Thrift and abstinence! They began to look the most snivelling of sins as I watched, with s.p.a.cious leisure, the near procession of gigantic trees, that superb wild which did not arise from such n.i.g.g.ard and flinty maxims. Frugality and prudence! That is to regard the means to death in life, the pallor and projecting bones of a warped existence, as good men dwell on courage, motherhood, rebellion, and May time, and the other proofs of vitality and growth. Now, I thought, I see what to do. All those improving lectures, reform leagues, university settlements, labour exchanges, and other props for crippled humanity, are idle. It is a generative idea that is wanted, a revelation, a vision. It would be easier and quicker to take regiments of folk out of Ancoats, Hanley, Bethnal Green, and the cottages of the countryside, for one long glance at the kind of earth I see now. The world would expand as they looked.
They would get the dynamic suggestion. In vain, afterwards, would the monopolists and the superior persons chant patriotic verse to drown the noise of chain forging at the Westminster foundry. Not the least good, that. The folk would not hear. Their minds would be absent and outward, not locked within to huddle with cramped and respectful thoughts. They would not start instinctively at the word of command. They would begin with dignity and a.s.surance to compa.s.s their own affairs, and in an enormous way; and they would make hardly a sound as they moved forward, and they would have uplifted and shining eyes. ("Then you think more of "em than I do," said the surgeon.)
It would be no use, I saw clearly, sending the folk to Algeria, Egypt, or New York. Such places never betray to the traveller that our world is not a shapeless parcel of fields and buildings, tied up with bylaws, and sealed by the Grand Lama as his last act in the stupendous work of creation. There it is, an angular package in the sky, which the sun reads, and directs on its way to heaven in advance of its limited syndicate of proprietors.
Here on the Madeira I had a vision instead of the earth as a great and shining sphere. There were no fences and private bounds. I saw for the first time an horizon as an arc suggesting how wide is our ambit. That bare shoulder of the world effaced regions and constellations in the sky. Our earth had celestial magnitude. It was warm, a living body. The abundant rain was vital, and the forest I saw, n.o.bler in stature and with an aspect of intensity beyond what the Amazon forests showed, rose like a sign of life triumphant.
You see what that tropical wilderness did for me, and with but a single glance. Whatever comes after, I shall never be the same again. The complacent length of the ship was before us. Amidships were some of the fellows staring overside, absorbed. Now and then, when his beat brought him to the port side, I could see the head of the little pilot on the bridge. His colleague was sleeping in one of the hammocks slung between the stanchions of the p.o.o.p awning. The Doctor was scrutinising a pair of motuca flies which hovered about his ankles, waiting for him to go to sleep. He wanted them for specimens. The Skipper, looking a little anxious, came slowly up the p.o.o.p ladder, crossed over, and stood by our chairs. "The river is full of big timber," he said. He went to stare overside, and then came back to us. "The current is about five knots, and those trees adrift are as big as barges. I hope they keep clear of the propeller." The Skipper"s eye was uneasy. He was glum with suspicion; he spoke of the way his fools might meet the wiles of fortune at a time when he was below and his ship was without its acute protective intelligence. He stood, a spare figure in white, in a limp gra.s.s hat with flapping eaves, gazing forward to the bridge mistrustfully. He had brought us in a valuable vessel to a place unknown, and now he had to go on, and afterwards get us all out again. I began to feel a large respect for this elderly master mariner (who did not give the beard of an onion for any man"s sympathy) who had skilfully contrived to put us where we were, and now was unaware what mischance would send us to rot under the forest wall, the bottom to fall out of our adventure just when we were in its narrowest pa.s.sage and achievement was almost within view. "This is no place for a ship," the captain mumbled. "It isn"t right. We"re disturbing the mud all the time; and look at those b.u.t.terflies now, dodging about us!" He was continuing this monologue as a dirty cap appeared at the head of the ladder, and a long and ragged length of sorrowful sailor mounted there, and doffed the cap.
The Skipper brusquely signed to him to approach. He was a youngster in an advanced stage of some trouble, and he had no English. I think he was a Swede. He demonstrated his sickness, baring his arm, muttering unintelligibly. The limb, like his hand, was distorted with large blisters. There was his face, too. I mistrusted my equanimity for some moments, but braced my eyes, compelling them to be scientific and impersonal. By signs we gathered he had been sleeping on deck, such was the heat of the forecastle, and the mosquitoes, the Doctor said, had poisoned a body already tainted from the stews of Rotterdam. The corroding spirit of the jungle was beginning to permeate through our flaws.
