  December 28. Lat. 39.10 N., long. 16.3 W. Course, S.W.1/2 west. We are nearing the tropics. Now the ship has such a complete set of grumblers, good fellows who know their work better than anyone less than God, that our great distance at sea is plain. Our men, casually gathered and speaking divers tongues, detached from earth and set afloat on a mobile islet to mix on it if they can, have become one body to deal with the common enemy. We are corporate to face each trouble as it meets us, and free to explain afterwards how much better we should have done under another captain. The skipper knows this broad spirit now possesses us, and so is contented and blithe, wearing only on deck that weary look which is the sober badge of high office, as though he were an unfortunate man to have us about him, we being what we are, but that he would do his best with the fools, seeing we are in his charge. This morning at six, hearing the men at the hosepipes giving the decks their daily wash, I tumbled out for a cold tub. This is a simple affair. You leave the cabin with a towel about you, stand in a clear space, and rotate before the hydrant, to general cheering. A hot bath on the “Capella” is not so easy, because, although there is a bath-room aboard, it has become a paint locker. One must descend This morning was the right prelude to the tropics. This was the morning when, if our planet had been till then untenanted, a world unconsummated and waiting approval, the divine approval would have come, and a child would have been born, an immortal, the offspring of Aurora and the Sea God, flame-haired and lusty, with eyes as bright as joy, and a rosy body to be kissed from toes to crown. The dancing light, and the warm shower suddenly born alive in it from one ripe cloud, the golden air, the waves of the north-east trades, the seas of the world in the first dawn, moving along like a multitude released to play, their blue passionate and profound, their crests innocent and dazzling, made me think I might hear faint cheering, if I listened intently. In the west was a steep range of cloudland rising from the sea, and against it was inclined the flame of a rainbow. There was that rainbow, as constant as the pennant hoisted over an uplighted occasion. The world’s noble emblem was aloft. I demanded of the Skipper if he would run up our ensign in reply to it; but he only peered at me curiously. The heat increased with the day. We had run well down from the bleak apex of the world with its nimbus of fogs. Here was the entrance to the place where our youthful dreams began. I recognised it. Every feature was as we both have seen it from afar, across the roofs from our outlook in the arid city when the path to it had appeared as hopeless to our feet as the path to the moon. This pioneer can assure his fellows whose bright illusions grow fainter with age that their dreams must be followed up, to be reached. At midday we began to cast clothes. As to the afternoon, of that I remember the less. There was the chief’s empty bunk, so much more alluring than my own. Into that I climbed, my mind steeled against drowsy weakness. I would digest my dinner with a book, eyes sternly alert. The “Capella” rocked slowly, a big cradle. My body was lax and responsive. There was about us the silent emptiness which is far from the centres where many men believe it is necessary to get lots of things done. The Chief suspired on his settee. The waves were singing to themselves. A ray of light laughed in my eyes, playing hide and seek across the wisdom of my book.... I put the book down. As you know, where I had come from we do not dare to sleep during daylight without first arguing with the conscience, which usually we fail to convince. This comes of our mental trick which takes a pleasure we wholly desire and puts on it a prohibitive label. Self-indulgence, you understand; softening of the character; courage, brothers, do not It is worth recording that when I awoke I found nothing had happened to me, except benefit. The venture can be made safely. Others had kept the course for me. The ship had not stopped. Through the door I could see a half-naked, blackened, and sweating stoker, who had been keeping the fires while I slept, and he was getting back his breath It was within an hour of midnight. The moon had set. I was idling amidships about the ship’s shadowy structure when I was asked to take charge of the bridge till eight bells. The second mate was ill, and the first mate was asleep through overwork. The skipper said he would not keep me up there long. I had but to call if a light came into view, and to keep an eye on the wheelhouse. Ah, but it is long since I played at ships, and was a pirate captain. I remembered there are dull folk who wonder what it feels like to be a king. The king does not know. Ask the small boy who is surprised with an order to hold a horse’s head. I took my promotion, mounting the steep ladder to the open height in the night. I felt then I was more than sundered from my kind. I had been taken and placed remotely from the comfort of the “Capella’s” isolated community also. There was me, and there were the stars. They were my nearest neighbours. I stood for you among A bell rang beside me in the night. It was answered at once from somewhere ahead. Others, then, were journeying with me. The void was peopled, though the travellers were all invisible; and I heard a confident voice call, “Lights are burning bright.” The lights were. I could see that. But when the profundities are about you, and you think you are alone in outer night, that is the kind of word to hear. Joyously I shouted into what seemed to be boundless nothing, “All Right!” One dayfall we saw the Canary Islands a great distance on the port beam. I do not know which day it was. The Hesperides were as blurred as the place in the calendar. The days had run together into a measureless sense of well-being. We had passed the last of the trivial allotments of time. The islands loomed, and I wondered whether that land was the hint of something in a past life which the memory saw but could not shape. Whatever was there it was too long forgotten. That apparition which a whisper told me was land faded as I gazed at it overseas, lazily trying to remember what it once meant. It was gone again. It was no matter now. Perhaps I was deceiving myself. Perhaps I had had no other life. This “Capella,” always under the height of a blue dome, always the centre of a circular floor of waters, waters to be seen beating against the steep and luminous walls encompassing us, though nowhere finding an outlet, was all my experience. I could recall only the faintest shadows of a past into that limpid present. I could see nothing clearly that