The meeting with our hosts occasioned a certain alteration in our movements: our trading agents began to inquire about horses; it was decided that we should go to fix ourselves in the neighbourhood of the studs. The plain in which our camp stood was covered with bulls, cows, horses, bisons, buffaloes, cranes, turkeys, pelicans: these birds mottled the green background of our savannah with white, black, and pink stains.
Our traders and hunters were stirred by many passions: not passions of race, education, or prejudice, but natural passions, full and absolute, making straight for their object, having for witnesses a tree fallen in the depths of an unknown forest, a nameless stream. The relations between the Spaniards and the Creek women formed the ground-work of the adventures; the "Burnt-woods" played the principal part in those romances. One story was famous: that of a trader in strong waters seduced and ruined by a "painted woman" or courtesan. This story, put into Seminole verse with the title of Tabamica, was sung in passing through the woods[512]. Carried off in their turn by the colonists, the Indian women soon died forsaken at Pensacola[513]: their misfortunes went to swell the Romanceros and to be numbered among the ballads of Ximenes.
*
The earth is a charming mother; we issue from her womb: in childhood, she holds us to her breasts swollen with milk and honey; in youth and old age, she lavishes upon us her refreshing waters, her harvests and her fruits; she offers us, wherever we may go, a shade, a bath, a table and a bed; she opens her entrails again to receive us after death, and throws a coverlet of herbs and flowers over our remains, while she secretly transforms us into her own substance, to reproduce us under some graceful shape. That is what I said to myself on waking, when my first look fell upon the sky, the canopy of my bed.
The hunters had set out for the work of the day; I remained behind with the women and children. I never left the side of my two sylvan goddesses: one was proud, the other sad. I did not understand a word of what they said to me, and they did not understand me; but I went to fetch water for their cup, shoots for their fire, mosses for their bed. They wore the petticoat and the wide, slashed sleeves of the Spanish women, the body and cloak of the Indian women. Their bare legs were cross-gartered with a lace-work of birch. They plaited their hair with posies or filaments of rushes; they mailed themselves in chains and necklaces of glass beads. From their ears hung purple berries; they had a fine talking paroquet: the bird of Armida; they fastened it on their shoulder like an emerald, or carried it hooded on their hand, as the great ladies of the tenth century carried their hawks. To harden their breasts and arms, they rubbed themselves with the apoya, or American gallingale. In Bengal the nautch-girls chew the betel-nut, and in the Levant the almes suck the mastic of Chio: the Floridan maidens pounded, between their teeth of a bluey whiteness, tears of liquid-amber and roots of libanis, which blended the fragrance of angelica, cedrat, and vanilla. They lived in an atmosphere of perfumes emanating from themselves, like orange-trees and flowers living in the pure exhalations from their leaves and chalices. I amused myself by placing a little ornament upon their heads: they submitted, gently dismayed; witches themselves, they thought I was working a charm upon them. One of them, the "proud" one, often prayed; she seemed to me half a Christian. The other sang in a voice of velvet, uttering at the end of each phrase a note that troubled one. Sometimes they spoke hastily to each other: I thought I could recognize the accents of jealousy, but the "sad" one wept, and silence was restored.
Weak as I was, I sought examples of weakness, in order to encourage myself. Had not Camoëns in the Indies loved a black Barbary slave, and might not I in America do homage to two young jonquil sultanas? Had Camoëns not addressed endechas, or stanzas, to his Barbaru escrava?[514]
*
A fishing-party was arranged. The sun was nearing its setting. In the foreground appeared sassafras, tulip-trees, catalpas, and oaks, from whose boughs hung skeins of white moss. Behind this foreground rose the most charming of trees, the papaw, which might have been taken for a chased silver style, surmounted by a Corinthian urn. In the background reigned balsam-trees, magnolias, and liquid-ambers.
An exquisite landscape.
The sun dropped behind that curtain: a ray piercing through the crown of a thicket sparkled like a carbuncle set in the sombre foliage; the light diverging between the trunks and branches projected heightening columns and mobile arabesques upon the sward. Below were lilacs, azaleas, annulated creepers with gigantic sheaves; above, the clouds, some fixed, like promontories or old towers, others fleeting, like rosy vapours or carded silk. By means of successive transformations, one saw the mouths of furnaces opening up in those clouds, heaps of embers piling themselves up, streams of lava flowing: all was dazzling, radiant, gilded, opulent, saturated with light.