I stopped at lianas, and curious foliage, trying to trace them to a beginning, but rarely with any success. There were some mantis, which commenced to run on a tree while I was examining its bark. They were like flakes of the bark. For a moment the tree seemed to quiver its hide at my irritating touch. Then the Doctor called, and I pushed along to find him stooping over a land snail, the size of a man"s fist, which rather puzzled him, for it had what he called an operculum; that is, a cap such as a winkle"s, only in this case it was as large as a crown piece. I do not know if it was the operculum, for my knowledge of such things is small; but I did feel this was the only twelfth birthday which had come to me for many years.
Presently we saw light, as you would from the interior of a tunnel. Some beams of sunshine slanted from a break in the roof to where a tree had fallen, making a bridge for us across an igaripe, a stream, that is, large enough to be a way for a canoe. The sundered, b.u.t.tressed roots of the tree formed a steep climb to begin with, but the b.u.t.tresses going straight along the trunk as handrails made crossing the bridge an easy matter. Raising my hand to a root which was hot in the sun, and watching a helicon b.u.t.terfly, a black and yellow fellow, which settled near us, slowly open and shut his wings, I jumped, because it felt as though a lighted match had dropped into my sleeve. But I couldn"t douse it. It burned in ten places at once. It was a first lesson in constant watchfulness in this new world. I had placed my hand in a swarm of inconspicuous fire ants. The dead tree was alive with them, and our pa.s.sage quickened. We rubbed ourselves hysterically, for the Doctor had got some too; and there was no professional reserve about him that time.
After crossing the igaripe the character of the forest changed. It was now a growth of wild cacao trees. Nothing grew beneath them. The floor was a black paste, littered with dead sticks. The woods were more open, but darker and more dank than before. The sooty limbs of the cacao trees grew low, and filled the view ahead with a perplexity of leafless and tortured boughs. They were hung about with fruit, pendent lamps lit with a pale greenish light. We saw nothing move there but two delicate b.u.t.terflies, which had transparent wings with opaque crimson spots, such as might have been served t.i.tania herself; yet the gloom and black ooze, and the eerie globes, with their illusion of light hung upon distorted shapes, was more the home of the fabulous sucuruja, the serpent which is forty feet long.
A dry stick snapping underfoot had the same effect as that crash which resounds for some embarra.s.sing seconds when your umbrella drops in a gallery of the British Museum. The impulse was to apologise to something. We had been so long in the twilight, recoiling at nameless objects in the path, a monstrous legume perhaps a yard long and coiled like a reptile, seeing things only with a second look, that the sudden entrance into a malocal, a forest clearing, which, as though it were a reservoir, the sun had filled with bright light, was like a plunge into a warm, fluid, and l.u.s.trous element.
In the clearing were the huts of an Indian village. Only the roofs could be seen, through some plantations of bananas. Around the clearing, a side of which was cut off by a stream, was the overshadowing green presence. Some chocolate babies, as serious as gnomes, looked up as we came into daylight, opened their eyes wide, and fled up the path between the plantains.
If I could sing, I would sing the banana. It has the loveliest leaf I know. I feel intemperate about it, because I came upon it after our pa.s.sage through a wood which could have been underground, a tangle of bare roots joining floor and ceiling in limitless caverns. We stood looking at the plantation till our mind was fed with grace and light.
The plantain jets upwards with a copious stem, and the fountain returns in broad rippled pennants, falling outwardly, refined to points, when the impulse is lost. A world could not be old on which such a plant grows. It is sure evidence of earth"s vitality. To look at it you would not think that growing is a long process, a matter of months and natural difficulties. The plantain is an instant and joyous answer to the sun.
The midribs of the leaves, powerful but resilient, held aloft in generous arches the broad planes of translucent green substance. It is not a fragile and dainty thing, except in colour and form. It is lush and solid, though its ascent is so aerial, and its form is content to the eye. There is no green like that of its leaves, except at sea. The stout midribs are sometimes rosy, but the banners they hold well above your upturned face are as the crest of a wave in the moment of collapse, the day showing through its fluid gla.s.s. And after the place of dead matter and mummied husks in gloom, where we had been wandering, this burst of leaves in full light was a return to life.
We continued along the path, in the way of the vanished children. Among the bananas were some rubber trees, their pale trunks scored with brown wounds, and under some of the incisions small tin cups adhered, fastened there with clay. In most of the cups the collected latex was congealed, for the cups were half full of rain-water, which was alive with mosquito larvae. The path led to the top of the river bank. The stream was narrow, but full and deep. A number of women and children were bathing below, and they looked up stolidly as we appeared. Some were negligent on the gra.s.s, sunning themselves. Others were combing their long, straight hair over their honey- and snuff-coloured bodies. The figures of the women were full, lissom, and rounded, and they posed as if they were aware that this place was theirs. They were as unconscious of their grace as animals. They looked round and up at us, and one stayed her hand, her comb half through the length of her hair, and all gazed intently at us with faces having no expression but a little surprise; then they turned again to proceed with their toilets and their gossip. They looked as proper with their brown and satiny limbs and bodies, in the secluded and sunny arbour where the water ran, framed in exuberant tropical foliage, as a herd of deer.