was not confined within the dark faultless line where the sky was inseparably annealed to the sea. Here I had been always. All I knew was this length of sheltered deck, and those doors behind me where I leaned on a rail between the stanchions, doors which sheltered a few familiars with their clothes on hooks, their pipe racks, and photographs of women, a length of deck finishing on either hand in two iron ladders, the ladder forward, just past the radiation and coal There we indubitably were though, and I dwelt constantly on the miracle of that lucky existence. The seas never changed. They followed us and the wind, a living host, the blue of their slopes and hollows as deep as ecstasy, their crests white and lambent. They were buoyant, they were leisurely, they were the right companions of travel. They just kept pace with us. They ran after us like happy children, as though they had been lagging. They came abeam to turn up to us their shining faces, calling to us musically, then dropping behind again in silence. When I looked overside into the pellucid depths, peering below the surface in long forgetfulness, leaving the body and gliding the mind in that palpable and hyacinthine air beneath us where the sunken foam dimmered in pale clouds, I felt myself not afloat but hovering in the midst of a hollow sphere filled with light. The blue water was only a heavier and a darker air. I had no weight there. I was only a quiet thought tinctured The upper half of the sphere was blue also, but of a different blue. The rarer and more volatile ether was above us. The sea was its essence and precipitate. The sea colour was profound and satisfying; but the colour of the sky was diffused, as though the heaven were an idea which was beyond you, which you stood regarding, and azure were it symbol, and that by concentration you might fathom its meaning. But I can report no luck from my concentrated efforts on that symbol. The colour may have been its own reward. Every morning after breakfast the Skipper and the Doctor made a visit to the forecastle. Then, after the Doctor had carefully searched his dress for insects, we spent the day together. We mounted the forecastle to begin with, watching the acre of dazzling foam which the “Capella’s” bows broke around us. Out of that the flying fish would get up, just under us, to go skimming off, flights of silver locusts. This reminded the surgeon that we might try for albacore and bonito, which would be a change from tinned mutton. The Skipper found a long fir pole, to which was attached sixty fathoms of line, with a large hook which we covered with a white rag, lapping a cutting of tin round the shank. When this object was dropped over the stern in its leaps from wave to wave it bore a distant resemblance to a flying fish. The weight of the trailing line, breaking a cord “tell-tale,” frequently gave us false alarms and long tiring hauls. But on the second The contours of this predatory fish express extraordinary speed and power, and its armed mouth has been upturned by Providence the better to catch the flying fish as they drop back to sea after an effort to escape from it. But Providence, or evolution, had never taught the coryphene that there are times when the little flying fish, as it falls back exhausted, may be a rag of white shirt and a scrap of bright tin ware with a large hook in its deceptive little belly. So there the dolphin was, glowing and fading with the hues of faery. Its life really illuminating it from within. As its life ebbed, or strove convulsively, its colours waned and pulsed. It was gold when it came on board, and darkened to ultramarine as it thrashed the deck, and its broad dorsal fin showed violet eyes. Its body changed to a pale metallic green; and then its light went out. Now as I look back upon the “Capella” and her company as they were in that period of our adventure when our place was but somewhere in mid-ocean between Senegambia and Trinidad, I see us but indifferently, for we are mellowed in that haze in which retrospection just discerns those affairs, long since accomplished, that were not altogether “30 Decr. A grey day. The sun fitful. Wind and seas on the port quarter, and the large following billows occasionally lopping inboard as she rolled. The decks therefore are sloppy again. We had a sharp reminder at six bells that we are not bound to any health resort, as Sandy put it. We were told to go aft, where the doctor would give each of us five grains of quinine. This is to be a daily rite. To encourage the men to take the quinine it is to be given to them in gin. Being foreigners, they did not understand the advice about the quinine, but they caught the word gin quite well, and they were outside the saloon alleyway, a smiling queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to see the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man was a big German deckhand. He took the glass from the doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this unexpected charity from the skipper dissolved instantly when the quinine got behind it. His eyes opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise of his fellows he turned violently to the ship’s side, rested his hands on it, and spat; spat carefully, continuously and with grave deliberation. “Distance run since noon yesterday 230 miles. Actual knots 9,5. Total distance 2072 miles. “The night is fine and starlit, the Milky Way a brilliant arch from east to west, under which we are steaming. When Venus rose she was a tiny moon, so refulgent that she gave a faint pallor to a large area of sky, outlined the coast of a cloud, and made a broad shining path on the sea. The moon rose after nine, veiled in filmy air, peeping motionless at the edge of a black curtain. “The moon later was quite obscured, and the steamer ceased to exist except where in my heated cabin the smoky oil lamp showed me my dismal cubicle. I went in and sat on the mate’s sea chest. The mate was on duty. On the washstand was his mug of cocoa, and on top of the mug two thick sandwiches of bread and meat. That food was black with cockroaches. The oil lamp stank but gave little light. The engines were throbbing, and out of the open door I saw the gleam of the wash, and heard its harassing note. I could not read. I loathed the idea of getting into the hot bunk and lying there, stewing, a clear keen, clangour of thoughts making sleep impossible. The mate appeared, drove off the cockroaches cheerfully, examined the sandwiches for inconspicuous deer, opening each to make sure, and then muffled himself with one. My God! I could have killed him with these two hands. What right had he to be cheerful? But he is such a ginger-headed boy, and to break that unconsciously