Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/738

728 ; till the popular excitement — on shore, be it understood — takes the form of a dance, begun for our delectation, and continued for that of the dancers themselves, long after we have glided away. White dresses, dashed here and there by a sprinkling of gay colours; behind them a glowing screen of garden-flowers, further back and all around the emerald green of cane-fields, overhead tall palms, not half seared and scant of foliage as we too frequently see them in the wind-swept islands of the Caribbean archipelago, but luxuriant with their heavy crowns; or giant flowering trees, crimson and yellow, the whole flooded, penetrated everywhere by the steady brightness of the tropical day, —

a gay sight, and harmonizing well with the sounds of welcome, happiness, and mirth. These tell, not indeed perhaps of all-absorbing industry, of venturesome speculation and colossal success, but of sufficiency, contentment, and well-doing, — good things too in their way.

 

the whole of the eighteenth century Fort Sommelsdyk continued to be a position of the greatest importance, covering the bulk of the colonial estates and the capital itself from the frequent inroads of Cayenne depredators, and their allies, the French maroons. With the final repression of these marauders, the military duties of the post may be said to have ceased; and it has now for several years served only as a police-station. No spot could have been better chosen; no truer centre found anywhere. Not only does the Commeweyne River, with its double fringe of estates and cultivation reaching far to the south, here unite with its main tributary, the Cottica, the eastern artery of a wide and populous district; but the same way gives direct access to the Perica River, another important affluent from the south-east; while at a little distance the Matappica watercourse branches off in a northerly direction, and winding amid a populous region of plantations and cane-fields, finds an opening to the sea beyond. Half the cultivation, and, owing to the character of the estates, more than half the rural population of Dutch Guiana, are within the range of these districts; and the selection of this post will ever remain a proof of the administrative, no less than of the military talents of Van Sommelsdyk.

The small fort, a pentagon, erected on a grass-grown promontory at the meeting of the two great waters, has a very pretty appearance. On every side the further view is shut off by the dense forest through which the rivers make their winding way by channels from thirty to forty feet in depth; no other habitation is in sight; and the cleared space around the fort-buildings has an out-of-the-world look, befitting a scene of weird adventure in "Mabinogion" or "The Fairie Queene." But the poetry of the New World is in itself, not in the eyes of those who behold it; and if fairies exist west of the Atlantic, they are invisible for the most. Above its junction, the Commeweyne changes character, and instead of being a broad, slow-flowing volume of brackish water, becomes a comparatively narrow, but deep and rapid stream; while its former muddy colour is exchanged for pure black, not unlike the appearance of the mid-Atlantic depths in its inky glassiness. If taken up, however, in small quantity, the black colour, which is due chiefly to the depth, gives place to a light yellow; otherwise the water is clear, free from any admixture of mud, and perfectly healthy, with a slightly astringent taste. These peculiarities are popularly ascribed to some vegetable extract of the nature of tannin, derived from the decomposing substances of the equatorial forest, underneath which these rivers take their rise.

We for our part no longer pursue our voyage on the Commeweyne, but diverging, follow its tributary — or rather an equal stream — the Cottica, and our course is henceforth east, almost parallel with the sea-line, though at some distance from it. From Fort Sommelsdyk onwards, the view on either bank gains in beauty what it loses in extent. The bendings and turnings of the river are innumerable; indeed, it not rarely coils itself on itself in an almost circular loop, the nearest points of which have been in many instances artificially connected by a short but deep and navigable canal, the work of Dutch industry. Several little islands, each an impenetrable mass of tangled vegetation, have thus been formed; on two larger ones, far up the 