I had never seen primitive man in his native place till then. There he was, as at the beginning, and I saw with a new respect from what a splendid creature we are derived. It was, I am glad to say, to cheer the existence of these people that I had put money in a church plate at Poplar. Poplar, you may have heard, is a parish in civilisation where an organised community is able, through its heritage of the best of two thousand years of religion, science, commerce, and politics, to eke out to a finish the lives of its members (warped as they so often are by arid dispensations of Providence) with the humane Poor Law. The Poor Law is the civilised man"s ironic rebuke to a parsimonious Creator. It is a jest which will ruin the solemnity of the Judgment Day. Only the man of long culture could think of such a shattering insult to the All Wise who made this earth too small for the children He continues to send to it, trailing their clouds of glory which prove a sad hindrance and get so fouled in the fight for standing room on their arrival. But these savages of the Brazilian forest know nothing of the immortal joke conceived by their cleverer brothers. They have all they want.
Experience has not taught them to devise such a cosmic mock as a Poor Law. How do these poor savages live then, who have not been vouchsafed such light? They pluck bananas, I suppose, and eat them, swinging in hammocks. They live a purely animal existence. More than that, I even hear that should you find a child hungry in an Indian village, you may be sure all the strong men there are hungry too. I was not able to prove that; yet it may be true there are people to-day to whom the law that the fittest must survive has not yet been helpfully revealed. (This is really the Doctor"s fault. I should never have thought of Poplar if he had not wondered aloud how those bathers under the palms managed without a workhouse.)
Behind us were the shelters of these settled Indians, the "cabaclos," as they are called in Brazil (literally, copper coloured). Each house was but a square roof of the fronds of a species of attalea palm, upheld at each corner by poles seven feet high. The houses had no sides, but were quite open, except that some had a quarter of the interior part.i.tioned off with a screen of leaves. There was a rough attempt at a garden about each dwelling, with rose bushes and coleas in the midst of gourds and patches of maize. The roses were scented, and of the single briar kind.
We entered one of the dwellings, and surprised a young woman within who was swinging in a hammock smoking a native pipe of red clay through a gra.s.s stem. One fine limb, free of her cotton gown to the thigh, hung indolently over the hammock, the toes touching the earth and giving the couch movement. Her black hair, all at first we could see of her head, nearly reached the ground.
A well-grown girl, innocent from head to feet, saw us enter, and cried to her mother, who rose in the hammock, threw her gown over her leg, smiled gravely at us, and alighted, to vanish behind the screen with the child, reappearing presently with the girl neatly attired. Other children came, and soon had confidence to examine us closely and critically, grave little mortals with eyes which spoke the only language I understood there. The men and women who gathered stood behind the children, smiling sadly and kindly. They were gentle, undemonstrative, and observant, with features of the conventional Indian type. The men were spare and lithe, of medium height, wearing only shorts tied with string below their bronze busts. The women were of fuller build, with heavier but more cheerful features, and each was dressed in a single cotton garment, open above, revealing the b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
The noon shadows of the hut, and the trees, were deep as the stains of ink. A tray of mandioca root, farinha, was set in the hot sun to dry.
Under a gourd tree was a heap of turtle sh.e.l.ls. A little game, a capybara, and a bird like a crow with a brown rump, were hung on the screen. But the most remarkable feature of the house in the forest was its pets. A pair of parraquets ran in and out the bushes like green mice. My helmet was tipped over my eyes, and, looking upwards, there was an audience of monkeys in the shadow, quite beside themselves with curiosity. My sudden movement sent them off like fireworks. One was a most engaging little fellow, a jet-black tamarin slightly larger than a squirrel. Presently he found courage to come closer, with a companion, a brown monkey of his own size. As they sat side by side the Doctor pointed out that the expressions in the faces of these monkeys showed temperaments separating them even more widely than they were separated by those physical differences which made them species. I saw at once, with some pleasure and a little vanity, that I might be more nearly related to the friendly cabaclos than I am to some people in England.
The brown chap would be no doubt a master of industry on the tree tops, keeping a whole tree to himself, and living on nuts which others gathered. You could see it in his keen and domineering look, and in the quick, casual way he crowded his fellow, who always made room for him. I have seen such a face, and such manners, in great industrial centres.