happy smile of his would be sacrilege. Besides, he began to tell me about his sweetheart. “The Chief was making an abstract, and was searching through his log for ten tons of coal which were missing. In the hunt for the lost coal I lost myself. I grew excited wherever a thick bush of figures promised the hidden quarry; and in an hour’s search found the strayed tons in hiding at the bottom of a column. They had been left there, and not transported into the next. Again the dread of that bunk had to be faced and dealt with. I stood at the chief’s door, knocking out my pipe, looking astern into the night, looking to where Ursa-Major, our celestial familiar of home, was low down and preparing to leave us altogether to the strange and perhaps unlucky gods of other skies. O the nights at sea! “31 Decr. Wakened with my heart jumping because of a devastating sound without. In the early morning, Tinker was being thrashed by the “I had a lonely evening with the chief. This is New Year’s eve. We talked of the East India Dock Road, and of much else in London Town. At eight bells, when we held up our glasses in the direction of Polaris, the moon was bright and the waters hushed. Then we took each a hurricane lamp, and went about the decks collecting flying fish for breakfast, finding a dozen of them. “1 Jan. The uplifted splendour of these days persists; but the splendour sags now a little at midday with the weight of the heat. The poop deck is now sheltered with an awning; and lying there in lazy chairs, with a wind following and barely overtaking “Under the awning at night, to the Doctor and to me, the first mate played his accordion. He is a little Welshman, this mate, with a childish nose and a brutish moustache, and in his face is blended a girlish innocence of large affairs, and the hirsute nature of the adult male animal, a nature he relieves on the “Capella” with bawdy talk and guffaws. He played ‘Come, Birdie, Come,’ and things like that, and then told us some Monte Videan stories. As they were true stories about himself and other young sailors they ought really to be included in a faithful diary of a sea voyage, yet as I cannot reproduce the Doctor’s antiseptic judgment, of which I know nothing but the glow of his pipe in the unresponding “3 Jan. The hottest day we have had. I descended at midday to the engines to see Sandy at work with his shining giants. Standing on the middle platform, while he was shouting his greetings to me over the uproar, I felt the heat of the grating through my boot soles, and shifted. The temperature there was 122°. Sandy was but in his drawers and a pair of old boots, and the tongues of the boots, properly, were hanging out. His noble torso was glistening with moisture, and as I talked, energetically vaulting my words above the roar of the crank throws in that hot and oleaginous place, the perspiration began a sudden drop from my own face and hands, and in a copious way which startled me. For a time I had some difficulty in breathing, as though in a vacuum, but gradually forgot this danger of suffocation in the love of the artist Sandy showed while offering me the spectacle of ‘his job.’ I think I understood him. At first one would see no order in that haze of rioting steel. The massive metal waves of the shaft were walloping and plunging in their pits with an astonishing bird-like alacrity; about fifteen tons of polished steel were moving with swift and somewhat awful desperation. The big room shook and hummed with the vigour of it. But order came as Sandy talked, and presently I found the continuous thunder, that deadening bass of the crank throws, seemed to lessen as we conversed, sitting together on a tool chest. Our “4 Jan. A moderate north-east wind and sea, and a bright morning; but far out a dark cloud formed, and drew, and driving towards us, covered us presently with a blue-black canopy. The warm torrent fell with outrageous violence, and for all we could see of our way the “Capella” might have been in a dense fog. The mosquito curtains were served out to-day, and we amused ourselves draping our bunks. Later, the weather cleared. The night was stiflingly hot; and in that reeking bunk, with an iron bulkhead separating me from the engine room, it was like lying on the shelf of an oven. Though wide open on its catch, the door admitted no air, but did allow a miserable tap-tapping as the ship rolled. At eleven o’clock a pale face floated in the black vacancy of the door, and I could see the Doctor peering in to find if I were awake. ‘I say, Purser, I can’t sleep. Will you come and have a gossip, old dear?’ We went aft in our pyjamas, the Doctor cleared away bottles and things from his settee, and we disembarked from the ‘Capella,’ “5 Jan. We seem to have got to a dead end of the trade winds. The heat of the forenoon was oppressively humid and dinner was nearly lost through it. The cook, a fair and plump Dutchman, broke down in the midst of his pans, and was carried out to find his breath again. This poor chef is up at four o’clock every morning coffee making; is working in the galley, which is badly ventilated, all day, getting two hours’ rest in the early afternoon. Then he goes on till the saloon tea is over; when he begins to bake bread. He fills in his leisure in peeling potatoes. “All round the horizon motionless and permanent storm clouds are banked. Their forms do not alter, but their colours change with the hours. They seem to encompass us in a circular lake, a range of precipitous and intricately piled Alps, high and massive. Cleaving those steeps of calamitous rocks—for so they looked, and not in the least like vapour—are chasms full of night, and the upper slopes and summits are lucent in amber and pearl. In the south and east the ranges are indigo dark and threatening, and the water between us and that closed country is opaque and heavy as molten lead. Across the peaks of the mountains rest horizontal strata of mist. Some petrels were about to-day. The evening is cool, with a slight head breeze.” After weeks at sea, imprisoned within the walls Poised between two profundities—though nearer the clouds, cirrus and lofty though they are, than the land straight beneath the keel—and with morning and night the only variety in the round, the days flicker by white and black like a magic lantern working without a story. Tired of watching for the fruits of our enterprise I went to sleep. Old Captain Morgan must have lived a dull life, monotonous with adventure. What is the use of travel, I asked myself. The stars are as near to London as they are to the Spanish main. In their planetary journey through the void the passengers at Peckham see as much as their fellows who peer through the windows in Macassar. The sun