The Doctor went to his surgery. The pilot sat up in his hammock, glanced indifferently at the sick sailor, yawning and stretching his arms, his dainty little brown feet dangling just clear of the deck. He began to roll a cigarette of something which looked like tea. Then he dropped out, and went forward to release his mate on the bridge, and the senior pilot came up as the Doctor had finished his job. The junior pilot, a fragile, girlish fellow, rather taciturn, greets us always with a faintly supercilious smile. His chief is a round, jolly little man, hearty, and lavish with ornamental gestures. We both smiled involuntarily as he marched across to us, with his uniform cap, bearing our ship"s badge, stuck on the back of his head with a bias to the right ear. There is not enough of Portuguese in our ship"s company to serve one conversation adequately, but we get on well with this pilot, and he with us. He sits in a hammock, making pantomime explanatory of Brazil to us strangers, and we pick him up with alacrity, after but brief pauses.
While the Doctor beguiled him into dramatic moments, I lay back and watched him, searching for Brazilian characteristics, to report here.
You know that, when you have returned from a far country, you are asked unanswerable questions about its people, and especially about its women.
We are easily flattered by the suggestion that we are authoritative, with opinions got from uncommon experience, especially where women with strange eyes and dark skins are concerned. So, once upon a time, I caught myself-or rather, I caught that cold, critical, and impartial part of me, which is a solemn fake-when answering a question of this kind, explaining in a comprehensive way the character of the Brazilian people, as though I were telling of the objective phenomena of one simple soul. Presently the wise and ribald part of me woke, caught the note of that inhuman voice, and raised a derisive cry, heard by me with grave deprecation, but not heard at all by my listener. I stopped. For what do I know of the Brazilian character? Very little. Is there such a thing? I suppose the true Brazilian is like the true Englishman, or the typical bird which is known by its bones, but may be anything from a crow to a nightingale, but is more likely a lark. You can imagine the foreigner taking his knowledge of the British pick-pocket who met him at the landing-stage, the pen-portraits of Bernard Shaw, the Rev. Jeremiah Hardsh.e.l.l, Father O"Flynn, You, Me, the cabman who swore at him, his landlady and her daughter, Lloyd-George, Piccadilly by night, and Tom Bowling, carefully adjusting all that valuable British data, just as Professor Karl Pearson does his physical statistics, and explaining the result as the modern English; adding, in the usual footnote, what decadent tendencies are to be deduced, in addition, from the facts which could not be worked into the major premises.
Now, there was the handsome Brazilian customs officer, tall, august, with dark eyes haughty and slow with thought, the waves of his romantic black hair faintly traced in silver, who might have been a poet, or a philosophic revolutionist; but who was the man, as the first mate told us (after we had searched everywhere for the articles) who "pinched your bloomin" field-gla.s.ses and my meerschaum."
Take, if you like, the ultra-fashionable ladies at the Para hotel, who looked at us with sleepy eyes, and who, I suspect, were not Brazilians at all. Supposing they were, there must be counted the wife of the official at Serpa. She came aboard there with her husband to see an English ship; she reminded me of that picture of the Madonna by Sa.s.soferrato in the National Gallery; I am unable to come nearer to justice to her than that. Again, there was a certain vain native apothecary, and he had the idea that I was bottle-washer to the "Capella"s" surgeon, much to that fellow"s secret delight. The chemist treated me with a studied difference in consequence; and though our surgeon could have undeceived the mistaken man, having some Portuguese, he refused to do so. I remember the pilot who, when he left us at Serpa, and I bade him farewell, did, before all our ship"s company, embrace me heartily, rest his cheek against mine, and make loving noises in his throat. And there is our present chief guide, now swinging in his hammock, and looking down upon us waggishly.
He had not been a pilot always. Once he was a clown in a circus; that little fact is a clue to much which otherwise would have been obscure in him. When he boarded us at Serpa to take the place of the man who shrank from the thought of the Madeira, the chart-room under the bridge was given to him, and as the mate put it, "he moved in." He had bundles, boxes, bags, baskets, a tin trunk, a chair, a parrot, a hammock, and some pictures. He was going to be with us for two months, but his affair had the conclusive character of a migration, a final severance from his old life. His friends came to see him depart, and they wound themselves in each others arms, head laid in resignation on shoulders. "Looks as if we"re bound for the Golden Sh.o.r.e," commented the boatswain.
