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Two Years in the French West Indies by Lafcadio Hearn
page 95 of 493 (19%)
overlooking streets too steep for any vehicle, slope the red
walls of the mouldering fort, patched with the viridescence of
ruin.

[Illustration: COOLIE MERCHANT.]

By a road leading up beyond the city, you reach the cemetery.
The staggering iron gates by which you enter it are almost rusted
from their hinges, and the low wall enclosing it is nearly all
verdant. Within, you see a wilderness of strange weeds, vines,
creepers, fantastic shrubs run mad, with a few palms mounting
above the green confusion;--only here and there a gleam of slabs
with inscriptions half erased. Such as you can read are
epitaphs of seamen, dating back to the years 1800, 1802, 1812.
Over these lizards are running; undulations in the weeds warn you
to beware of snakes; toads leap away as you proceed; and you
observe everywhere crickets perched--grass-colored creatures with
two ruby specks for eyes. They make a sound shrill as the scream
of machinery beveling marble. At the farther end of the cemetery
is a heavy ruin that would seem to have once been part of a
church: it is so covered with creeping weeds now that you only
distinguish the masonry on close approach, and high trees are
growing within it. There is something in tropical ruin peculiarly
and terribly impressive: this luxuriant, evergreen, ever-splendid
Nature consumes the results of human endeavor so swiftly, buries
memories so profoundly, distorts the labors of generations so
grotesquely, that one feels here, as nowhere else, how ephemeral
man is, how intense and how tireless the effort necessary to
preserve his frail creations even a little while from the vast
unconscious forces antagonistic to all stability, to all
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