I have the every sensation of the very moment,—the vegetal odors, the mighty tropic light, the warmth, the intensity of irreproducible color.... Beyond a doubt, the artist who dashed the design on this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a nearly similar experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in me, but which I cannot communicate to others.
... And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write about the Pays des Revenants can only be for others, who have never beheld it,—vague like the design upon this fan.
VI
Brrrrrrrrrrr!... The steam-winch is lifting the anchor; and the Guadeloupe trembles through every plank as the iron torrent of her chain-cable rumbles through the hawse-holes.... At last the quivering ceases;—there is a moment's silence; and Violet-Eyes seems trying to catch a last glimpse of her faithful bonne among the ever-thickening crowd upon the quay.... Ah! there she is—waving her foulard. Mademoiselle Lys is waving a handkerchief in reply....