This little rounded man, the pilot, with his unctuous olive skin, tiny moustache of black silk, and impudent eyes, looked ripe in middle age, though actually he was but thirty. He wore a suit of azure cotton, ironed faultlessly, and his tunic fitted with hooks and eyes across his throat. His boots were sulphur coloured and Parisian. A ma.s.sive gold ring, which carried a carbonado nearly as large as the stopper of a beer bottle, was embedded in a fat finger of his right hand. In the front of his cap he had sewn the badge of our line, and he was curiously proud of that gaudy symbol. He would wear the cap on one ear, and walk up and down in display, with a lofty smile, and a carriage supposed to appertain to a British officer in a grand moment. He had a great admiration for all that was British, except our food. If you were up at sunrise you could see him at his toilet, and the spectacle was worth the effort. His array of toilet vesicles reminded me of the shelves in a barber"s shop. Oiled and fragrant, he took his seat for breakfast with much formal politeness. He shook our saloon company into a sense of its responsibilities, for we had grown indifferent as to dress, and sometimes we had three-day beards. His handkerchiefs and linen were scented, and dainty with floral designs. And ours-oh, ours-! He took wine at breakfast, and after idling a little with our foreign dishes he would wipe his mouth on our tablecloth, and then leave for the bridge.
As he pa.s.sed across the p.o.o.p we would hear him hawk violently, and spit on the deck. Then the Skipper would glare, and drive his chair backwards in a dark pa.s.sion.
Gazing at the foliage as it unfolded, our pilot named the paranas, tributaries, and islands, when they drew abeam. He told us what the trees were; and then with head shakes and uplifted hands and eyes, indicated what grave things were behind that screen of leaves. (Though I don"t suppose he knew.) His mimicry was so spontaneous and exact that it was more entertaining and just as instructive as speech. He taught us how the Indians kill you, and what some villagers did to a naughty padre, and how the sucuruju swallows a deer, and how to make love to a Brazilian girl. He kicked the slippers from his little feet, and smuggled into the hammock mesh for a snooze, waving a hand coyly to us over the edge of his nest.
The dinner bell rang. Because the saloon is now hot beyond endurance, the steward has fixed a table on deck, and so, as we eat, we can see the jungle pa.s.s. That keeps some of our mind from dwelling over much on the dreary menu. The potatoes have begun to ferment. The meat is out of tins; sometimes it is served as fritters, sometimes we recognise it in a hash, and sometimes, shameless, it appears without dress, a naked and shiny lump straight from its metal bed. Often the bread is sour. The b.u.t.ter, too, is out of tins. Feeding is not a joy, but a duty. But it is soon over. Although everybody now complains of indigestion, we have far to go yet, and the cheerfulness which faces all circ.u.mstances brazenly must be our manna. Our table, some deal planks on trestles, is mellowed by a white tablecloth. We sit round on boxes. Over head the sun flames on the awning, making it golden and translucent. I let the soup pa.s.s.
The next dish is a hot pot of tinned mutton and preserved vegetables.
Something must be done, and I do it then. There is some pickled beef and pickled onions. I watch the forest pa.s.s. Then, for desert, the steward, the hot beads touring about the mounts of his large pale face, brings along oleaginous fritters of plum duff. The Doctor leaves. I follow him to the chairs again, and we exchange tobacco-boxes and fill our pipes.
This may seem to you unendurable for long. I did not think so, though of habits so regular and engrained that my chances of survival, when viewed comparatively, for my ship mates were hardened and usually were more robust, seemed poor enough. But I enjoyed it. There was nourishment, a tonic stay, in our desire to greet every onset of the miseries, which now were camped about us, besieging our souls, with sansculotte insolence. We called to the Eumenides with mockery. Like Th.o.r.eau, I believe I could live on a tenpenny nail, if it comes to that.
There is no doubt the forest influences our moods in a way you at home could not understand. Our minds take its light and shade, and just as our little company, gathered in the Chief"s room at a time when the seas were running high, recalled sombre legends which told of foredoom, so this forest, an intrusive presence which is with us morning, noon, and night, voiceless, or making such sounds as we know are not for our ears, now shadows us, the prescience of destiny, as though an eyeless mask sat at table with us, a being which could tell us what we would know, but though it stays, makes no sign.
This forest, since we entered the Para River, now a thousand miles away, has not ceased. There have been the clearings of the settlements from Para inwards; but as Spruce says in his Journal, those clearings and campos alter the forest of the Amazon no more than would the culling of a few weeds alter the aspect of an English cornfield. The few openings I have seen in the forest do not derange my clear consciousness of a limitless ocean of leaves, its deep billows of foliage rolling down to the only paths there are in this country, the rivers, and there overhanging, arrested in collapse. There is no land. One must travel by boat from one settlement to another. The settlements are but islands, narrow foot-holds, widely sundered by vast gulfs of jungle.
