The Town of Sleep.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 22 June 1910, Page 4

The Town of Sleep.

AN IMPRESSION OF ST. HER RE MARTINIQUE. The Times (London) recently published the (following engrossing article from one of its special correspondents :— "Come- round on the port side I You will see it better. . . . There! Thnlfc'sPele!" Pele! Tt looks innocent enough. From well out to sea for a few minutes onJy we had seen the full outline of the mounitiain clear-cut against the sky, Ithe cone truncated ias sharply as top of an egg which has been sliced with a kiiiife. In the awful moment on that Bth of May, 1902, when the cap of the mountain lifted, before the 'blast of flame swept down upon the city on the shore, it is said that 'by the mere concussion masts and funnels were lifted oult of ships that lay off shore. Hut to-day, and usually, it is only from out at sea .that one sees the monster's outline intact. One by one the green amd happylooking hills wheel by us until,"too suddenly, it seems (for surely it should be prefaced by some warming scene of desolation!). the 'long curved line of the bay is before one whore was once, was once St. Pierre. "It is men, not walls, that make a city," the Greek maxim rtin; and more, it is living men. For the walls of Sit. Pierre are there still; and probably n)o fewer than 40.00 C of its inhabitants are (there also. But they have ;been asleep these eight years now. And it is extraordinary impressive, fhiis white, sightless skeleton of n dead ciity. In orderly rows the houses sltiand as seen from the sea, the streets rising in tier upon well-gradodi tiiei back from the shore to the hills. Biiit every street is silept, every house roofless, every window cavernous and blind. The sea is as smooth as a SHEET OF GLASS. Between us and the shore one small bolat contains two boys, who have been fishing, the sum shining on their copper-coloured skins and on. the brilliant red .rock-fish with which the bottom of the boat is littered. Otherwise there is no life in all the wide roadstead, where seventeen vessels, with numerous small boats, were swallowed up that diiy. On the forlorn wreck of a jetty we are met by half a dozen almost unclad black folk, (three women (the elderly hag, perhaps, the mother ol the other two), one 'old and crippled man, and (two young boys, all thrusting oil us pathetic souvenirs dug from this graveyard of a city. Before us, as we iaind, lies the wide paved street which runs along and parallel Ito the water front. "And there," says tho ship's officer wlito is my guide and counsellor, "wan Ithe wickedest spot in the whole West Tndies! That row of houses, pink and white, to the left. The French nature, you know, away from the restraints of home, with the ignorance and docility of the blacks; iit is a bad combination."

Tliere are legends flow of blaspliemons riito-s which wore hi progress when the "fire from the Lord out of heaven" was raiiuod , down— legends which have prolNibly crown up si nice the event. But there seems ito have been good ground foi that description, "tho wickedest spot in the West Tndies." And of over 40,000 people who were presumably in the city at tho time only one man escaped, a prisoner under SENTENCE OF DEATH

for mtwder confined in a cell impervious to the flames and fumes, and ho only escaped to die of the shock a few days later.

Fifty yards of narrow cross street briing up to what was once the chief business thoroughfare of St. Pierre. Wide and straight it runs for a mile in either directon, tho roadway flagged wi'th blocks of stone, fair and smooth, to where on each side the gutters .arc now green ribbons of •herbage. Then the high curb rises, and beyond it the brrwid-'paved sidewalk (for the French build their colonial cities better than we) reaches to the straight, clean, orderly frontage of the stone-built shops. Straight and orderly the line of the shop-fronts dtill stands—the fronts only, with groping doorways and empty windows. Hero and there, still fixed in tho heavy masonry, tht rusted damps and pins show where doors were Jiimg and window shutters fastened; but beyond, the baro incombustible stone and metal not a fragment or shred of wood or glass or fabric remains of all the bravery of what wns once perhaps the gayesil and most fashionable shopping street in the West Indies. Nbw and again one gathers indications of what kind of stock was carried 1 in this shop or that. Here a mass 'of what was once coiled chain, now fused to a solid lump of metal, sugg«fe that a jeweller throve. But for tho most Mrt eneh building is full, choked to the roof, with ash; and