They are the marks of the ablest and best, who get on. His hard, eager eyes showed censoriousness, cruelty, and acquisitiveness. But his companion, with a sooty and hairless face, and black hair parted in the middle of a frail forehead, was a pal of ours, and knew it. The brown midget showed angry distrust of us, knowing what devilry was in his own mind. But the black, though more delicate and nervous a monkey, his mind being innocent of secret plots, had gentleness and faith in his looks, and showed a laughable and welcome curiosity in us. He made friendly twitterings-not the harsh and menacing chatter of the other-and perfectly self-possessed, his pure soul giving him quiethood, examined us in a brotherly way with an ebon paw which was as small and fragile as a black fairy"s.
A jabiru stork stood on one leg, beak on breast, meditating, caring nothing for all that was outside its ruminating mind. There were parrots on the cross-ties of the roof, on the floor, on the shoulders of the women, and in the hands of the children, and they were getting an interesting time through the monkeys when their faces were not c.o.c.ked sideways at us in a knowing fashion. And what looked like a crow was giving bitter and ruthless chase to a young agouti, in and out of the bare feet of the company. I have never seen creatures so tame. But Indian women, as I learned afterwards, have a fine gift for winning the confidence of wild things, and that afternoon they took hold of the creatures, anyhow and anywhere, to bring them for our inspection, without the captives showing the least alarm or anger. There were the dogs, too. But they were like all the dogs we saw in Brazil, looking sorry for themselves; and they sat about in case they should fall if they attempted to stand. Our audience broke up suddenly, in an uproar of protests, to chase the brown monkey, who was towing a frantic parrot by the tail.
We continued our walk, entering the forest again on another path. Here the growth was secondary, and the underbush dense on both sides of the trail. The voices of the village stopped as we entered the shades, and there was no more sound except when a bird scurried away heavily, and again, when some cicadas, the "scissors grinders," suddenly sprang an astonishing whirring from a tree. The sound was as loud as that of a locomotive letting steam escape in a covered station. At a clearing so small that the roof of the jungle had been but little broken, where a hut stood as though at a well-bottom sunk in a depth of trees, we turned back. That deep well in the trees contained but little light, for already it was being choked with vines. The hut was of the usual light construction, though its sides were of leaves, as well as its roof. I think it was the most melancholy dwelling I have ever happened on in my wanderings. It did not look as though it had been long deserted. There were ashes and a broken flesh-pot outside it. The entrance was veiled with gross spiders" webs. On the earth floor within were puddles of rain. Round it the forest stood, like night in abeyance. The tree tops overhung, silently intent on what man had been doing at their feet. A child"s chemise was stretched on a thorn, and close by was a small grave, separated by little sticks from the secular earth. A dead plant was in the centre of the grave, and a crude wooden crucifix.
We had plenty of opportunities for exploring Serpa, for the Amazon that rainy season was slow in rising, and consequently it would have been unsafe for us to venture into the Madeira. The tributary would have been full, but it was necessary for the waters of the main stream to dam and heighten the flood of its tributary before we could trust our draught there. We were nine days at Serpa. The Amazon would rise as much as a foot one day, and our distance from the sh.o.r.e would increase perceptibly, with strong whirling eddies which made the trip ash.o.r.e more difficult. Then it would fall again. Some of the yellow Amazon porpoises showed alongside occasionally, and alligators floated about, though nothing was seen of them but their snouts.
Serpa is a small but growing place. It was but a missionary settlement of Abacaxis Indians from the Madeira in 1759, and was called Itacoatiara. When I was there it was renewing its old importance, because the Madeira-Mamore railway undertaking had placed a depot a little to the west of the village. The Doctor and I spent many memorable days in its neighbourhood, b.u.t.terfly-hunting and sauntering. Though mosquitoes, anopeline and culex, are as common here as elsewhere in the Brazils-the lighters which came alongside with cargo for us conveyed clouds of them, and they took possession of every dark nook of the "Capella"-it is noteworthy that Serpa has the reputation, in Amazonas, of a health resort. I could find no explanation of that. There was malaria at Serpa, of course; but compared with the really lethal country, a country not so different in appearance and climate, of the upper Madeira, the salubrity of Serpa is perplexing. That virulent form of malaria peculiar to some tropical localities is a phenomenon which medical research has not yet explained. In the almost unexplored region of the Rio Madeira the fever is certain to every traveller, though the land is largely without inhabitants; and it is almost equally certain that it will be of the malignant type. Yet at an old settlement like Serpa, where probably every inhabitant has had malaria, and every mosquito is likely to be a host, the fever is but mild, and the traveller may escape it entirely.
