Читать книгу Seven League Boots - Richard Halliburton - Страница 13
ОглавлениеTHE BLACK KING’S CASTLE
My motorcar bumped along a wretched Haitian road that seemed to lead deeper and deeper into primitive Africa. Past groups of crude mud houses crumbling in the heat, past gross-faced barelegged black women shuffling along the side path with burdens upon their heads, past innumerable half-wild pigs and piccaninnies, through a land that had succumbed to dilapidation, shiftlessness and weeds. With each one of the twenty miles from Cap Haitien I had become less hopeful that there could be anything beautiful in such a decayed and backward country.
And then, rising graceful and cool right out of this squalor, the ruins of a superb French château loomed up at the end of the road.
Had I at that moment met Marie Antoinette walking along with the black Haitian women, I couldn’t have been more surprised. Here was a palace, abandoned and falling, but designed unmistakably in the purest French Renaissance tradition, and far more majestic than the most extravagant reports had led me to expect. For this was Sans Souci of which I had heard, the palace Christophe had built for himself in 1812.
For a decade this imposing residence housed the Black Monarch’s grandiloquent court of dusky dukes and duchesses. And then for one final tragic week it was the scene of murder and destruction, and suffered with the royal family the vengeance of the mob which came to exterminate the monarchy. Gutted by flames, roofless, exposed to tropical wind and rain for over a century, it is still magnificent. The harmonious lines, the sweep of the grand staircase, the whole effect softened by the green vines that trail from the weathered walls, made me agree with the poet who said, “More beautiful than beauty—are its ruins.”
And as I stood before this château, which would have been notable in any country, I remembered that it had been built in the jungle and regally occupied by an illiterate black ex-dishwasher who had once served in a public bar.
From room to room of this stately ruin I walked, trying to picture the scenes it had witnessed. Here Christophe held his court beside his ex-slave Queen, and received the dark-skinned Comte de Limonade and the Duchesse de Marmelade, without once smiling at their names. Here the white maiden ladies from Philadelphia taught Christophe’s daughters, Améthyste and Athénaire, to play the harp. Here in the courtyard above the great fountain, Christophe reviewed his troops. Here in this bedroom, paralyzed and faced with assassination, he fired into his heart the bullet that ended his reign of terror.
But I knew that this palace was only a prelude to the great work, the Citadel waiting three thousand feet above.
Continuing on beyond the formal gardens, I found the path that led to it. Up this path for eight years the thousands of slaves had struggled with bricks and cannon. Up this path Christophe strode countless times, driving forward his slave-laborers, lashing one, shooting another; and here vengeance pursued him as his wife and children, frantic with fear and sobbing with despair, strove to drag his corpse to safety.
The trail, mounting and twisting, tunneled through the dense jungle. I climbed steadily for two hours and finally reached a clearing near the mountain top. And there, still farther above me, I saw the Citadel’s colossal prow rearing haughtily from the summit of the peak.
The day before, I had looked down at it from the air. That view was extraordinary; but now, looking upward from below, I felt the full impact of its forbidding bulk. No wonder the Haitian natives leave it strictly alone, this evil reminder of the tyranny their ancestors endured. No wonder Christophe had to squander the wealth and energy of his nation in the creation of such a refuge.
I reached the entrance. A hundred and thirty feet of wall rose sheer above me. The ponderous gates, still on their hinges, allowed me to pass inside. The ramps and steps were dark and damp. Bats flew about in the dimness. The doorways from room to room were like tunnels, for Christophe had taken no chances with the walls and partitions of his fort. A ten-foot thickness of such master masonry would have held up the Pyramids. So he made them twenty and thirty feet, vowing they must outlast the ages. And outlast the ages I have no doubt they will.
And cannon! Surely such a collection of cannon is to be found nowhere else on earth. There must be six hundred rusty muzzle-loaders, some lined up on wooden carriages, some strewn about like wind-blown straws. There are monster mortars with fifteen-inch bores, and green, richly embossed bronze guns, seized when Napoleon’s expedition was defeated in its three-year effort to regain the French colony of Haiti from Christophe’s army of rebellious slaves. These guns, marked with the date and place of forging, bear German, English and Austrian marks as well as French. Many of them were captured by Napoleon at Lodi and Marengo, before his veteran troops lost them in turn to the Negroes at Cap Haitien. The largest heap of these cannon is, by accident, in the cellar of the great bastion. This part of the Citadel contained four heavily fortified galleries, but the gallery floors were of wood, which has rotted and allowed all the ordnance to tumble helter-skelter to the ground.
If I was astonished by the cannon, I was doubly astonished by the accumulation of cannon balls. Tons upon tons of these projectiles lie piled up in metal hillocks everywhere, enough to feed the guns for weeks of continuous firing. Just outside the gates I found a space thirty feet square packed solid with a mound of four-inch shot nearly four feet high—over eighty thousand in one place. That there are at least a million more of all sizes in and about the Citadel, is not an extravagant estimate. And all have been lifted three thousand feet to their resting place by women, who balanced the heavy burden in baskets on their head.