rises in the east, In the chart room some days ago I learned we had 3000 fathoms under us. Well; these waves of the tropics, curling over such abysmal deeps, look much the same as the waves off Land’s End. I began to see what I had done. I had changed the murk of winter in London for the discomforts of the dog days. I had come thousands of miles to see the thermometer rise. Where are the Spanish Main, the Guianas, and the Brazils? At last I had discovered them. I found their true bearings. They are in Raleigh’s “Golden City of Manoa,” in Burney’s “Buccaneers of America,” with Drake, Humboldt, Bates, and Wallace; and I had left them all at home. We borrow the light of an observant and imaginative traveller, and see the foreign land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines. At eight this morning we crossed the equator. I paid my footing in whisky, and forgot all about the equator. Soon after that, idling under the poop awning, I picked up the Doctor’s book from his vacant chair. I took the essays of Emerson carelessly and read at once—the sage plainly had laid a trap for me—“Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, a house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve as well as all trades and spectacles.” So——. At this moment the first mate crossed my light, and presently I heard the sounding Emerson went sprawling. I stood up. Twenty-five fathoms! Then that grey sand stuck to the tallow of the weight was the first of the Brazils. The circle of waters was still complete about us, but over the bows, at a great distance, were thunder clouds and wild lights. The oceanic swell had decreased to a languid and glassy beat, and the water had become jade green in colour, shot with turquoise gleams. The Skipper, himself interested and almost jolly, announced a pound of tobacco to the first man who spied the coast. We were nearing it at last. Those far clouds canopied the forests of the Amazon. We stood in at slow speed. I know those forests. I mean I have often navigated their obscure waterways, rafting through the wilds on a map, in my slippers, at night. Now those forests soon were to loom on a veritable skyline. I should see them where they stood, their roots in the unfrequented floods. I should see Santa Maria de Belem, its aerial foliage over its shipping and squalor. It was quite near now. I should see Santarem and Obydos, and Itacoatiara; and then, turning from the King of Rivers to his tributary, the Madeira, follow the Madeira to the San Antonio falls in the heart of the South American continent. We drew over 23 feet, with this “Capella.” We were going to try what had never been attempted before by an ocean steamer. This, too, was pioneering. I also was on an adventure, going Our nearness to land stirs up some old dreads in our minds also. We discuss those dreads again, though with more concern than we did at Swansea. Over the bows is now the prelude. We have heard many unsettling legends of yellow fever, malaria, blackwater fever, dysentery, and beri-beri. The mates, looking for land, swear they were fools to come a voyage like this. They ought to have known better. The Doctor, who does not always smile when he is amused, advises us not to buy a white sun umbrella at Para, but a black one; then it will do for the funerals. “Land O!” That was the Skipper’s own perfunctory cry. He had saved his pound of tobacco. It was two in the afternoon. There was America. I rediscovered it with some difficulty. All I could see was a mere local thickening of the horizon, as though the pen which drew the faint line dividing the world ahead into an upper and a nether opalescence had run a little freely at one point. That thickening of the horizon was the island of Monjui. Soon, though, there was a palpable something athwart our course. The skyline heightened into a bluish barrier, which, as we approached still nearer, broke into sections. The chart showed that a series of low wooded islands skirted the mainland. Yet It was not easy to make out, before sunrise, what it was we had come to. I saw a phantom and indeterminate country; but as though we guessed it was suspicious and observant, and its stillness a device, we moved forward slowly and noiselessly, as a thief at an entrance. Low level cliffs were near to either beam. The cliffs might have been the dense residuum of the night. The night had been precipitated from the sky, which was clearing and brightening. Our steamer was between banks of these iron shades. Suddenly the sunrise ran a long band of glowing saffron over the shadow to port, and the vague summit became remarkable with a parapet of black filigree, crowns and fronds of palms and strange trees showing in rigid patterns of ebony. A faint air then moved from off shore as though under the impulse of the pouring light. It was heated and Full day came quickly to show me the reality of one of my early visions, and I suppose I may not expect many more such minutes as I spent when watching from the “Capella’s” bridge the forest of the Amazon take shape. It was soon over. The morning light brimmed at the forest top, and spilled into the river. The channel filled with sunshine. There it was then. In the northern cliff I could see even the boughs and trunks; they were veins of silver in a mass of solid chrysolite. This forest had not the rounded and dull verdure of our own woods in midsummer, with deep bays of shadow. It was a sheer front, uniform, shadowless, and astonishingly vivid. I thought then the appearance of the forest was but a local feature, and so gazed at it for what it would show me next. It had nothing else to show me. Clumps of palms threw their fronds above the forest roof in some places, or a giant exogen raised a dome; but that was all. Those strong characters in the growth were seen only in Occasionally the river narrowed, or we passed close to one wall, and then we could see the texture of the forest surface, the microstructure of the cliff, though we could never look into it for more than a few yards, except where, in some places, habitations were thrust into the base of the woods, as in lower caverns. An exuberant wealth of forms built up that forest which was so featureless from a little distance. The numerous palms gave grace and life to the faÇade, for their plumes flung in noble arcs from tall and slender columns, or sprayed directly from the ground in emerald fountains. The rest was inextricable confusion. Vines looped across the front of green, binding the forest with cordage, and the roots of epiphytes dropped from upper boughs, like hanks of twine. In some places the river widened into lagoons, and we seemed to be in a maze of islands. Canoes shot across the waterways, and river schooners, shaped