River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [17]
Pamplemousses was upon him before he was aware of it.
The village was one of the prettiest on the island, with brightly painted bungalows, whitewashed churches, and cobbled lanes that tinkled musically under a horse’s hooves. The houses and squares were much as Fitcher remembered, but when his eyes strayed in the direction of the Botanical Gardens, he received a shock that almost toppled him from his mount: where once there had been orderly, well-spaced trees and broad, picturesque vistas, there was now a wild and tangled muddle of greenery. He shook his head in disbelief and looked again, more closely: the gateposts were where he would have expected them to be, but there seemed to be nothing beyond but jungle.
Reining in his horse, Fitcher appealed to an elderly passer-by: ‘Madam! The garden? D’ee know the way?’
The woman pursed her lips and shook her head: ‘Ah, msieu … le garden is no more … depwi twenty years … abandonné by l’Anglais …’
She wandered off, shaking her head, leaving Fitcher to continue on his way.
Although Fitcher was saddened to learn that his own compatriots were responsible for the garden’s decline, he was not entirely surprised. Since the death of Sir Joseph Banks, the last Curator of Kew Gardens, Britain’s own botanical institutions had fallen into neglect, so it was scarcely a cause for wonder that a garden in a distant colony should be in a state of disrepair. Yet this did nothing to mitigate Fitcher’s revulsion at the sight of the wilderness that loomed before him now: the untrimmed crowns of the garden’s trees had grown into each other, forming a canopy so dense that the grounds beneath, with their flower-beds and flag-stoned pathways, were shrouded in darkness; along the peripheries of the compound, the greenery was as impenetrable as a wall, and the unclipped aerial roots of the banyans that flanked the main gateway had thickened into a forbidding barrier – a portcullis that seemed to be designed to keep intruders at bay. This was no primeval jungle, for no ordinary wilderness would contain such a proliferation of species, from different continents. In Nature there existed no forest where African creepers were at war with Chinese trees, nor one where Indian shrubs and Brazilian vines were locked in a mortal embrace. This was a work of Man, a botanical Babel.
Yet, even as he was mourning the garden’s demise, Fitcher was not unmindful of the fact that he had been presented with a rare opportunity. Abandoned or not, the grounds were sure to contain many rare plants, and since they no longer belonged to anyone, a collector like himself could scarcely be accused of robbery if he were to retrieve a few valuable specimens.
At the old gateway Fitcher tethered his horse to one of the rusted posts before stepping towards the thicket of banyan roots that barred the entrance. He had advanced only a few paces when he was brought up short – for he realized suddenly that the garden was not quite as abandoned as it looked: looking down at the ground, he discovered that the muddy soil had been trodden recently by a pair of shoes. Fitcher paused: he had heard that brigandage was still rife in some parts of the island so it was perfectly possible that the prints had been made by some dangerous cut-throat. But having been forewarned, Fitcher had taken the precaution of bringing a pistol and machete. After checking the pistol to make sure it was loaded he put it back in his pocket. Then, withdrawing his machete from the