The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Author:Patrick Leigh Fermor
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-59017-522-4
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Pitons, close up, were just as surprising as they had looked from the air: two lonely spikes jutting out of the coast of the island, each shaped like the Matterhorn, and one of them slightly taller than the other. Their perpendicular sides were coated with red, green and canary-yellow moss and creeper, and when, from our little boat in the gulf that they enclosed, we clapped our hands, a host of birds took flight from their nests on invisible ledges and gyrated clamorously above our heads. They are described in books as ‘spires of lava forced out generations ago from the craters of two great volcanoes.’ Being no geologist, this is not very clear to me, and I have not been able to discover, from works of reference, exactly what it means. The vision which immediately presents itself is of two pointed jets of lava shooting out of holes to a great height—2,619 feet and 2,481 feet respectively—and cooling before they could fall to earth again: petrified fountains. There is plainly something wrong with this. The second (I cannot think of any other meaning) is that the two elongated lozenges were already solid, and lurking somewhere under the surface of the earth; and when the volcanic holes were blown in the coast, they both got caught in the upward motion, and jammed half-way out. If this is anywhere near the truth, creepers and forests have now entirely smothered their foundations except where their sides drop clean into the sea. The Petit Piton had never been scaled till late in the last century, after, it is rumoured, a party of British sailors had made the attempt, all of them falling dead at various points on the way to the summit, from the bite of the Trigonocéphale. This terrible snake has contrived to make its way here from the South American mainland, travelling, it must be supposed, in the same way as the ancestors of the Martinican brutes—by sea, on floating branches.

There is a low-lying volcano behind these peaks, called—it is the last one in this book—the Soufrière. A pleasant little fishing town of the same name extricates itself from the forest at the edge of the water.

Our encampment among the coconut palms and dug-out canoes—for the old Carib art has been inherited by nearly all the Windward islanders—was soon the meeting-place of a swarm of lewd village children who settled round us in a ring and commented on our appearance. A boy of ten, to put us at our ease, civilly offered us cigarettes, and then, lighting them with his own, expatiated on the backwardness of his home town. It was a dead-and-alive place, he affirmed. He broke off to ask if we would like some beer. It was a wonderful thought. He ran off into the village with one of our pound notes. The other children began chattering to each other in Créole. ‘Herbert won’t come back,’ one of them said.

‘Why won’t he?’

‘Herbert’s a thief.’

As if to disprove this libel, he came running down the sand with the beer a few seconds later.

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