By now you will be asking what Itacoatiara is like, that community contentedly lost in the secret forest. I am afraid you will not learn, unless, in the happy future, you and I select a few friends, a few books, and erect some houses of palm leaves to protect us from the too vigorous sun there, and so, secure from all the really urgent and important matters which do not matter a twinkle to the eternal stars, noon it far and secure until the time comes for the gentle villagers to carry us out and forget us; remembering us again when the annual Day of the Dead comes round. They will leave some comfortable candles above us that night.
There the earth is a warm and luscious body. The lazy paths are cool with groves, and in the middle hours of the sun, when only a few b.u.t.terflies are abroad, and the gra.s.shoppers are shrilling in the quiet, you swing in a hammock under a thatch-the air has been through some tree in blossom-and gossip, and drink coffee. Beyond the path of the village there is-n.o.body knows what; not even the Royal Geographical Society. One heard of a large and mysterious lake a day"s journey inland. n.o.body knew anything about it. n.o.body cared. One old man once, when hunting, saw its mirror through the forest"s aisles, and heard the mult.i.tude of its birds.
The foresh.o.r.e of the village is rugged with boulders richly tinctured with iron oxide, and often having a scoriaceous surface. There we would land, and scramble up to a street which ends on the height above the river. It is a broad road, with white, substantial, one-story houses on either side. The dwellings and stores have no windows, but are built with open fronts, for ventilation. This is Serpa"s main street. It is shaded with avenues of trees. In the narrower side turnings the trees meet to form arcades. One day we saw such an avenue covered with yellow, trumpet-shaped blossoms. Ox-carts with solid wheels stand in the walks.
The sunlight, broken in the leaves of the trees, patterned the roads with white fire, and so dappled the cattle that they were obscure; you saw the oxen only when they moved. There is a large square, gra.s.s-grown, in the centre of the village, where stands the church, a white, simple building with an open belfry in which the bell hangs plain, bright with verdigris. About here the merchants and tradesmen of Serpa have their places. The men, hearty and friendly souls, walk abroad in clean linen suits and straw hats, and their ladies, pallid, slight, but often singularly beautiful, are dressed as Europeans, but without hats; sometimes, when out walking late in the day, a lady would have a scarlet flower in her hair.
By the foresh.o.r.e were the cabins, of mud and wood, of the negroes.
Beyond the town, the roads run through the clearings, and end on the forest. In the clearings were the huts, wattle and daub, and of leaves, of the settled Indians and half-breeds. These were often prettily placed beneath groups of graceful palms. It was in the last direction that most often we made our way with our b.u.t.terfly nets while other folk were sleeping during the sun"s height. The humid heat, I suppose, was really a trial. One did perspire in an alarming way and with the least exertion. The Doctor, who carries substance, would have dark patches in his khaki uniform, and would wonder, with foreboding, whether any more in this life he would catch hold of a cold jug which held a straight pint in which ice tinkled. But to me the illumination, the heat, the odour, and the quiethood of those noons made life a great prize. I will say that my comrade, the Doctor, did much to make it so, with his gentle fun, and his wide knowledge of earth-lore. There was so much, wherever we went, to keep me on the magic side of time, and out of its shadow. On the west of the town were some huts, with plantations of bananas, pineapples, papaws, and maize, where blossomed cannas, mimosas, pa.s.sion-flowers, and where other unseen blooms, especially after rain, made breathing a sensuous pleasure. There we tried to intercept the swallow-like flight of big sulphur and orange b.u.t.terflies, though never with success. We had more success with the b.u.t.terflies in the clearings, where some new huts stood, beyond the village. Over the stagnant pools in those open s.p.a.ces dragonflies hovered, fellows that moved, when we approached, like lines of red light. The b.u.t.terflies, particularly a vermilion beauty with black bars on his wings, and a swift flier, used to settle and gem the mud about these pools. Other species frequented the flowering shrubs which had grown over the burnt wreckage and stumps of the forest. That area was full of insects and birds. There we saw daily the Sauba ants, sometimes called the parasol ants, in endless processions, each ant holding a piece of leaf, the size of a sixpenny bit, over its tiny body. Tanagers shot amongst the bushes like blue projectiles. We saw a ficus there on one occasion, of fair size, with large leathery leaves, which carried a colony of remarkable caterpillars, each about seven inches long, thick in proportion, blue black in colour with yellow stripes, and a coral head, and filaments at the latter end. They were pugnacious worms, fighting each other desperately when two met on a leaf. The larvae stripped that tree in a day. We were not always sure that the people in this part of Serpa were friendly. Mostly they were half-breeds, varying mixtures of Indian and negro, and no doubt very superst.i.tious. The rodent"s foot was commonly worn by the women, who, if we took notice of their children, sometimes would spit, to avert the evil eye. But when the thunder clouds banked close, and the air, being still, became loaded with the scent of the wood fires of the villagers, promising rain, we would enter a hut, and then always found we were welcome.
