A spectacular alignment of Mauritian mountains By Jooneed Jeeroburkhan
Written by Editor Monday, 10 January 2011 09:55
News Articles - Health and Environment
This is a picture from Mauritius taken on September 19, 2010, at 3.26 p.m. from the slope of the Pouce Mountain looking west at a spectacular alignment of mountains – Corps de garde, Tourelle Tamarin, Montagne Rempart, Le Morne, Trois Mamelles and Piton de la Rivière Noire. The location of the mountains on the photo has been graciously done by Deva Ramasawmy.
I spent many months of 2010 in Mauritius and saw and appreciated many views. I remember specially how, after experiencing the four seasons for so long in Canada, I thoroughly enjoyed my first real Spring in Mauritius in August-September when the air warmed up gradually and the trees burst with flowers, the litchis and mangoes and longanes and avocadoes alongside the more spectacular Tecomas and Jacarandas, and so many others, including the perennially blooming Bougainvilleas. Up till then I had known only two Mauritian seasons, Summer and Winter. But the most spectacular and most memorable view was this one, up from behind and above Montagne Berthelot, which I looked up to as a kid vacationing at my grand-parents’ riverside house in Bois-Chéri, seen from the Western slope of Pouce Mountain, which I escalated one day in September with a bunch of jolly (and very serious) amateurs of endemic Mauritian flora.
Behind the mountain there are other mountains, goes the saying. This couldn’t be truer judging from this panoramic landscape of our main island home. I loved this view so much that I felt it deserved to figure on my Xmas and New Year greeting card this December 2010 so that others may share the thrill of seeing differently familiar landmarks that have been with us for so long that we take them for granted. These landmarks have become such a solid part of our daily environment that we trivialize them through force of sterile habit. Caught up in the daily grind of rushing to and from work and school through the debilitating local traffic, we don’t stop to look and rediscover them, let alone climb up the Pouce to view them “autrement”, from a fresh outlook. Perspective is everything.
Sixty years after playing at the foot of Montagne Berthelot, I did it. I climbed up the Pouce and suddenly saw this spectacular alignment of all these familiar mountains, the Corps de Garde, the Tourelle Tamarin, the Montagne du Rempart, the Morne Brabant, the Trois-Mamelles, and the Piton de la Rivière-Noire, all in one fell swoop. I felt like John Keats when he first read George Champan’s translation of Homer in October 1816, staying up the whole night with excitement, and writing his famous sonnet at dawn, where he compares himself to “some watcher of the skies/when a new planet swims into his ken”, and to “stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/ he stared at the Pacific and all his men/looked at each other with a wild surmise/silent upon a peak in Darien”!
