Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/174

164 number of ragged black loungers, you may improve your leisure by watching the great barges as they float leisurely along the tide, bearing their neatly protected loads of sugar, cocoa, or other plantation produce for the cargo-ships, that wait off the town "stellings," or wharfs, patiently moored day by day, with so little bustle or movement of life about them, that you wonder whether their crews have not all by common consent abandoned them, and gone off to join a lotus-eating majority on shore. Or if you are driven to seek refuge while wandering through the interior of the town, the great broad streets, all mathematically straight, will offer you the shelter of their noble avenues, where tamarind, mahogany, sand-box, or other leafy trees, planted with Batavian regularity, cast down a long black streak of shade on the glaring whiteness of the highway; or you may rest, if so inclined, beside some well in one of the many rectangular spaces left open for the sake of air or ornament, here and there in the very heart of the town, like squares in London, but without the soot.

One such green oasis contains half-hidden amid its trees the handsome Portuguese synagogue, of recent construction; another the Dutch, less showy but more substantial, as befits the old standing and wealth of the worshippers within its walls, and the memory of Samuel Cohen Nassy, its talented founder, the Surinam Joshua of his tribe when they camped, two centuries ago, on the banks of their newly-acquired Jordan. A third "square" — I use the inappropriate word for want of a better in our own language; but the French place or Arab meidan would more correctly express the thing — boasts the presence of the Dutch Reformed church (the building, I mean), a model of heavy propriety, suggestive of pew-openers and the Hundredth Psalm, Old Tune; while a fourth has in its enclosure the flimsy, showy construction that does appropriate duty for the gaudy rites of Rome. A fifth has for its centre-piece the Lutheran place of worship; a sixth, the Moravian; and so forth. But whatever be the gods within, the surroundings of every temple are of a kind in which Mr. Tylor could legitimately discern something of a "survival" of tree-worship and the "groves" of old — a sensible survival in these sun-lorded equatorial regions. Select, then, your city of refuge where you will; but except it be by chance some stray black policeman, whom an unusual and utterly heroic sense of duty keeps awake and on his beat, or a few dust-sprinkled ebony children, too young as yet to appreciate the impropriety of being up and alive at this hour — you yourself, and the ungainly Johnny-crows that here, as at Kingston, do an acknowledged share of the street-cleaning business, will be the only animal specimens discernible among this profusion of vegetable life. For these shade-spots, with all their cool, are delusive in their promise — they are mere islets plunged amid an overwhelming ocean of light and heat; and flesh, however solid, though protected by them from actual combustion in the furnace around, must soon thaw and resolve itself into a dew under the influence of the reflected glare.

Better take example, as indeed it is the traveller's wisdom to do in any latitude, whether tropical or arctic, from the natives of the land, and like them retire, after a substantial one-o'clock breakfast, luncheon, or dinner — since any of these three designations may be fairly applied to the meal in question — to an easy undress and quiet slumber till four or later have chappit in the afternoon. Indoors you will find it cool enough. The house-walls, though of wood, at least throughout the upper stories, are solidly constructed, and are further protected from the heat by any amount of verandahs outside, which, in true Dutch taste, are not rarely dissembled under the architectural appearance of porticos. The house-roofs are highly pitched, and an airy attic intervenes between them and the habitation below; the windows, too, are well furnished with jalousies and shutters, and the bedrooms are most often up two flights of stairs, occasionally three. If, under circumstances like these, you cannot keep cool, especially when you have nothing else on earth to do, you have only yourself, not the climate, to blame. Such at any rate is the opinion, confirmed by practice, of the colonists universally, European or creole, white or coloured; and as they have, in fact, been up and at work each in his particular line of business ever since earliest dawn, it would be hard to grudge them their stated and, for the matter of that, well-earned afternoon nap. Merchants, tradesmen, accountants, proprietors, bankers, and the like, thus disposed of, his Dutch Majesty's officials, civil, military, or naval (for a small frigate is always stationed at Paramaribo, ready at the colonial governor's behests), may, I think, sleep securely calm when all around are sleeping; nay, even the watchmen — and they are many in these gates of keen, energetic Israel —