Even when kept to the ship for any reason this country offered constant new things to keep our thoughts moving. A regatao, the river pedlar, would bring his roomy montario, the gipsy van of the river, his family aboard-the wife, the grandmother, and the sad, shy, little children-and offer us fruits, and perhaps his monkey and parrots.
Gradually the "Capella" added to her company. The Chief bought a parrot which had many Indian and Portuguese phrases. It tried to climb a funnel guy, in escaping the curiosity of our terrier, and fell into the river.
We fished her out with a bucket. The vampire bats came aboard every night. They were not very terrible creatures to look at; but we discovered they frequented the forecastle for no good purpose. Again, stories filtered through to us of sickness on the Madeira, and abruptly they gave the palms and the sunsets a new light. One man was brought in from beyond and died of beri-beri. This shook the nerves of one of our Brazilian pilots, and he refused to go beyond where we were. As for me, there at Serpa the "Capella" was at anchor, and we were not near the Madeira, and seemed never likely to go. I watched the sunsets. The brief, cool evenings prompted me (fever in the future or not) to praise and grace. Crickets chirped everywhere on the ship then, and the air was full of the sparks of fireflies. You could smell this good earth.
There was one sunset when the overspreading of violet clouds would have shut out the day quite, but that the canopy was not closely adjusted to the low barrier of forest to the westward. Through that narrow c.h.i.n.k a yellow light streamed, and traced shapes on the lurid walls and roof which narrowly enclosed us. This was the beginning of the most alarming of our daily electrical storms. There was no wind. Serpa and all the coast facing that rift where the light entered our prison, stood prominent and strange, and surprised us as much as if we had not looked in that direction till then. The curtain dropped behind the forest, and all light was shut out. We could not see across the ship. Knowing how strong and bright could be the electrical discharges (though they were rarely accompanied by thunder) when not heralded in so portentous a way, we waited with some anxiety for this display to begin. It began over the trees behind Serpa. Blue fire flickered low down, and was quickly doused. Then a crack of light sprang across the inverted black bowl from east to west in three quick movements. Its instant ramifications fractured all the roof in a network of dazzling blue lines. The reticulations of light were fleeting, but never gone. Night contracted and expanded, and the sharp sounds, which were not like thunder, might have been the tumbling flinders of night"s roof. We saw not only the river, and the shapes of the trees and the village, as in wavering daylight, but their colours. One flash sheeted the heavens, and its overbright glare extinguished everything. It came with an explosion, like the firing of a great gun close to our ears, and for a time we thought the ship was struck. In this effort the storm exhausted itself.
The day before we left for the Madeira we took aboard sixty head of cattle. They were wild things, which had been collected in the campo with great difficulty, and driven into lighters. A rope was dropped over the horns of each beast: this was attached to a crane hook, the winch was started, and up the poor wretch came, all its weight on its horns, b.u.mping inertly against the ship"s side in its pa.s.sage, like a bale, and was then dumped in a heap on deck. This treatment seemed to subdue it.
Each quietly submitted to a halter. Several lost horns, and one hurt its leg, and had to be dragged to its place. But, to our great joy-we were watching the scene from the bridge-the Brazilian herdsmen on the lighter shouted an anxious warning to their fellows on our deck as a small black heifer, a potbellied lump with a stretched neck, rotated in her unusual efforts to free her horns. She even bellowed. She b.u.mped heavily against the ship"s side, and tried desperately to find her feet.
She was, and I offered up thanks for this benefit, most plainly an implacable rebel. The cattlemen, as punishment for the trouble she had given them ash.o.r.e, kept her dangling over the deck, and one got level with her face and mocked her, slapping her nose. She actually defied him, though she was quite helpless, with some minatory sounds. She was no cow. She was insurrection, she was the hate for tyrants incarnated.
They dropped her. She was up and away like a cat, straight for the winchman, and tried to get the winch out of her path, bellowing as she worked. She put everybody on that deck in the shrouds or on the forecastle head as she trotted round, with her tail up, looking for brutes to put them to death. None of the cows (of course) helped her. By a trick she was caught, and her horns were lashed down to a ring bolt in a hatch coaming. Then she tried to kick all who pa.s.sed. If the rest of the cattle had been like her none would have suffered. Alas! They were probably all scientific evolutionists, content to wait for men to become kindly apple-lovers by slow and natural uplift; and gravely deprecated the action of the heifer, from which, as peaceful cows, they disa.s.sociated themselves.
