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 vestige still remained, the
negro Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years of absolute rule, had
watched for a time the smoke of the burning of his cane-fields in
the plain below, and then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted
him, had gone in and blown out his brains.
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