The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element. Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveller cannot reach, and its unchanging surface, merged through distance into a mere reflector of the day, a brightness or a gloom, in his immediate vicinity breaks into a complexity of green surges; then one day the voyager sees land at last and is released from it. But we have not seen land since Serpa. There are men whose lives are spent in the chasms of light where the rivers are sunk in the dominant element, but who never venture within its green surface, just as one would not go beneath the waves to walk in the twilight of the sea bottom.
Now I have been watching it for so long I see the outer aspect of the jungles does vary. When I saw it first on the Para River it appeared to my wondering eyes but featureless green cliffs. Then in the Narrows beyond Para I remember an impression of elegance and placidity, for there, the waters still being tidal and saline, the palms were conspicuous and in profuse abundance. The great palms are the chief feature of that forest elevation, with their graceful columns, and their generous and symmetrical fronds which sometimes are like gigantic green feathers, and again are like fans. A tall palm, whatever its species, being a definite expression of life-not an agglomeration of leaves, but body and crown, a real personality-the forest of the Narrows, populous with such exquisite beings, had marges of straight ascending lines and flourishing and geometrical crests.
Beyond the river Xingu, on the main stream, the forest, persistent as a presence, again changed its aspect. It was ragged and shapeless, an impenetrable tangle, its front strewn with fallen trees, the vision of outer desolation. By Obydos it was more aerial and shapely again, but not of that light and soaring grace of the Narrows. It was contained, yet mounted not in straight lines, as in the country of the palms, but in convex ma.s.ses. Here on the lower Madeira the forest seems of a nature intermediate between the rolling structure of the growth by Obydos, and the grace of the palm groves in the estuarine region of the Narrows. It is barbaric and splendid, easily prodigal with illimitable riches, sinking the river beneath a wealth of forms.
On the Madeira, as elsewhere in the world of the Amazons, some of the forest is on "terra-firma," as that land is called which is not flooded when the waters rise. There the trees reach their greatest alt.i.tude and diameter; it is the region of the caaapoam, the "great woods" of the Indians. A stretch of _terra firma_ shows as a low, vertical bank of clay, a narrow ribbon of yellow earth dividing the water from the jungle. More rarely the river cuts a section through some undulating heights of red conglomerate-heights I call these cliffs, as heights they are in this flat country, though at home they would attract no more attention than would the side of a gravel-pit-and again the bank may be of that cherry and saffron clay which gives a name to Itacoatiara. On such land the forest of the Madeira is immense, three or four species among the greater trees lording it in the green tumult expansively, always conspicuous where they stand, their huge boles showing in the verdant facade of the jungle as grey and brown pilasters, their crowns rising above the level roof of the forest in definite cupolas. There is one, having a neat and compact dome and a grey, smooth, and rounded trunk, and dense foliage as dark as that of the holm oak; and another, resembling it, but with a flattened and somewhat disrupted dome. I guessed these two giants to be silk-cottons. Another, which I supposed to be of the leguminous order, had a silvery bole, and a texture of pale green leaf.a.ge open and light, which at a distance resembled that of the birch. These three trees, when a.s.sembled and well grown, made most stately riverside groups. The trunks were smooth and bare till somewhere near ninety feet from the ground. Palms were intermediate, filling the s.p.a.ces between them, but the palms stood under the exogens, growing in alcoves of the ma.s.s, rising no higher than the beginning of the branches and foliage of their lords. The whole overhanging superstructure of the forest-not a window, an inlet, anywhere there-was rolling clouds of leaves from the lower rims of which vines were catenary, looping from one green cloud to another, or pendent, like the sundered cordage of a ship"s rigging. Two other trees were frequent, the pao mulatto, with limbs so dark as to look black, and the castanheiro, the Brazil nut tree.
The roof of the woods lowered when we were steaming past the igapo. The igapo, or aqueous jungle, through which the waters go deeply for some months of the year, is of a different character, and perhaps of a lesser height-it seems less; but then it grows on lower ground. I was told to note that its foliage is of a lighter green, but I cannot say I saw that. It is in the igapo that the Hevea Braziliensis flourishes, its pale bole, suggestive of the white poplar, deep in water for much of the year, and its crown sheltered by its greater neighbours, so that it grows in a still, heated, and humid twilight. This low ground is always marked by growths of small cecropia trees. These, with their white stems, their habit of free and regular branching, and their long leaves, digital in the manner of the horse-chestnut, have the appearance of great candelabra. Sometimes the igapo is prefaced by an area of cane.