The Indian says that if he eats a morsel of tiger he becomes fierce and strong. I have not the faith of the Indian, or I would have begged the heart of that heifer, and of it I would have brewed gallons of precious liquor, and brought it home in jars for incomparable gifts to the meek at heart who always do what the herdsmen tell them. The Doctor and I made a pet of that black cow, to the extent of seeing she got her rations regularly. It was no joke wading through manure among a press of nervous animals on a ship"s deck in the tropics, in order to see that a brave creature was justly dealt with; particularly as she swore violently whenever she saw us, looking up from her tightly tethered head with eyes full of unabated fury, and tried to get at us on the hatch above her, bound though she was. What a heart! For her head was fixed immovably, unlike the others; yet, till we arrived at Porto Velho she kept her fierce spirit, often kicking over her water bucket with her forefeet. Curse their charity!
With two new pilots, we upanch.o.r.ed next morning; and full of cattle, flies, and new odours, and a gang of cattlemen who at least appeared villainous, and carried long knives, the "Capella" continued up stream for the Madeira. The cattle were sheltered, as far as possible, with awnings improvised from spare canvas, and their fodder was bales of American hay. The Skipper did his best to meliorate the harsh native methods with dumb things.
And now it seems time to explain why we are bound for the centre of the American continent, where the unexplored jungle still persists, and disease or death, so the legends tell us, come to all white men who stay there for but a few months. If you will get your map of the Brazils, begin from Para, and cruise along the Amazon to the Madeira River-you turn south just before Manaos-when you have reached Santo Antonio on the tributary stream you have traversed the ultimate wilderness of a continent, and stand on the threshold of Bolivia, almost under the shadow of the Andes. If you find any pleasure in maps, flying in shoes of that kind when affairs pursue you too urgently (and I suppose you do, or you would not be so far into this narrative), you will hardly thank me when I tell you it is possible for an ocean steamer exceeding 23 feet in draught to make such a journey, and so break the romance of the obscure place at the end of it. But it must be said. Even one who travels for fun should keep to the truth in the matter of a ship"s draught. As a reasonable being you would prefer to believe the map; and that clearly shows the only way there (when the chance comes for you to take it) must be by canoe, a long and arduous journey to a seclusion remote, and so the more deeply desired. It certainly hurts our faith in a favourite chart to find that its well-defined seaboard is no barrier to modern traffic, but that, journeying over those pink and yellow inland areas, which should have no traffic with great ships, a large cargo steamer, full of Welsh coal, can come to an anchorage, still with many fathoms under her, at a point where the cartographer, for lack of place-names and other humane symbols, has set the word Forest, with the letters spread widely to the full extent of his ignorance, and so promised us sanctuary in plenty. I suppose that in a few years those remote wilds, somehow cleared of Indians, jungle, and malaria-though I do not see how all this can be done-will have no further interest for us, because it will possess many of the common disadvantages of civilisation"s benefits: it will be a point on a regular route of commerce. I am really sorry for you; but in the sad and cruel code of the sailor I can only reply as Jack did when he got the sole rag of beef in the hash, "Blow you, Bill. I"m all right." I had the fortune to go when the route was still much as it was in the first chapter of Genesis.
"But after all," you question me, hopeful yet, "nothing can be done with 5000 tons of Welsh cargo in a jungle."
People with the nose for dollars can do wonders. It would be unwise to back such a doughty opponent as the pristine jungle with its malaria against people who smell money there. In the early "seventies there was a man with one idea, Colonel George Church. His idea was to give to Bolivia, which the Andes shuts out from the Pacific, and two thousand miles of virgin forest from the Atlantic, a door communicating with the outside world. He said, for he was an enthusiast, that Bolivia is the richest country in the world. The mines of Potosi are in Bolivia. Its mountains rise from fertile tropical plains to Arctic alt.i.tudes. The rubber tree grows below, and a climate for barley is found in a few days" journey towards the sky. But the riches of Bolivia are locked up.
Small parcels of precious goods may be got out over the Andean barrier, on mule back; or they may dribble in a thin stream down the Beni, Mamore, and Madre de Dios rivers-rivers which unite not far from the Brazilian boundary to form the Rio Madeira. The Beni is a very great and deep river which has a course of 1500 miles before it contributes its volume to the Madeira. The Rio Madeira, a broad and deep stream in the rainy season, reaches the Amazon in another 1100 miles. But between Guajara-Merim and San Antonio the Madeira comes down a terrace 250 miles in length of nineteen dangerous cataracts. The Bolivian rubber collectors shoot those rapids in their batelaoes, large vessels carrying sometimes ten tons of produce and a crew of a dozen men, when the river is full. Many are overturned, and the produce and the men are lost. The Madeira traverses a country notorious even on the Amazon for its fever, and quite unexplored a mile inland anywhere on its banks; the rubber hunters, too, have to reckon with wandering tribes of hostile Indians.
The country is like that to-day. Then judge its value for a railway route in the early "seventies. But Colonel Church was a New Englander, and again he was a visionary, so therefore most energetic and compelling; he soon persuaded the practical business folk, who seldom know much, and are at the mercy of every eloquent dreamer, to part with a lot of money to buy his Bolivian dream. We do really find the Colonel, on 1st November 1871, solemnly cutting the first sod of a railway in the presence of a party of Indians, with the wild about him which had persisted from the beginning of things. What the Indians thought of it is not recorded. Anyhow, they seem to have humoured the infatuated man who stopped to cut a square of gra.s.s in the land of the Parentintins, the men who go stark naked, and make musical instruments out of the shin bones of their victims.
An English company of engineering contractors was given the job of building the line, and a small schooner, the "Silver Spray," went up to San Antonio with materials in 1872. Her captain, and some of her officers, died on the way. A year later the contractors confessed utter defeat. The jungle had won. They declared that "the country was a charnel-house, their men dying like flies, that the road ran through an inhospitable wilderness of alternating swamp and porphyry ridges, and that, with the command of all the capital in the world, and half its population, it would be impossible to build the road." (There is a quality of bitterness in their vehement hate which I recognise. I heard the same emotional chord expressed concerning that land, though not because of failure there, only two years ago.)
But the Bank of England held a large sum in trust for the pursuance of this enterprise, and after the lawyers had attended to the trust money in long debate in Chancery, there was yet enough of it left to justify the indefatigable colonel in beginning the railway again. That was in 1876. Messrs. Collins, of Philadelphia, obtained the contract. The road, of metre gauge, was to be built in three years. The matter excited the United States into a wonderful attention. The press there went slightly delirious, and the excited _Eagle_ was advised that "two Philadelphians are to overcome the Madeira rapids, and to open up to the world a land as fair as the Garden of the Lord." The little steamer "Mercedita," of 856 tons, with 54 engineers and material, was despatched to San Antonio on 2nd January 1878. Her departure was made an important national occasion, and it is an historic fact, which may be confirmed by a reference to the files of Philadelphian papers of that date, that strong men, as well as women and children, sobbed aloud on the departure of the steamer. The vessel arrived at San Antonio on the 16th February. They had barely started operations when, so they said, a Brazilian official told them, betraying some feeling, "when the English came here they did nothing but smoke and drink for two days, but Americans work like the devil." Yet, by all accounts, the English method was right. I prefer it, on the Amazon. The preface to work there should be extended to three or even more days of drinking and smoking.
Yet it must be said that if ever men should have honour for holding to a duty when it was far more easy, and even more reasonable, to leave it, then I submit the claim of those American engineers. Having lived in the place where many of them died, and knowing their story, I feel a certain kinship. There is no monument to them. No epic has been written of their tragedy. But their story is, I should think, one of the saddest in the annals of commerce. Of the 941 who left for San Antonio at different times, 221 lost their lives, mostly of disease, though 80 perished in the wreck of a transport ship. That is far higher a mortality rate than that of, say, the South African or the American Civil War.
Few of those men appeared to know the tropics. They thought "the tropics" meant only prodigal largess of fruits and sun and a wide lat.i.tude of life-a common mistake. The enterprise became a lingering disaster. Their state was already bad when a supply ship was lost; and they hopefully waited, ill and starving, but with a gallant mockery of their lot, as their letters and diaries attest, for food and medicine which were not to reach them. The doctors continued the daily round of the host of the fever-stricken, giving them quinine, which was a deceit made of flour. The wages of all ceased for legal reasons, and they were in a place where little is cultivated, and so most food has to be imported in spite of a tariff which usually doubles the price of every necessary of life. Some of the survivors, despairing and heroic souls, attempted to escape on rafts down the river; they might as well have tried to cut their way through the thousand miles of forest between them and Manaos. The railway undertaking collapsed again, and the clearing, the huts, and the workshops, and the short line that was actually laid, were left for the vines and weeds to bury. But now again the conquering forest is being attacked. The Madeira-Mamore Railway has been recommenced, and our steamer, the "Capella," is taking up supplies for the establishment at Porto Velho, from which the new railway begins, three miles this side of San Antonio.
III
On the morning of the 23rd January, while we were still considering, seeing what the sun was like, and the languid air, and that we were reduced to tinned beans, fat bacon, and b.u.t.ter which was oil and flies, whether it was worth while to note our breakfast bell-the steward stood swinging it, with the gravity of a priest, under the break of the p.o.o.p-a shout came from the bridge that the Rio Madeira was in view.
As far back as Swansea we had heard legends of this stream, and they were sufficiently disturbing. When we arrived at Para we heard more, and worse. The pilot we engaged there called the Madeira the "long cemetery." At Serpa, for the first time, we saw what happened to frail humanity when it ventured far on the Madeira. One day a river steamer came to Serpa, with a cargo of men from San Antonio. The river steamers of the Amazon are vessels of broad beam and shallow draft, painted the dingy hue of the river itself, and they have two tiers of decks, open-air shelves, between the supports of which the pa.s.sengers sling their hammocks. The pa.s.sengers do not sleep in bunks. This paddleboat came throbbing towards where we were at anchor. It was night, and she was unseen, a palpitation in the dark accompanied somehow by a fountain of sparks. Such boats burn wood in their furnaces. When her noise had ceased, and her lights imperceptibly enlarged as the current dropped her down abeam of us, a breath of her, a draught of air, pa.s.sed our way. I am more familiar now with the odour malaria causes, but then I thought she must have a freight of the dead. She anch.o.r.ed. We could see her loaded hammocks in the light of the few lamps she carried. Through the binoculars next morning I inspected with peculiar interest the row of cadaverous heads, with black tousled hair, lemon-coloured skins, open mouths and vacant eyes, which stared at us over her rails. Each looked as though once it had peered into the eyes of doom, and then was but waiting, caring nothing.
There, ahead, was the Madeira now for us. We were then nearly a thousand miles from the sea, well within South America. But that meeting-place of the Amazon and its chief tributary was an expanse of water surprising in its immensity. As much light was reflected from the floor as at sea. The water was oceanic in amplitude. The forest boundaries were so far away that one could not realise, even when the time we had been on the river was remembered as a prolonged monotony, that this was the centre of a continent. The forest on our port side was near enough for us to see its limbs and its vines; but to the south-west, where we were heading for Bolivia, and to the north, the way to the Guianas, and to the east, out of which we had come, and to the west, where was Peru, the land was but a low violet barrier, varying in alt.i.tude with distance, and with silver sections in it, marking the river roads. In the north-west there was a broad silver path through the wall, the way to the Rio Negro, Manaos, and the Orinoco. In the south the near forest, being flooded, was a puzzle of islands. As we progressed they opened out as a line of green headlands. The Madeira appeared to have three widely separated mouths, with a complexity of intermediate and connective minor ditches. Indeed, the gate of the river was a region of inundated jungle. One began to understand why travellers here sometimes find themselves on the wrong river.
Our bows turned in to the forest wall, and for a few minutes I could not see any way for us there. The jungle parted, and we were on a narrow turgid flood, the colour of the main river, but swifter; a majestic forest was near to either beam. We were enclosed. And after we entered the Madeira my dark thoughts of our future at once left me. If they returned, it was only to be joked about, in the dry way one does refer to a dread that has been long in the distance, and then one day takes shape, becomes material, and settles down with us. Its form, as you know, nearly always allays your alarms. Your simple mind has expected something with the lowering face of evil. Lo! evil has even bright eyes.
Its nature, its dark craft which you have dreaded, is not seen, and your mind grows light with surprise. What, only this, then?
I never saw earth look more resplendent and chromatic than on the day when we entered that river with a bad name. Presently, I thought-here was a brief resurgence of the old gloom which had shrouded my conjectural Madeira-I might be called upon to pay the price for this surprising gift of intense colour, light, and luscious heat, for the quickening of the blood, as though the tropic air were a stimulant as well as a narcotic. Well, it does seem but fair, if chance, being happy, gives you a place in the tropics, to expect to have less time there than is given for the job of eking out a meagre existence in the north. It would not be right to look for gain both ways. (You will have noticed already, I suppose, that I have not been on the Madeira fifteen minutes.) This, I thought, as I walked to and fro on the "Capella," is different from that endurance, bitter and prolonged, in the land where there is no sun worth mentioning, where the north-east wind blows, where the poor rate is so and so in the pound (and you are one of the fortunate if you pay it), and Lord Rosebery lectures on Thrift. I mentioned this to the Doctor. He did not remove his pipe from his mouth.
Because (the idea dawned on me as I sank into a deck chair beside the surgeon under the p.o.o.p awning, and borrowed his silver tobacco-box), because, as to thrift and parching winds, abstinence and prudence, and lectures by the solemn on how to thin out your life in cold climates where all that is worth having is annexed, why praise a man who is willing to deprave his life to sand and frost? There in merry England the poor wretch is, where the riches of earth are not broadcast largess as I see they are here, but are stacked on each side of the road, and guarded by police, leaving to him but the inclement highway, with nothing but Lord Rosebery"s advice and benediction to help him keep the wind out of the holes in his trousers; that benefit, and the bleak consideration that he may swink all day for a handful of beans, or go without. What is prudence in that man? It is his goodwill for the police. To be blue nosed and meek at heart, and to h.o.a.rd half the crust of your stinted bread, is to blaspheme the King of Glory. Some men will touch their crowns to Carnegie in heaven.