very like junks, with high poops and blue and red sails, were diminished beneath the verdure, betraying the great height of the woods. Because of its longitudinal extension, fining down to a point in the distance, the elevation of the forest, when uncontrasted, looked much less than it really was. The scene was so luminous, still, and voiceless, it was so like a radiant mirage, or a vivid remembrance of an emotional dream got from books read and read again, that only the unquestionable verity We anchored just before breakfast, and a small launch flying a large Brazilian flag was soon fussing at our gangway. The Brazilian customs men boarded us, and the official who was left in charge to overlook the “Capella” while we remained was a tall and majestic Latin with dark eyes of such nobility and brooding melancholy that it never occurred to me that our doctor, who has travelled much, was other than a fellow with a dull Anglo-Saxon mind when he removed some loose property to his cabin and locked his door, before he went ashore. So I left my field glasses on the ice-chest; and that was the last I saw of them. Yet that fellow had such lovely hair, as the ladies would say, and his smile and his courtesy were fit for kings. He carried a scented pink handkerchief and wore patent leather boots. Our surgeon had but a faint laugh when these explanations were made to him, taking my hand fondly, and saying he loved little children. Para, a flat congestion of white buildings and red roofs in the sun, was about a mile beyond our anchorage, over the port bow; and as its name has been to me one that had the appeal of the world not ours, like Tripoli of Barbary, Macassar, the Marquesas, There was an esplanade, shadowed by an avenue of mangoes. We crossed that, and went along hot narrow streets, by blotched and shabby walls, to the office to which our ship was consigned. We met a fisherman carrying a large turtle by a flipper. We came to a dim cool warehouse. There, some negroes and half-breeds were lazily hauling packages in the shadows. It had an office railed off where a few English clerks, in immaculate white, overlooked a staff of natives. The warehouse had a strange and memorable odour, evasive, sweet, and pungent, as barbaric a note as I found in Para, and I understood at once I had come to a place where there were things I did not know. I felt almost timorous and yet compelled when I sniffed at those shadows; though what the eye saw in the squalid streets of the riverside, where brown folk stood regarding us carelessly from openings in the walls, I had thought no more than a little interesting. What length of time we should have in Belem was uncertain, but presently the Skipper, looking most Outside the office was a small public square where grew palms which ran flexible boles, swaying with the weight of their crowns, clear above the surrounding buildings, shadowing them except in one place, where the front of a ruinous church showed, topped by a crucifix. The church, a white and dilapidated structure, was hoary with ficus and other plants which grew from ledges and crevices. Through the crowns of the palms the sunlight fell in dazzling lathes and partitions, chequering the stones. An ox-cart stood beneath. The Paraenses, passing by at a lazy gait—which After lunch some disappointment and irresolution crept into our holiday....There had been a time—but that was when Para was only in a book; that was when its mere printed name was to me a token of the tropics. You know the place I mean. Well, here I was, placed by the ordinary moves of circumstance in the very place the name of which once had been to me like a chord of that music none hears but oneself. I stood in Para, outside a picture postcard shop. Electric cars were bumping down a narrow street. The glitter of a cheap jeweller’s was next to the stationer’s; and on the other side was a vendor of American and Parisian boots. There have been changes in Para since Bates wrote his idylls of the forest. We two travellers, after ordering some red earthenware chatties, went to find Bates’ village of Nazareth. In 1850 it was a mile from the town. It is part of the town now, and an electric tram took us there, a tram which drove vultures off the line as it bumped along. The heat was a serious burden. The many dogs, which found energy enough to limp out of the way of the car only when at the point of death, were thin and diseased, and most unfortunate to our nice eyes. The Brazilian men of better quality we passed were dressed in black cloth suits, and one mocked the equator with a silk hat and yellow boots. I set down these things as the tram showed them. The evident pride and hauteur, too, of these We passed through by-ways, where naked brown babies played before the doors. We happened upon Near the agent’s office we met an English shipping clerk, and he took us into a drink shop, and sat us at a marble-topped table having gilded iron legs, and called for gin tonics. We began to tell He was a pallid fellow with a contemplative smile, and with weary eyes and tired movements. “I know all that,” he said. “It’s a bit of a hole. Still—You’d be surprised. There’s a lot here you don’t see at first. It’s big. All out there—he waved his arm west inclusively—it’s a world with no light yet. You get lost in it. But you’re going up. You’ll see. The other end of the forest is as far from the people in the streets here as London is—it’s farther—and they know no more about it. I was like you when I first came. I gave the place a week, and then reckoned I knew it near enough. Now, I’m—well, I’m half afraid of it ... not afraid of anything I can see ... I don’t know. There’s something dam strange about it. Something you never can find out. It’s something that’s been here since the beginning, and it’s too big and strong for us. It waits its time. I can feel it now. Look at those palm trees, outside. Don’t they look as if they’re waiting? What are they waiting for? You get that feeling here in the afternoon when you can’t get air, and the rain clouds are banking up round the woods, and nothing moves. ‘Lord,’ said a fellow to me when I first came, ‘tell us about Peckham. But for the spicy talk about yellow fever I’d think I was dead and waiting wide awake for the judgment day.’ That’s just the feeling. As if something dark was coming and you couldn’t move. There the forest is, all round us. Nobody knows what’s at the back of it. Men leave Para, “Down by the square one day I saw an old boy in white ducks and a sun helmet having a shindy with the sentry at the barracks. The old fellow was kicking up a dust. He was English, and I suppose he thought the sentry would understand him, if he shouted. English and Americans do. “You have to get into the road here, when you approach the barracks. It’s the custom. The sentry always sends you off the pavement. The old chap was quite red in the face about it. And the things he was saying! Lucky for him the soldier didn’t know what he meant. So I went over, as he was an Englishman, and told him what the sentry wanted. ‘What,’ said the man, ‘walk in the road? Not me. I’d sooner go back.’ “Go back he did, too. I walked with him and we got rather pally. We came in here. We sat at that table in the corner. He said he was Captain Davis, of Barry. Ever heard of him? He said he had brought out a shallow-draught river boat, and he was taking her up the Rio Japura. The way he talked! Do you know the Japura? Well, it’s a deuce of a way from here. But that old captain talked—he talked like a child. He was so obstinate about it. He was going to take that boat up the Japura, and you’d have thought it was above Boulter’s Lock. Then he began to swear about the dagoes. “The old chap got quite wild again when he thought of that soldier. He was a little man, nothing “He told me he knew a man in Barry who’d got a fine pub—a little gold-mine. He said there was a stuffed bear at the pub and it brought lots of customers. Seemed to think I must know the place. He said he was going to try to get an alligator for the chap who kept the pub. The alligator could stand on its hind legs at the other side of the door, with an electric bulb in its mouth, like a lemon. That was his fine idea. He reckoned that would bring customers. Then old Davis started to fidget about. I began to think he wanted to tell me something, and I wondered what the deuce it was. I thought it was money. It generally is. At last he told me. He wanted one of those dried Indian heads for that pub. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘The Indians kill somebody, and make his head smaller than a baby’s, and the hair hangs down all round.’ “Have you ever seen one of those heads? The Indians bone ’em, and stuff ’em with spice and “But I tried to persuade him to let the head go. The Government has stopped that business, you know. Got a bit too thick. If you ordered a head, the Johnnies would just go out and have somebody’s napper. “I missed old Davis after that. I was transferred to Manaos, up river. I don’t know what became of him. It was nearly a year when I came back to Para. Our people had had the clearing of that boat old Davis brought out, and I found some of his papers, still unsettled. I asked about him, in a general way, and found he hadn’t arrived. His tug had been back twice. When it was here last it seemed the native skipper explained Davis went ashore, when returning, at a place where they touched for rubber. He went into the village and didn’t come back. Well, it seems the skipper waited. No Davis. So he tootled his whistle and went on up stream, because the river was falling, and he had some more stations to do in the season. He was at the village again in a few days, though, and Davis wasn’t there then. The tug captain said the village was deserted, and he supposed the old chap had gone down river in another boat. But he’s not back yet. The boss said the fever had got him, somewhere. That’s the way things go here. “A month ago an American civil engineer touched here, and had to wait for a boat for New York. He’d been right up country surveying for some job or another, Peru way. I went up to his “It was a little dried head, no bigger than a cricket ball, and about the same colour. Very like an Indian’s too. The features were quite plain, and there was a tiny wart over the left eyebrow. ‘I bet you that’s thousands of years old,’ said the American. ‘I bet you it isn’t two,’ I said.” We returned to the steamer in the late afternoon, bringing with us two Brazilian pilots, who were to take us as far as Itacoatiara. We sailed next morning for the interior. Para, like all the towns on the Amazon, has but one way out of it. There is a continent behind Para, but you cannot go that way; when you leave the city you must take the river. Para stands by the only entrance to what is now the greatest region of virgin tropics left in the world. Always at anchor off the city’s front are at least a dozen European steamers, most of them flying the red ensign. A famous engineering contractor, also British, is busy constructing modern I crept within the mosquito curtain that night, and the still heated dark lay on my mind, the pressure of an unknown full of dread. I thought of the pale shipping clerk and his tired smile, and of Captain Davis, his face no bigger than a cricket ball, and the same colour, with a wart over his eye; and recalled the anxious canvass I had heard made for news of sickness up-river. A ship had passed outwards that morning, the consul told us, with twenty men on board down with fever. And Thorwaldsen. I forgot to tell you about Thorwaldsen. He was a trader, and last rainy season he took his vessel up some far backwater, beyond Manaos, with his wife and his little daughter. News had just come from nowhere to Para that his wife had died in childbirth in the wilds, and Thorwaldsen had been murdered; but nothing was known of his daughter. There it was. I did not know the Thorwaldsens. But the trader’s little girl who might then be alone in the gloom of the jungle with savages, helped to keep me awake. And the wife, that fair-haired Swede; she was in the alien wilderness, beyond all gentlehood, when her time came. I could see two mosquitoes doing their best to work backwards through the curtain mesh. They were after me, the emissaries of the unknown, and their pertinacity was astonishing. “Jan. 9. The ‘Capella’ left Para at three o’clock this morning, and continued up the Para River. Daylight found us in a wide brownish stream, with the shores low and indistinguishable on either beam. When the sun grew hot, the jungle came close in; it was often so close that we could see the nests of wasps on the trees, like grey shields hanging there. Between the Para River and the Amazon the waters dissipate into a maze of serpenting ditches. In width these channels usually are no more than canals, but they were deep enough to float our big tramp steamer. They thread a multitude of islands, islands overloaded with a massed growth “The dilated loom of the rains, the cloud shapes so continental that they occupied, where they stood not so far away, all the space between the earth and sky, bulged over the forest at the end of every view. The heat was luscious; but then I had nothing to do but to look on from a hammock under the awning. The foliage which was pressed out over the water, not many yards from the hurrying ‘Capella,’ had a closeness of texture astonishing, and even awful, to one who