The numberless islands, being of recent formation, have a forest of a different nature, and they seldom carry the larger trees. The upper ends of many of the islands terminate in sandy pits, where dwarf willows grow. So foreign was the rest of the vegetation, that notwithstanding its volume and intricacy, I detected those humble little willows at once, as one would start surprised at an English word heard in the meaningless uproar of an alien mult.i.tude.
The forest absorbed us; as one"s attention would be challenged and drawn by the casual regard, never noticeably direct, but never withdrawn, of a being superior and mysterious, so I was drawn to watch the still and intent stature of the jungle, waiting for it to become vocal, for some relaxing of its static form. Nothing ever happened. I never discovered it. Rigid, watchful, enigmatic, its presence was constant, but without so much as one blossom in all its green vacuity to show the least friendly familiarity to one who had found flowers and woodlands kind. It had nothing that I knew. It remained securely aloof and indifferent, till I thought hostility was implied, as the sea implies its impartial hostility, in a constant presence which experience could not fathom, nor interest soften, nor courage intimidate. We sank gradually deeper inwards towards its central fastnesses.
By noon on our first day on the Madeira we reached the village of Rozarinho, which is on the left bank, with the tributary of the same name a little more up stream, but entering from the other side. Here, as we followed a loop of the stream, the Madeira seemed circ.u.mscribed, a tranquil lake. The yellow water, though swift, had so polished a surface that the reflections of the forest were hardly disturbed, sinking below the tops of the inverted trees to the ultimate clouds, giving an illusion of profundity to the apparent lake. The village was but a handful of leaf huts grouped about the nucleus of one or two larger buildings with white walls. There was the usual jetty of a few planks to which some canoes were tied. The forest was a high background to those diminished huts; the latter, as we came upon them, suddenly increased the height of the trees.
In another place the shelter of a family of Indians was at the top of a bank, secretive within the base of the woods. A row of chocolate babies stood outside that nest, with four jabiru storks among them. Each bird, so much taller than the babies, stood resting meditatively on one leg, as though waiting the order to take up an infant and deliver it somewhere. None of them, storks or infants, took the least notice of us.
Perhaps the time had not yet come for them to be aware of mundane things. Certainly I had a feeling myself, so strange was the place, and quiet and tranquil the day, that we had pa.s.sed world"s end, and that what we saw beyond our steamer was the coloured stuff of dreams which, if a wind blew, would wreathe and clear; vanish, and leave a shining void. The sunset deepened this apprehension. There came a wonderful sky of orange and mauve. It was over us and came down and under the ship. We moved with glowing clouds beneath our keel. There was no river; the forest girdled the radiant interior of a hollow sphere.
The pilots could not proceed at night. Shortly after sundown we anch.o.r.ed, in nine fathoms. The trees were not many yards from the steamer. When the ship was at rest a canoe with two Indians came alongside, with a basket of guavas. They were shy fellows, and each carried in his hand a bright machete, for they did not seem quite sure of our company. After tea we sat about the p.o.o.p, trying to smoke, and, in the case of the Doctor and the Purser, wearing at the same time veils of b.u.t.terfly nets, as protection from the mosquito swarms. The netting was put over the helmet, and tucked into the neck of the tunic. Yet, when I poked the stem of the pipe, which carried the gauze with it, into my mouth, the veil was drawn tight on the face. A mosquito jumped to the opportunity, and arrived. Alongside, the frogs were making the deafening clangour of an iron foundry, and through that sound shrilled the cicadas. I listened for the first time to the din of a tropical night in the forest. There is no word strong enough to convey this uproar to ears which have not listened to it.
_Jan. 24._ A bright still sunrise, promising heat; and before breakfast the ship"s ironwork was too hot to touch. The novelty of this Madeira is already beginning to merge into the yellow of the river, the blue of the sky, and the green of the jungle, with but the occasional variation of low roseous cliffs. The average width of the river may be less than a quarter of a mile. It is loaded with floating timber, launched upon it by "terras-cahidas," landslides, caused by the rains, which carry away sections of the forest each large enough to furnish an English park with trees. Sometimes we see a bight in the bank where such a collapse has only recently occurred, the wreckage of trees being still fresh. Many of the trees which charge down on the current are of great bulk, with half their table-like base high out of the water. Occasionally rafts of them appear, locked with creepers, and bearing flourishing gardens of weeds.
This characteristic gives the river its Portuguese name, "river of wood." The Indians know the Madeira as the Cayary, "white river."
