A SEASHORE ONE MILE UP 



woodpeckers hammered and todies creaked while 

 two big hawks hung aloft and watched our slow 

 progress. The valley of the Cul-de-Sac stretched 

 out more and more and at last the great salt lakes 

 came into view. The road wound and wound 

 about, always zigzagging, always up. 



Martins appeared, a hawk rushed past, scream- 

 ing as it went. The road tipped over the rim of 

 the world and the whole hemisphere and zone 

 shifted and I was riding the trail to Mussoorie — 

 toward the gateway of the Himalayas. In all my 

 flying over Haiti I got no such sudden shift — such 

 complete translation from the tropics behind, of a 

 West Indian island, to the absolute threshold of 

 the Hills themselves! As we went on and up, 

 there opened out an inconceivably steep canyon 

 with a dry torrent bed at the bottom; huge 

 boulders, moss-covered, jutted out from the sides, 

 bignonias bloomed on the trail, and instead of the 

 hot, moist air of Port-au-Prince there came to my 

 nostrils a breath from the snows. I sat straight 

 up in my saddle, breathed deep and thought of 

 Kim's red Lama who strode out across the country 

 when he sniffed the air of the Hills. 



With the last glimpse of the gulf and the Cul-de- 

 Sac, all hint of the tropics vanished, and we were 

 in a land of pines. Swallows swooped across the 

 trail and criss-crossed the sky; the banks on the 

 mountain side of the trail were padded with giant 

 eagle brakes, and tree-ferns came into view. I 

 stopped at the edge of a sheer precipice, and the 



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