Fifty different shades of green on the hills. Palm trees in the shallows were dead, their fronds drooping yellow. These marked the tidal zone; above it green burst out everywhere. Streets and buildings were hacked out of a vegetable world. Green and white, as in his childhood vision, but here the two primal colors were separated out, held in a blue egg of sea and sky. They were just above the waves and yet the horizon was so far away! Instant evidence of the size of this world. No wonder they had thought the Earth was flat. The white water sloshing through the streets below made a continuous krrrrr sound, as loud as the cheers of the crowd.

The rank stench was suddenly cut by the smell of tar on the wind. “Pitch Lake down by La Brea all dug out and shipped away, nothing left but a black hole in the ground, and a little pond we use locally. See that’s what you smell, new road here by the water.” Asphalt road, sweating mirages. People jammed the black roadside; they all had black hair. A young woman climbed the car to put a necklace of flowers around his neck. Their sweet scent clashed with the stinging salt haze. Perfume and incense, chased by the hot vegetable wind, tarred and spiced. Steel drums, so familiar in all the hard noise, pinging and panging, they played Martian music here! The rooftops in the drowned district to their left now supported ramshackle patios. The stench was of a greenhouse gone bad, things rotting, a hot wet press of air and everything blazing in a talcum of light. Sweat ran freely down his skin. People cheered from the flooded rooftops, from boats, the water coated with flowers floating up and down on the foam. Black hair gleaming like chitin or jewels. A floating wood dock piled with several bands, playing different tunes all at once. Fish scales and flower petals strewn underfoot, silver and red and black dots swimming. Flung flowers flashed by on the wind, streaks of pure color, yellow pink and red. The driver of their car turned around to talk, ignoring the road, “Hear the duglas play soaka music, pan music, listen that cuttin contest, the best five bands in Port a Spain.”

They passed through an old neighborhood, visibly ancient, the buildings made of small crumbling bricks, capped by corrugated metal roofs, or even thatch— all ancient, tiny, the people tiny too, brown-skinned, “The countryside Hindu, the cities black. T ‘n T mix them, that’s dugla.” Grass covered the ground, burst out of every crack in the walls, out of roofs, out of potholes, out of everything not recently paved by tarry asphalt— an explosive surge of green, pouring out of every surface of the world. The thick air reeked!