VOLCANIC DUST, dreadful to see, but merciful, perhaps ; for under it buried deep, are things tjiat one does not care to think of. No life, no pemshinible material survived that first stifling, withering blast; then came the rain ot d'ush and ashes, covering all things, as for the most part they remain hidden (to this dayV • A Jl i] > £ WTe . m «rcifully yet, naiturc •in the T«>p,cs is prolific. From the hill slopes on all sides vegetation has pushed its way nmtong the ruins. _ Seeds have been (borne by the wind or dropped by birds, or, Raving long lam dormant in crevices ™> ue «» fid in the uncongenial up through Ith-e overlying .layer oi debris to the air. In every intert °.f rhn nf "g every wall from here the roofs once were, a mantle of fohage and blossoming shmlxs has been drawn over'thewhole dead S +1 Ea< * str *#t Paved street, nth the wh.te walls on eitJier hand is little more than a pergola, a. K iW to, an avenue cut 'through the gree ? * P , . 1 eve, 'y side a dense sonib of faint-perfumed mimtosa and eupatonum with its clustered floAv-er-beade and grey-green leaves, has thrust up and over and amonfe them climb strange creepers £ whidh tlie yellow gherkin-like fruits or the imomordica a.re conspicuous And over and among these again are the butterflies and moths, gorgeous %hin@s tto make the European lepidopterist despair; splendid fritilllanes, all molten copper and silver and rose, beautiful moths at the Lithosia or Footman family white butterflies and yellow, and a host of representatives of genera unknown to British collectors. Leaving the silent streets, we turned shorewards, another lamd myself, and walked for .a maJ« along the edge of the incoming tide; awl it is strange walking, for the sand beneath one's feet treads as firm and sound as anywhere on the Engish coast. But it is black.

For some males but from shore they say that the floor of tflie sea is, even now, after all those years, carpeted deep in this black p&\\ untier which and on which nWfchine lives. A m,ile or so along the shore one comes to the broad pebblostrewn bed (af the watercourse (dm™ the centre of njhich ji 10ft wide rivulet of water (bubbles orystalcloar from the mountains), which floted ma a barrier the linvaHow and kept it from overwhelming

THE DESOLATED TOWN. Up to /the nearer shore of the OM toed overythiirg ,is screen and flowsr»tudded. Beyond it Jies a barren land, seamed) and ibro/wn; such a

land *is thait in which Roland' wandered when he came to the Dark Tower. Seamed and parched and brbwm it stretches as far as the eye caiii reach up the slopes olf Pel© to the whilte cloud wrefciths.

Back we (turned iagniro from the shore through the silent streets M the sleeping city. Here the ?ircuT'a>r itoasin ol n foivnitaiin 'holds in iits centre the pedestal ol what was an eSaibo.rate 'bronze group, w.i'bh swans, nearly life-size, alt each corner, which, one may ihelieve, once powrecl water ■through their curved necks. The necks aro headless now. Only 'one swan still stands on its base. Two others, melted out of shape, lie in the empty basin, mere lumps of metal. Tn another place the hondi of an iron, lion ithrusts out from ,the well, with open mouth, through which, once agaiiv, water used to pour; but the pipes .are melted away, and. under the rust the features of the lion are buried anul ha'ltf dilitora.ted ihy the breath of the furnace. We rxissedi where two massive columns still show whait was the stately entrance t'o the Governor's house; but the heavy iron pjates lie wrecked and twisted on the ground, and beyond <the noble pleasure grounds are a wildorness of tangled woodland growth, with hens and there a hummock of ruined masonry half draped in green. Tn 'the cemetoiry the tonibst'ones lie split by the heat and twisted from thair beds, and the monuments lie. fiti-ewu broken on the ground; Imit it has little moaning now, this place where the resting places of a fmv hundred deml were" lmiVoured with monuments of marble and granite, while all Around, in the city wlich is one vast cemetery lie 40,000 DEAD un.nvarked. My ship's officer told me that ho knew St. Pierre well before fib wa.'i stricken, andi not less than once a year then ho has been able to put in heire and come ashore; and at each visit he has seen how mature has gained upon the town. In. a few more years the streets will all be overgrown, the -masonry buried in green, wind the forest-growith will have pushed its way to the- shore. This is one of the islands where tho dreaded snake the Fer do Lnnee is found. In ,ju.<?t such, a broken wilderness as this, whore untkir the flowers and tJie butterflies the wreckage of the city offers strange dark hiding-places, iit will love to make its home. Then few people, will oare to push their way through tlmj thick growth anionig the ruins. Ships will content themselves with parsing off shore, and passengers Avill be s-ltown from a. distance the place whore once St. Pierre stood. But a l.iittle more and a generation will arise to which the story of tho disaster is ibut a tradition, and the very site of the wickedest spot in the West Tndies will be forgotiten, its memory overgrown wiitli myth and legend, even as the ruins of the citv itself are a>l ready half submerged in flowers and green lcoves.