THE TOWN OF SLEEP

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 47, 4 June 1910, Page 10

THE TOWN OF SLEEP

AX IMPRESSION OF ST. PIERRE, MARTINIQUE. "Come round on the port side! You will see it better There! That's Pelee!" Pelee! It looks innocent enough. It was in the other direction, to" northward, that it did its terrible work eisjlit years ago. From there the island lies smiling and peaceful in the sunshine, with rich wooded valleys lying between the green shoulders of warm footmlls which rise to the heavily timbered slopes of the great hill itself." From well out at sea for a few minutes only we had seen the full outline of the mountain clear-cut against the sky, the cone truncated as sharply as the top of an egg which has .been sliced with a knife. 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 out of ships that lay off shore. But to-day, and usually, it is' only from out at sea. that one sees the monster's outline intact. It is not well that majesty should be pried upon too closely; wherefore, all over the world, the monarchs among the .peaks keep their lower heights swathed in cloutiw.reaths so that one does not see thenfaces from near at (hand, but only from a respectful distance is it permitted to look on kingship unveiled.

SKELETON OF A DEAD CITY. One, iby one the, green and happy-look-ins; hills wheel by us until, too suddenly, it seems (for surely it should be prefaced by some warning scene of desolation!) the long curved line of the bay is ibefore one where was once St. Pierre. "It is men, not walls, that make a city," the Greek maxim ran; and more, it is living men. For the walls of St. Pierre are there still; and probably no fewer than 40,000 of its inhabitants are tnere 'also. But they have been asleep these eight years now. And it is extraordinarily impressive, this white, sightless skeleton of a dead city. In orderly rows the houses stand as seen from the sea, the streets rising in tier upon well-grad-I ed tier hack from the shore to the' hills, I But every street is silent, every house I roofless, every window cavernous and blind. The sea is as smooth as a sheet of glass. Between us and the shore one small boat contains two boys who have been fishing, the sun shining on their copper-colored sums and on the .brilliant red rock-fish with which the bottom oi 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 day. Almost without a single ripple we slide through the still, indigo-colored sea; the anchor runs out • and we swing gently round, some three hundred yards, perhaps, from the uncanny land. We go ashore in the ship's launch, for no one puts out to take us off or greet us; and the captain does not come with us. The bottom here is buried many feet deep in volcanic dust and ashes, and in such stuff, even in a calm like this, an anchor t drags at times.

THE MISERABLE REMNANT.

. On the forlorn wreck of a jetty Ave are met by half a dozen almost unclad black folk, three women (the elderly hag, perhaps, the mother of the other two), one old and crippled man, and two young boys, all thrusting on us pathetic souvenirs dug from this graveyard of u city—goblets and other glass vessels showing the action of the fire, half fused and melted out, of shape; coins burnt and bent; personal ornaments, as a bronze crucifix and chain; bits of bric-a-brac like an old wrought-iron candlestick and an Indian god in Benares brass —alj alike bearing witness to the awfulness of that hom when the hot air searched the town as a flame is driven by a forced draught through a funace; each poor &r----■ticl'e indeed a memento mori. How could human life continue in an atmosphere which almost instantaneously charred and destroyed all woodwork, melted the softer metals, ana left the hardest halffused, blistered and distorted, and split blocks of marble and granite as we see them split here? They say that in these streets the dead lay,' in their scores and hundreds, all crouched in one direction, all with their useless arms bent across their faces. WHISPERS OF ABOMINATIONS.

Before us, as we hand, lies the wide? paved street which runs along and parallel to the water front. "And there," says the ship's officer, who is my guide and counsellor, "was the wickedest spot in the whole West indies! 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; it is a bad combination.' And it is impossible not to remember: The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered unto Zoar. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that wsliieh grew upon the ground. WILL JbuON BE BURIED.

My ship's officer told me that he knew St. Pierre well before it was stricKen, and not less than once a year since then he has 'been able able to put in here and come ashore; and at each visit he lias seen how nature has gained upon the town. In a few more years the streets will all 'be overgrown, the masonry buried in green, and the forest growth will have forced its way down to the shore. This is one of the islands where the dreaded snake, the Fer de Lance, is found. In just such a broken wilderness as this, where under the flowers and the butter-flies the wreckage of the city offers strong* hiding-places, it will love to maike its home. Then few people will care to push their way through the thick growth among the ruins. Ships will content themselves with .passing off shore, and passengers will be shown irom a distance the place where once St. Pierre stood. But a little more and a generation will arise to which the story of the disaster is but a tradition, and the vest spot of the wickedest spot m the West Indies will be forgotten)'! us memory • overgrown with myth and legend, even as the ruins of the city itself are already half submerged in flowers and gneen leaves. —Times correspondent.