No matter where the eye falls within the fortress, one sees evidence—on the parapet, in the galleries, in long rows, in grass-grown heaps—of the fact that Christophe was driven by an obsession for more and more guns and ammunition. He amassed them throughout fourteen back-breaking years with a hunger amounting to a mania, as if by sheer quantity he could attain godlike security and hold his power. Since fate overtook him before his refuge was entirely completed, not one gun in twenty is mounted, and ironically enough, not a single shot from all this vast arsenal was ever fired. The stores of gunpowder are there, too, enough to insure an ample supply during the longest siege. Spilling out of the barrels stored in dark stone cellars, the powder has never been disturbed; but the dampness of a century has taken the life out of it. Fortunately, none of Christophe’s many enemies chose to touch a match to this tremendous store when it was still fresh, for the explosion would have blown the Citadel completely off the mountain.
Vaulted stairs led to the courtyard. At one end of it rose the private quarters of the King, a separate building standing apart and built with considerable refinement and grace, somewhat in the manner of Sans Souci. But this apartment felt the concentrated fury of the destroying mobs which, rushing in behind Christophe’s fleeing corpse-bearers, soon reduced it to bare and broken walls. At the other end, multi-storied galleries and barracks blocked out the sky, enough to shelter five thousand men. And beneath these barracks were rows of dungeons which Christophe kept filled, as they were completed, with those of his victims for whom he thought shooting too merciful.
In the center of the courtyard I found a loaf-shaped mound of solidified plaster, twenty feet long and higher than a man. Beside it is an undistinguished stucco tomb inscribed in French: “Here Lies King Henry Christophe—1767:1820—Whose Motto Was ‘I Rise From My Ashes.’ ” Alas, there were no ashes. The tomb contains only chunks of the plaster mound, for this mound, on the day of Christophe’s suicide, was the vat of liquid quicklime in which his family, too close-pressed by the pursuing rebels to dig a grave, flung his corpse. Soon nothing remained of the body but the brass buttons on his uniform and the bullet in his heart.
So occupied was I in noting the cannon and the courtyard, it took me all afternoon to reach the battlements. Several times I had stopped to examine shallow excavations in the walls and floors, dug there by treasure hunters searching for the millions of dollars’ worth of gold which Christophe is supposed to have buried secretly somewhere in the Citadel. As yet no one has found anything, but then no one has known where to begin to dig in such a mountain of masonry, and consequently the searches have been only half-hearted, in spite of the prize.
Climbing to the highest rampart, I could look down at the world three thousand feet below. The audacious skyrocketing walls of the Citadel fell sheer a hundred feet or more on every side, and joined the mountain top as solidly as a tree rises from its roots. Now I could appreciate for the first time the giant size of the fortress—five hundred by three hundred feet—and grasp its full beauty. For beautiful it is, in a cruel, powerful way. The walls, once grimly gray, are ablaze with bright orange lichen which has spread across the stones, and upon this burning color the sunset must fall with splendor. Until the arrival of the U. S. Marines the entire Citadel was a hanging garden of trees and shrubs, almost merging with the jungle which had reached up to take possession the moment it was abandoned. But the Marines cleared the courts and battlements of a hundred years’ growth of vegetation, and little else was necessary to restore it to the original condition.
If only for its commanding position, Christophe must have loved this site well, since from it he could survey a large part of his kingdom. Through his telescope he could see, twenty miles away, Cap Haitien’s harbor filled with a forest of ships. But when I looked I found only a fishing smack or two, beached in the mud. Where Christophe beheld rich plantations and broad fields of cane, producing at that time enough sugar for the world, I could see only a wilderness of brush and trees. But what Christophe heard, rising clearly from the lowlands, I too could hear the same as he: the rhythmic chanting of the black Haitian villagers, and the incessant all-pervading throbbing of the drums. The physical aspects of Haiti have changed since Christophe’s time, but its fundamental self not at all. In everything but geography, it is still African.
Since mid-morning the sun had been obscured, and now, as I stood just before nightfall on top of the prodigious prow and looked out upon King Henry’s land, a heavy black mist gathered and filled the valleys below with a black sea. Thunder and lightning began to crash and echo within hand’s reach of my battlement, and the sky grew strangely, ominously dark. The Black Olympians were gathering to dictate in cannonading tones the destinies of Haiti, and the mighty Citadel was the throne room for this earth-shaking conclave.
Wave after wave of clouds, rolling in from the northern coast, were now climbing rapidly up the mountain side. They reached the lowest pediments of the walls, completely submerging the realms beneath and stretching, an ocean of black fog, far off to meet the night. Only the Citadel, for one unearthly moment, floated above this rising tide, its prow cleaving the oncoming waves so that a huge stone ship, beautiful, silent and alone, seemed to be sailing majestically forward into the supernatural darkness—on through the thunder—out across the sky—proud to bear the name of the great Black King who had launched it, the most defiant challenge in the annals of his race.