knew only the thin woods of the north. It ascended directly from the water’s edge, sometimes out of the water, and we did not often see its foundation. There were no shady aisles and glades. The sight was stopped on a front of polished emerald, a congestion of stiff leaves. The air was still. Individual sprays and fronds, projecting from the mass in parabolas with flamboyant abandon and poise, were as rigid as metallic and enamelled shapes. The diversity of forms, and especially the number and variety of the palms, so overloaded an unseen standing that the parapets of the woods occasionally leaned outwards to form an arcade above our masts. One should not call this the jungle; it was even a soft and benignant Eden. This was the forest I really wished to find. Often the heavy parapets of the woods were upheld on long colonnades of grey palm boles; or the whole “There was not a sound but the noise of our intruding steamer. Occasionally we brushed a projecting spray, or a vine pendent from a cornice. We proved the forest then. In some shallow places were regiments of aquatic grasses, bearing long plumes. There were trees which stood in the water on a tangle of straight pallid roots, as though on stilts. This up-burst of intense life so seldom showed the land to which it was fast, and the side rivers and paranas were so many, that I could believe the forest afloat, an archipelago of opaque green vapours. Our heavy wash swayed and undulated the aquatic plants and grasses, as though disturbing the fringe of those green clouds which clung to the water because of their weight in a still air. “There was seldom a sign of life but the infrequent snowy herons, and those curious brown fowl, the ciganas. The sun was flaming on the majestic assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by our steamer, coiled over us in a lazy flux. I did not hear the bell calling to meals. We all hung over the ‘Capella’s’ side, gaping, like a lot of boys. “Sometimes we passed single habitations on the water side. Ephemeral huts of palm-leaves were forced down by the forest, which overhung them, to wade on frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on the jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with no show of emotion, “There was a question at night as to whether our pilots would anchor or not. They decided to go on. We did not go the route of Bates, via Breves, but took the Parana de Buyassa on our way to the Amazon. It was night when we got to the Parana, and but for the trailing lights, the fairy mooring lines of habitations in the woods, and what the silent explosions of lightning revealed of great heads of trees, startlingly close and monstrous, as though watching us in silent and intent regard, we saw nothing of it.” Once I knew a small boy, and on a summer day too much in the past now to be recalled without some private emotion, he said to his father, on the beach of a popular East Anglian resort, “And where is the sea?” He stood then, for the first time, where the sea, by all the promises of pictures and poems, should have been breaking on its cold grey crags. “The sea?” said the father, in astonishment, “why, there it is. Didn’t you know?” And that father, being an exact man, there beyond appeal the sea was. And what was it? A discoloured wash, of mean limit, which flopped wearily on some shabby sands littered with people and luncheon papers. Such a flat, stupid, and leaden disillusion surely never before fell on the upturned, bright and expectant soul of a young human, who, I can vouch, began life, like most others, believing the noblest of everything. It was an ocean which was inferior even to the bathing-machines, and could be seen but in division when that child, walking along the rank of those boxes on wheels, peeped between them. You will have noticed with what simple indifference the people who really know what they call the truth will shatter an illusion we have long cherished; though, as we alone see our private dreams, those honest folk cannot be blamed for poking their feet through fine pictures they did not know were there. I had a picture of the Amazon, which I had long cherished. I was leaning to-day over the bulwarks of the “Capella,” watching the jungle pass. The “We shall be on the Amazon soon,” I said hopefully, to the doctor. “We have been on it for hours,” he replied. And that is how I got there. But the Amazon is not seen, any more than is the sea, at the first glance. What the eye first gathers, is, naturally (for it is but an eye), nothing like commensurate with your own image of the river. The mind, by suggestive symbols, builds something portentous, a vague and tremendous idea. What I saw was only a very swift and opaque yellow flood, not much broader, it seemed to me, than the Thames at Gravesend, and the monotonous green of the forest. It was all I saw for a considerable time. I see something different now. It is not easily explained merely as a yellow river, with a verdant elevation on either hand, and over it a blue sky. “Jan. 10. The torrid morning, tempered by a cooling breeze which followed us up river, was soon overcast. Disappointingly narrow at first, the Amazon broadened later, but not to one’s conception of its magnitude. But the greatness of this stream, I have already learned, dawns upon you in time, and if you sufficiently endure. It persists about you, this forest and this river, like the stark desolation of the sea. The real width of the river is not often seen because of the islands which fringe its banks, many of them of considerable size. The side channels, or paranas-miris, between the islands and the shores, are used in preference to the main stream by the native sailing craft, to avoid the strength of the current. We had the river to ourselves. The ‘Capella’ was taken by the pilots, first over to one side and then to the other, dodging the set of the stream. The forest has changed. It has now a graceless and savage aspect when we are close to it. There are not so many palms. At a little distance the growth appears a mass of spindly oaks and beeches, though with a more vivid and lighter green foliage. But when near it shows itself alien enough, a front of nameless and congested leaves. I suppose it would be more than a hundred feet in altitude. Sometimes the forest stands in the water. At other times a yellow bank shows, a narrow strip under the trees, rarely more than four feet high, and strewn with the bleaching “Early in the forenoon sections of the forest vanished in grey rain squalls, though elsewhere the sun was brilliant. The plane of the dingy yellow flood was variegated with transient areas of bright sulphur and chocolate. We were hugging the right bank, and so saw the mouth of the