The Sugar Islands by Alec Waugh

one-way street meant nothing more than that she was lazy. It was a problem with a fascination that led us most afternoons to the ordering of a series of lime squashes in the Délices du Lido. But though Fort de France could offer no better entertainment to the tourist, it was an unsatisfactory one.
    For soft drinks do you no more good than rum does in the afternoon. You are better without either. I have never spent an afternoon in Fort de France without envying those who had offices and telephones, letters to be dictated and strings of agents trying to ship their sugar crops. I have never at the day’s end, without a feeling of unutterable relief, looked down from the climbing road on to the lighted streets and the lights of the ships at anchor.
    One such day in particular I remember. We had come into Fort de France one afternoon, in the mistaken belief that a friendof Eldred’s was on the Flandre. We had spent a hot and profitless half-hour walking round an oven-like ship. Coaling was in progress and the coal dust had blown into our eyes and mouths. We were hot, fractious, and uncomfortable. ‘Let’s go and have an orangeade and then get out of this as quickly as possible,’ we said. On the steps of the club, however, we ran into the son of its President, Edouard Boulenger.
    â€˜What, you fellows here?’ he said. ‘You’re just in time. Jump in quick. We’re going up to the pit. There’s a fight on. A snake and a mongoose.’
    It was the first time that I had seen such a fight. There is not actually a great deal to see. It is darkish inside the building, the pit itself is netted over, and through the mesh of wire it is hard to distinguish against the brown sanded floor the movements of the small dark forms. You see a brown line along the sand and a brown shadow hovering. Then suddenly there is a gleam of white; the thrashing of the snake’s white belly. For a few moments the brown shadow is flecked with the twisting and writhing of the white whip. Then the brown shadow slinks away. The fer de lance , the most hostile small snake in the world, is still. There is not a great deal to see. But it is thrilling. There is a taut, tense atmosphere, not only through the fight but afterwards, when the snake has been lifted out of the pit while its head is cut open and the poison poured into a phial. During a cockfight there is an incessant noise. Everyone shouts and gesticulates. But there is complete silence during the snake’s silent battle. It has a sinister quality. And it is with a feeling of exhaustion and of relief that you come out into the street, into the declining sunlight. You are grateful for the sound of voices.
    Longer than usual that evening we sat on the veranda of the club. It was completely dark when we came down its stairs into the savannah. Never had the cool and quiet of the hills been more welcome. Never had a bathe seemed a more complete banishment of every harassing circumstance that the day had brought. Low in the sky there was a moon, a baby moon. As we swam it was half moonshine and half phosphorus, the splintered silver that was about us. And even in the north of Siam, after a day of marching over precipitous mountain paths and above flooded paddy fields, I have known no greater peace than the lying out on the veranda after dinner, watching the moon and theSouthern Cross sink side by side into the sea, hearing from every bush and shrub the murmur of innumerable crickets.
    Once we went to St. Pierre.
    From Fond Lahaye it is a three hours’ sail in a canoe, along a coast indented with green valleys that run back climbingly through fields of sugar cane. At the foot of most of these valleys, between the stems of the coconut palms, you see the outline of wooden cabins. So concealed are these cabins behind that façade of greenery that were it not for the fishing nets hung out along the beach on poles to dry you would scarcely suspect that there was a