4

It was a memorable excursion.  They rode from Cap Haytien for a day’s journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle with populous country.  They passed countless villages of thatched huts alive with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all the time they seemed to be in a wilderness.  They forded rivers, they had at times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they lost their way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the background until it dominated the landscape.  Long after dark they blundered upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they were to pass the night.  They were interrogated under a flaring torch by peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd into the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about their right to go further.  They might have been in some remote corner of Nigeria.  Their papers, laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that the commandant could not read.  They carried their point with difficulty.

But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of imperialism that humanity has ever made.  The roads and parks and prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines and precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding traces of a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly approach to his fastness.  Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace with great terraces and the still traceable outline of gardens, though there were green things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees thrust out of the empty windows.  Here from a belvedere of which the skull-like vestige still remained, the negro Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of the burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown out his brains.

He had christened the place after the best of examples, “Sans Souci.”

But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never used.  The defection of his guards made him abandon that.  To build it, they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives.  He had the true Imperial lavishness.  So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush, looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky—­for even the guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside