CHAPTER XI 



The Mysterious Migration 



Because of a wedding party in which I had neither part nor 

 interest, I happened to see a very wonderful thing. Like so 

 many tropical weddings, these nuptials began some months 

 too late and ended quite a few hours too early. They cele- 

 brated the climax of a romance, somewhat gone stale, between 

 a mulatto girl whose name I cannot remember and a black 

 boy called George. The fact that the bride was about to be 

 delivered of a child, and was already the mother of several 

 children by virtue of previous adventures, did not dampen 

 the ardor of the wedding guests, but served to increase their 

 joy, helped, no doubt, by copious quantities of rum purchased 

 from a tiny Hquor shop in the settlement. The noise of the 

 celebration, augmented by a pair of monstrous drums and 

 several guitars, by some queer trick of acoustics carried across 

 the glades and flooded my clearing with clashing sound until 

 the small hours of the morning. Finally I could stand the din 

 no longer and, weary from hours of tossing to and fro listening 

 to the hundredth repetition of a chorus which stated over 

 and over again that the singers wanted "no peas no rice nor 

 cocoanut oil," I dragged irritably out of bed, donned shoes and 

 shorts and went out into the moonlight. 



For a time I wandered aimlessly about and then turned into 

 a donkey trail that wound down to the seashore. Presently 

 I emerged from a great bed of cactus and prickly pear near a 

 huge mound of rocks on the very edge of the beach. Here the 

 surf was sliding up very gently, slithering in long creeping 

 fingers between the rocks, etched in vivid highlight by the 