Its course to-day serpentines so freely that at times we steer almost east, and then again go west. Our general direction is south-west. At eight this morning, after some anxious moments when the river was dangerous with reefs, we pa.s.sed the village of Borba, 140 miles from Serpa. Here there is a considerable clearing, with kine browsing over a hummocky sward that is well above the river on an occurrence of the red clay. This release of the eyes was a smooth and grateful experience after the enclosing walls. Some steps dug in the face of the low cliff led to the white houses, all roofed with red tiles. The village faced the river. From each house ascended the leisurely smoke of early morning. The church was in the midst of the houses, its bell conspicuous with verdigris. Two men stood to watch us pa.s.s. It was a pleasant a.s.surance to have, those roofs and the steeple rising actually into the light of the sky. The dominant forest, in which we were sunk, was here definitely put down by our fellow-men.
We were beyond Borba, and its parana and island just above it, before the pilot had finished telling us, where we watched from the "Capella"s"
bridge, that Borba was a settlement which had suffered much from attacks of the Araras Indians. The river took a sharp turn to the east, and again went west. Islands were numerous. These islands are lancet-shaped, and lie along the banks, separated by side channels, their paranas, from the land. The smaller river craft often take a parana instead of the main stream, to avoid the rush of the current. The whole region seems lifeless. There is never a flower to be seen, and rarely a bird.
Sometimes, though, we disturb the snowy heron. On one sandy island, pa.s.sed during the afternoon, and called appropriately, Ilho do Jacare, we saw two alligators. Otherwise we have the silent river to ourselves; though I am forgetting the b.u.t.terflies, and the constant arrival aboard of new winged shapes which are sometimes so large and grotesque that one is uncertain about their aggressive qualities. As we idle on the p.o.o.p we keep by us two insect nets, and a killing-bottle. The Doctor is making a collection, and I am supposed to a.s.sist.
When I came on deck on the morning of our arrival in the Brazils it was not the orange sunrise behind a forest which was topped by a black design of palm fronds, nor the warm odour of the place, nor the height and intensity of the vegetation, which was most remarkable to me, a new-comer from the restricted north. It was a b.u.t.terfly which flickered across our steamer like a coloured flame. No other experience put England so remote.
A superb b.u.t.terfly, too bright and quick to be anything but an escape from Paradise, will stay its dancing flight, as though with intelligent surprise at our presence, hover as if puzzled, and swoop to inspect us, alighting on some such incongruous piece of our furniture as a coil of rope, or the cook"s refuse pail, pulsing its wings there, plainly nothing to do with us, the prismatic image of joy. Out always rush some of our men at it, as though the sight of it had maddened them, as would a revelation of accessible riches. It moves only at the last moment, abruptly and insolently. They are left to gape at its mocking retreat.
It goes in erratic flashes to the wall of trees and then soars over the parapet, hope at large.
Then there are the other things which, so far as most of us know, have no names, though a sailor, wringing his hands in anguish, is usually ready with a name. To-day we had such a visitor. He looked a fellow the Doctor might require, so I marked him down when he settled near a hatch on the afterdeck. He was a bee the size of a walnut, and habited in dark blue velvet. In this land it is wise to a.s.sume that everything bites or stings, and that when a creature looks dead it is only carefully watching you. I clapped the net over that fellow and instantly he appeared most dead. Knowing he was but shamming, and that he would give me no a.s.sistance, I stood wondering what I could do next; then the cook came along. The cook saw the situation, laughed at my timidity with tropical forms, went down on his knees, and caught my prisoner. The cook raised a piercing cry.
On the bridge I saw them levelling their gla.s.ses at us; and some engineers came to their cabin doors to see us where we stood on the lonely deck, the cook and the Purser, in a tableau of poignant tragedy.
The cook walked round and round, nursing his suffering member, and I did not catch all he said, for I know very little Dutch; but the spirit of it was familiar, and his thumb was bleeding badly. The bee had resumed death again. The state of the cook"s thumb was a surprise till the surgeon exhibited the bee"s weapons, when it became clear that thumbs, especially when Dutch and rosy, like our cook"s, afforded the right medium for an artist who worked with such mandibles, and a tail that was a stiletto.
