West Indies -- Description and travel; West Indies -- Pictorial works
It is curious to see the long electric Canadian road car swing at
ten-mile speed down these narrow streets crowded with the picturesque
people of the Western Indies. The effect of the streets is
kaleidoscopic; the sudden appearance of a car reminds one of the
mutoscope which shows a railway train rushing at the audience. Such is
the impression of the road car in the crowded Jamaican streets. The
people have become accustomed to this touch of a vigorous Western world.
The noise of its rushing and the horrible jangle of its clanking bell
have ceased to provoke interest. The car is a thing on which, for a
copper or two, the workers may ride home. It saves great fatigue and
much walking. The market baskets may be placed beneath the seats; the
town slips rapidly behind, and home is reached. Heaven knows what moves
the car along. There are no horses, and no engines like those on the
railway. It is a thing causing annoyance to the buggyman, that is all.
For the rest you can ride five or six miles at ten miles an hour speed
for four Jamaican pennies.
The country-people, who come once a week to sell their produce in the
great Saturday foregathering of agricultural Jamaica, still show wonder
and fear at the approach of a tram. They still jump into the hedges as
the tram flies along--still turn their eyes away from the chaff of the
negro conductor. But that is the only respect shown to this foreign
importation.
The dusty streets of the capital melt into country lanes with scented
hedges as you swing out of the city on a journey to the Constant Spring
terminus of the tramway. White dust takes the place of the darker city
dust. The scent of half the flowers of the world crush out the musty
odour of crowded alleys, always stewing beneath a tropic sun. That is
the great charm of the tramway, the only real excuse for its existence.
By it you can rush out of evil town-life into the sweetness of the most
beautiful country in the world. To see a high range of purple mountains,
fronted by heavy fields of banana trees and towering pines, and
brilliant flowers of every tint and shade and shape--to see all these
from the seat of a tram car which might just as well be taking you from
Shepherd’s Bush to Kew, is a thing every one should experience. The
attitude of the native to the cars is representative of ingrained
indifference to everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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