went off at
a tangent to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid
book, WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able
to visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the "Black Napoleon," the
Emperor Christophe. He went with a young American demonstrator from
Harvard.

4

It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle
with populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts
alive with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all
the time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had
at times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they
lost their way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great
mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the
background until it dominated the landscape. Long after dark they
blundered upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they
were to pass the night. They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd into
the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about their
right to go further. They might have been in some remote corner of
Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the
fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that the commandant could
not read. They carried their point with difficulty.

But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
imperialism that humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and
prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines and
precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding traces of
a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly approach to his
fastness. Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace
with great terraces and the still traceable outline of gardens, though
there were green things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees
thrust out of the empty windows. Here from a belvedere of which the
skull-like ve