In England the forms of insect life soon become familiar. There is the housefly, the lesser cabbage white b.u.t.terfly, and one or two other little things. In the Brazils, though the great host of forms is surprising enough, it is the variety in that host which is more surprising still. Any bright day on the "Capella" you may walk the length of the ship, carrying a net and a collecting-bottle, and fill the bottle (b.u.t.terflies, c.o.c.kroaches, and bugs not admitted), and perhaps have not three of a species. The men frequently bring us something buzzing in a hat; though accidents do happen half-way to where the Doctor is sitting, and the specimen is mangled in a frenzy. A hornet came to us that way. He was in violet armour, as hard as a crab, was still stabbing the air with his long needle, and working on a fragment of hat he held in his jaws, But such knights in mail are really harmless, for after all they need not be interfered with. It is the insignificant little fellows whose object in life it is to interfere with us which really make the difference.
So far on the river we have not met the famous pium fly. But the motuca fly is a nuisance during the afternoon sleep. It is nearly of the size and appearance of a "blue-bottle" fly, but its wings, having black tips, look as though their ends were cut off. The motucas, while we slept, would alight on the wrists and ankles, and where each had fed there would be a wound from which the blood steadily trickled.
The mosquitoes do not trouble us till sundown. But one morning in my cabin I was interested in the hovering of what I thought was a small, leggy spider which, because of its colouration of black and grey bands, was evasive to the sight as it drifted about on its invisible thread. At last I caught it, and found it was a new mosquito. In pursuing it I found a number of them in the cabin. When I exhibited the insect to the surgeon he did not well disguise his concern. "Say nothing about it," he said, "but this is the yellow-fever brute," So our interest in our new life is kept alert and bright. The solid teak doors of our cabins are now permanently fixed back. Shutting them would mean suffocation; but as the cabins must be closed before sundown to keep out the clouds of gnats, the carpenter has made wooden frames, covered with copper gauze, to fit the door openings at night, and rounds of gauze to cap the open ports; and with a damp cloth, and some careful hunting each morning, one is able to keep down the mosquitoes which have managed to find entry during the night and have retired at sunrise to rest in dark corners.
For our care notwithstanding the insects do find their way in to a.s.sault our lighted lamps. The Chief, partly because as an old sailor he is a fatalist, and partly because he thinks his ma.s.sive body must be invulnerable, and partly because he has a contempt, anyway, for protecting himself, each morning has a new collection of curios, alive and dead, littered about his room. (I do not wonder Bates remained in this land so long; it is Elysium for the entomologist.) One of the live creatures found in his room the Chief retains and cherishes, and hopes to tame, though the object does not yet answer to his name of Edwin.
This creature is a green mantis or praying insect, about four inches long, which the Chief came upon where it rested on the copper gauze of his door-cover, holding a fly in its hands, and eating it as one would an apple. This mantis is an entertaining freak, and can easily keep an audience watching it for an hour, if the day is dull. Edwin, in colour and form, is as fresh, fragile, and translucent as a leaf in spring. He has a long thin neck-the stalk to his wings, as it were-which is quite a third of his length. He has a calm, human face with a pointed chin at the end of his neck; he turns his face to gaze at you without moving his body, just as a man looks backwards over his shoulder. This uncanny mimicry makes the Chief shake with mirth. Then, if you alarm Edwin, he springs round to face you, frilling his wings abroad, standing up and sparring with his long arms, which have hooks at their ends. At other times he will remain still, with his hands clasped up before his face, as though in earnest devotion, for a trying period. If a fly alights near him he turns his face that way and regards it attentively. Then sluggishly he approaches it for closer scrutiny. Having satisfied himself it is a good fly, without warning his arms shoot out and that fly is hopelessly caught in the hooked hands. He eats it, I repeat, as you do apples, and the authentic mouthfuls of fly can be seen pa.s.sing down his gla.s.sy neck. Edwin is fragile as a new leaf in form, has the same delicate colour, and has fascinating ways; but somehow he gives an observer the uncomfortable thought that the means to existence on this earth, though intricately and wonderfully devised, might have been managed differently. Edwin, who seems but a pretty fragment of vegetation, is what we call a lie. His very existence rests on the fact that he is a diabolical lie.
Gossamers in the rigging to-day led the captain to prophesy a storm before night. Clouds of an indigo darkness, of immense bulk, and motionless, reduced the sunset to mere runnels of opaline light about the bases of dark mountains inverted in the heavens. There was a rapid fall of temperature, but no rain. Our world, and we in its centre on the "Capella," waited for the storm in an expectant hush. Night fell while we waited. The smooth river again deepened into the nadir of the last of day, and the forest about us changed to material ramparts of cobalt. The pilot made preparations to anchor. The engine bell rang to stand-by, a summons of familiar urgency, but with a new and alarming note when heard in a place like that. The forest made no response. A little later the bell clanged rapidly again, and the pulse of our steamer slowed, ceased.
