614: Corbett: Hunting for a book

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

>From Bob Corbett:

Folks, I'm trying to help someone find a book.  He has only the xeroxed
copy of the first chapter.  The book opens with the paragraph below, which
seems to name what is likely to be a major character.

Anyone recognize what book this would be?  Thanks for any help,

===========

Chapter 1


All that could be felt was dark uncertainty. It was a fearless gesture for
anyone to make the journey, if for all the reasons on earth, foolhardy.
Petronius Caamana Medina had left his plantation in his usual bold and
brash manner. He had rejected the simple misgivings and subtle spheres of
coldness that permeated his skin. But as a certain document, indeed a map,
felt snug in his inside chest pocket and as the sun's redness shined in
the hazed atmosphere, his team of servants and burros followed him up the
windswept, rock strewn trails to find where that dark uncertainty would
lead.  It was late summer in 1915, near the northeastern border that
separated the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The boundary line between both
countries was not posted. Neither signs nor any sort of directions
indicated when a traveler might have just crossed and entered either
country. The dense forests of the Dominican Republic abruptly halted at
that invisible division line, while the deep mountains of Haiti stood in
naked contrast with absolutely no trees and a vulnerable, ravaged
landscape, a barren skelton of a country. Any Dominican tree that happened
to fall or collapse onto Haiti territory was quickly snatched up by local
natives to become firewood. One could easily imagine the bigger and wiser
trees at the very edges of the boundary line spreading their branches out
to prevent the smaller trees from wandering and consumed into charcoal.