“Well, madam, I might suggest horseback riding. I’m feeling fine!”
She shook her head.
“You? I can’t go galloping around these mountains the way you do.”
It was true. Frederick Douglass estimated his age to be over seventy. Yet he was spending hours every day in the saddle.
“It’s the only way one can see Haiti!”
They took the boat to Cap Haitien, and while Helen was entertained in one of the big white houses set on the slopes and surrounded by a tropical garden, Douglass, accompanied by other horsemen, rode up to the summit of Bonne-à-l’Evêque. Gradually the earth fell away until the rocky edges of the mountain showed like snarling teeth, and the foothills below seemed like jungle forest. An earthquake in 1842 was said to have shaken the Citadel to the danger point; but Douglass, viewing this mightiest fortress in the Western world, doubted whether any human army with all its modern equipment could take it. Christophe had built his Citadel at a height of twenty-six hundred feet—an amazing feat of engineering so harmoniously constructed through and through that, though thousands and thousands of natives must have died during the course of its construction, one could almost believe it the work of one man.
Douglass stood at the massive pile which is now the tomb of the most dominant black man in history.
“If a nation’s greatness can at all be measured by its great soldiers,” he thought, “then little Haiti, with its Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, must surely be listed among the first!”
Another day they took him up a high cliff overlooking the Môle St. Nicolas.
“You have perhaps heard that Abbé Raynal called it the Gibraltar of the West Indies,” the Haitian commented, watching Douglass’ face.