We could hear the water uncoiling along our plates. The forest itself approached us, came perilously near. The Skipper"s voice cried abruptly, "Let go!" and at once the virgin silence was demolished by the uproar of our cable. The "Capella" throbbed violently; she literally undulated in the drag of the current. We still drifted slowly down stream. The second anchor was dropped, and held us. The silence closed in on us instantly.
Far in the forest somewhere, while we were whispering to each other in the quiet, a tree fell with a deep, significant boom.
_Jan. 25._ We had been under way for more than an hour when my eyes opened on the illuminated panorama of leaves and boles unfolding past the door of my cabin. The cicadas were grinding their scissors loudly in the trees alongside. I spent much of this day on the bridge, where I liked to be, watching the pilot at work. The Skipper was there, and in a cantankerous mood. The pilot wants us to make a chart of the river. He has given the captain and me a long list of islands, paranas, tributaries, villages, and sitios. Every map and reference to the river we have on board is valueless. A map of the river indicates many settlements with beautiful names; and at each point, when we arrive, nothing but the forest shows. How the cartographers arrived at such results is a mystery. This river, which their generous imaginings have seen as a tortuous bough of the Amazon, laden with villages which they indicate on their maps with marks like little round fruits, is almost barren. Every day we pa.s.s small sitios or clearings; maybe the map-makers mean such places as those. Yet each clearing is but a brief security, a raft of land-the size of the garden of an English villa-lonely in an ocean of deep leaves, where a rubber man has built himself a timber house, and some huts for his serfs. It will have a jetty and a huddle of canoes, and usually a few children on the bank watching us. We salute that place with our syren as we pa.s.s, and sometimes the kiddies spring for home then as though we were shooting at them. Or we see a little embowered shack with a pile of fuel logs beside it, and a crude name-board, where the river boats replenish when traversing this stream, during the season, for rubber. Our pilots have much to say of these stations, and of all the rubber men on the river and their wealth. But away with their rubber! I am tired of it, and will keep it out of this book if I can. For it is blasphemous that in such a potentially opulent land the juice of one of its wild trees should be dwelt upon-as it is in the states of Amazonas and Para-as though it were the sole act of Providence. The Brazilians can see nothing here but rubber. The generative qualities of this land through fierce sun and warm showers-for rarely a day pa.s.ses without rain, whatever the season-a land of constant high summer with a free fecundity which has buried the earth everywhere under a wild growth nearly two hundred feet deep, is insignificant to them. They see nothing in it at all but the d.a.m.nable commodity which is its ruin. Para is mainly rubber, and Manaos.
The Amazon is rubber, and most of its tributaries. The Madeira particularly is rubber. The whole system of communication, which covers 34,000 miles of navigable waters, waters nourishing a humus which literally stirs beneath your feet with the movements of spores and seeds, that system would collapse but for the rubber. The pa.s.sengers on the river boats are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All the talk is of rubber. There are no manufactures, no agriculture, no fisheries, and no saw-mills, in a region which could feed, clothe, and shelter the population of a continent. There was a book by a Brazilian I saw at Para, recently published, and called the "Green h.e.l.l" (Inferno Verde).
On its cover was the picture of a nude Indian woman, symbolical of Amazonas, and from wounds in her body her blood was draining into the little tin cups which the rubber collector uses against the incisions on the rubber tree. From what I heard of the subject, and I heard much, that picture was little overdrawn. I begin to think the usual commercial mind is the most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad wonders in the pageant of humanity.
It is only on the "Capella"s" bridge that you feel the stagnant air which is upset by the steamer"s progress. There it spills over us, heavy with the scent of the lairage on the fore deck. The bridge is a narrow, elevated outlook, full in the sun"s eye, where I can get a view of the complete ship as she serpentines in her narrow way. On the port side of it the Skipper has a seat, and there now he sits all day, gazing moodily ahead. The dapper little pilot stands centrally, throwing brief commands over his shoulder into the open window of the wheelhouse, where a sailor, gravely chewing tobacco, his hands on the wheel, is as rapt as though in a trance. I think the pilot finds his way by divination. The depth of the river is most variable. In the dry season I hear the stream becomes but a chain of pools connected by threads which may be no more than eighteen inches deep, the rest of its bed being dry mud cross-hatched by sun cracks. The rains in far Bolivia, overflowing the swamps there, during some months of the year increase the depth of the Madeira by forty-five feet. The local rainy season would make hardly any difference to it. The river is fed from reservoirs which stretch beneath the Andes.