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Show WHEN PELEE WAS AT PEACE. Wonderful View From the Crater's Kim. ! Lafcadio Hearn, the author and traveler, trav-eler, whose exquisite prose has charmed ! readers of current literature, writes j rapturously in "A Midsummer Trip to I the Tropics" of the island of Martin-1 Martin-1 ique. Following is his description of I the vista from the summit of Mont Tclee: Valleys and mornes, peaks and ravines, ra-vines, succeeding each other as surge succeeds surge in a storm, a weirdly tossed world, but beautiful as it is weird; all green the foreground, with all tints of green, shadowing off to billowy bil-lowy distances of purest blue. The sea line remains invisible as ever; you know where it is only by the zone of pale light ringing the double sphericity of sky and ocean. And in this double blue void the island seems to hang suspended; sus-pended; far peaks seem to come up from nowhere, to rest on nothing like forms of mirage. Unless to attempt photography, distances take the same color as the sea. All is vague, vertiginous; vertig-inous; the land still seems to quiver with the prodigious forces that upheaved up-heaved it. High over all this billowing and peaking towers the Pitons of Carbet, gem-violet through the vapored miles, the tallest one filleted with a single soft white band of cloud. Through all the wonderful chain of the Antilles you might seek in vain for other peaks as exquisite of form as these. Their beauty beau-ty no less surprises the traveler today than it did Columbus three, hundred and eighty-six years ago, when, on the 13th day of June, 1502, his caravel first sailed into sight of them, and he asked his Indian guide the name of the unknown un-known land and the names of those marvelous shapes. Then, according to-Pedro to-Pedro Martyr de Anghiera, the Indian answered that the name of the island was Madiana: that those peaks had been venerated from immemorial time by the ancient peoples of the archi-I archi-I pelago as the birthplace of the human race; and that the first brown inhabitants inhab-itants of Madiana, having been driven from their natural heritage by the man-eating pirates of the south the cannibal Caribs remembered and mourned for their sacred mountains, and gave the names of them, for a memory, to the loftiest summits of their new home. Hayti. Surely never was fairer spot hallowed by the legend of man's nursing-place than the valley blue-shadowed by. those peaks, worthy, for their gracious femininity of shape, to seem the visible breasts of the All-nourishing All-nourishing Mother. , dreaming under this tropic sun. Touching the zone of pale light northeast, appears a beautiful peaked silhouette, Dominica. We had hoped to perceive Saint Lucia, but the atmosphere at-mosphere is too heavily charged with vapor today. How magnificent must be the view on certain extraordinary aays, wnen u reacne iium Aiuiguo. m the Grenadines over a range of three hundred miles! But the' atmospheric conditions which allow of such a spectacle spec-tacle are rare, indeed. As a general rule, even in the most unclouded West Indian weather, the loftiest peaks fade into the light at a distance of one hundred hun-dred miles. A sharp ridge covered with- fern cuts off the view of the northern slopes: one must climb it to .look down upon Ma-couba. Ma-couba. Macouba' occupies the steepest slope of Pelee and the grimmest part of the coast; its little chef-lieu is industrially indus-trially famous for the manufacture of native tobacco, and historically for the ministrations of Pere Labat, who rebuilt re-built Its church. Little change has taken olace in the parish since his time. "Do you know Macouba?" asks a native writer; "it is not Pelion- upon Ossa, but ten or twelve Pelions side by side with ten or twelve Ossae, inter-separated inter-separated by prodigious ravines. Men can speak to each other from places whence, by rapid walking, it would require re-quire hours to meet; toj, travel there is to experience on dry land the sensation of the sea." With the diminution of the warmth provoked by the exertion, of climbing, you begin to notice how cool.it feels: you could almost doubt the testimony of your latitude. Directly east is Sene-gambia; Sene-gambia; we are well south of. Timbuc-too Timbuc-too and the Sahara on a line with southern India. The ocean has cooled the winds; at this altitude the rarity of the air is northern; but in the valleys val-leys below the vegetation is African. The best plants, the best . forage, the flowers of the gardens., iy;e. of Guinea:, the graceful date palms are. from the Atlas region, those tamarinds, whose thick shade stifles all other vegetable life beneath it. are from Senegal. Only, in the touch of the air, the vapory colors col-ors of distance, the shapes of the hills, there is a something not of Africa; that strange fascination which has given to the island its poetic Creole name le Paps .des Revenants. And the charm is as puissant in our own day as it was more than 200 years ago when Pere Dutertre wrote: "I have never met one single man, nor one single woman, of all those who came back therefrom, in whom I have not remarked a most passionate desire to return thereunto." Time and familiarity do not weaken the charm either for those born among these scenes who never voyaged beyond be-yond their native island, or for those to whom the streets of Paris and the streets of St. Pierre are equally well known. Even, at a time when Martinique Mar-tinique had been forsaken by hundreds of her ruined planters, and the para-disc para-disc life of the old days had become only a memory to embitter exile, a Creole writes: "Let there suddenly open before you one of those vistas, or anscs, with colonnades col-onnades or cocoa palm at the end of which you see smoking the chimney of a sugar mill, and catch a' glimpse of a hamlet of negro cabins (cases) or merely picture to yourself one of the being hauled by two ranks of fishermen; fisher-men; a canoe waiting for the embellie to make a dash for the beach; even a negro bending under the weight of a basket of fruits, and running along the shore to get to market and illuminate that with the light of the sun! What landscapes! O Salvator Rosa! O Claude Lorraine if I had your pencil! .' . . Well do I remember the day on which, after twenty years of absence, I found myself again in the presence of these wonders I feel once more the thrill of delight that made all my body tremble, they that came to my eyes. It was my land, my own land, that appeared ap-peared so beautiful." At the beginning, while gazing south, east, west, to the rim of the world, all laughed, shouted, interchanged the quick delight of new impressions; every ev-ery face was radiant. . . . Now all look serious none speak. The first physical joy of finding oneself on this point in violet air, exalted above the hills, soon yields to other emotions inspired in-spired by . the mighty vision and the colossal peace of the heights. Dominating Dom-inating all, I think, is the consciousness conscious-ness of the awful antiquity of what one is looking upon sucli a sensation, perhaps, per-haps, as of old found utterance in that tremendous question of the Book of job "Wast thou brought forth before the hills?" ... . And the blue multitude multi-tude of the peaks, the perpetual congregation con-gregation of the mornes, seem to chorus cho-rus in the vast resplendence telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless pas-sionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath until something; like the fullness of a great j grief begins to weigh at the heart. .' . . For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and color, will surely endure marvellous as now after we shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon i it. |