Xingu as we passed. At midday some hills ahead, the Serra de Almerim, gave us relief from the dead level of the wearying green walls. The sight of those blue heights with their flat tops—they were perhaps no more than 1000 feet above the forest—curiously stimulated the eye and lifted one’s humour, long depressed by the everlasting sameness of the prospect and the heat. Later in the day we passed more of the welcome hills, the Serra de Maranuaqua, “The river and the forest are best at sundown. The serene level rays discovered the woods. We saw trees then distinctly, almost as a surprise. Till then the forest had been but a gloom by day. Behind us was the jungle front. It changed from green to gold, a band of light between the river and the darkling sky. Some greater trees emerged majestically. It was the first time that day we had really seen the features of the jungle. It was but a momentary revelation. The clouds were reflectors, throwing amber lights below. In the hills astern of us ravines hitherto unsuspected caught the transitory glory. The dark heights had many polished facets. One range, round-shouldered and wooded, I thought resembled the promontories about Clovelly, and for a few minutes the Amazon had the bright eyes of a friend. On a ridge of those “We continued cruising along the south shore. The usual pulsations of lightning made night intermittent; the forest was not more than 150 feet from our vessel, and sitting under the awning the trees kept jumping out of the night, startlingly near. The night was still and hot, and my cabin lamp had attracted myriads of insects through the door which had been left open for air. A heap of crawlers lay dead on the desk, and the bunk curtain was smothered with grotesque winged shapes, flies, cicadas, mantis, phasmas, moths, beetles, and mosquitoes.” Next morning found us running along the north shore. Parrots were squawking in the woods alongside. A large alligator floated close by the ship, its jaws open in menace. At breakfast time a strip of white beach came into view on the opposite coast, a place in that world of three colours on which one’s tired eyes could alight and rest. That was Santarem. Sharp hills rose immediately behind the town. The town is in a saddle of the hills, slipping down to the river in terraces of white, chrome, and blue houses. The Rio Tapajos, a black water tributary and a noble river, enters the main stream by Santarem, its dark flood sharply contrasted with the tawny Amazon. But the Amazon sweeps right across its mouth in a masterful way. There is a definite line dividing black from yellow water, and then no more Tapajos. We passed numerous floating islands (Ilhas de Caapim) and trees adrift, evidence, the pilots said, that the river was rising. These grass islands are a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush pastures adrift. Some of them are so large it is difficult to believe they are really afloat till they come alongside. Then, if the river is at all broken by a breeze, the meadow plainly undulates. This floating cane and grass grows in the sheltered bays and quiet paranas-miris, for though the latter are navigable side-channels of the river in the rainy season, in the dry they are merely isolated swamps. But when the river is in flood the earth is washed away from the roots of this marsh growth, and it moves off, a flourishing, mobile field, often twenty feet in thickness. Such islands, when large, can be dangerous to small craft. Small flowers blossom on these aquatic fields, which shelter snakes and turtles, and sometimes the peixe-boi, the manatee. Obydos was in sight in the afternoon, but presently we lost it in a violent squall of rain. The squall came down like a gun burst, and nearly carried away the awnings. It was evening before we were abreast of that most picturesque town I saw on the river. Obydos rests on one of the rare Amazon cliffs of rufus clay and sandstone. The forest mounts the hill above it, and the scattered red roofs of the town show in a surf of foliage. The cliffs glowed in cream and cherry tints, with a cascade of vines falling over them, though not reaching the shore. The dainty little houses sit high in a loop of the cliffs. We left the city behind, with But Obydos and sunsets and rain squalls, and the fireflies which flit about the dark ship at night in myriads, tiny blue and yellow glow-lamps which burn with puzzling inconstancy, as though being switched on and off, though they help me with this narrative, yet candour compels me to tell you that they take up more space in this book than they do in the land of the Amazon. They were incidental and small to us, dominated by the shadowing presence of the forest. We have been on the river nearly a week. But our steamer’s decks, even by day, are deserted now. We lean overside no longer looking at this strange country. The heat is the most noteworthy fact, and drives every one to what little leeward to the glare there is. Our cook, who is a salamander of a fellow, and has no need to fear the possibilities of his future life—though I do not remember he ever told me he was really thoughtful for them—feeling a little uncomfortable one day when at work on our dinner, glanced at his thermometer, and fled in terror. It registered 134°. He begged me to go in and verify it, and once inside I was hardly any time doing that. We have such days, without a breath of air, and two vivid walls of still jungle, and between them a yellow river serpentining under the torrid sun, and a silence which is like deafness. Under the shadow of the awning aft, in his deck chair, the Doctor is preparing our defences by This is how it was. Donkey, in spite of instructions, and I know how emphatic the Skipper usually is, slept on deck away from his mosquito bar a few nights ago. He said at the time that he wasn’t afraid of them little fanciful biters, or something of the kind. I have no doubt the Doctor would have had some trouble in making clear to Donkey’s understanding exactly what are the links, delicate but sure, between mosquitoes and dissolution and decay in man. So he showed Donkey a picture. I wish I knew what it was—but the surgeon preserves the usual professional reticence in the affairs of his patients. For now Donkey is convinced it is very bad to sleep outside his curtain, and when he tries to tell us how unwholesome such sleeping can be, just at the point when he gets most entertaining his vocabulary wears into holes and tatters. You could not conjure that man from his curtain now, no, not if you showed him, in a vision, We require now such childish laughter at each other’s discomfiture to break the spell of this land into which we are sinking deeper. Still the forest glides by. It is a shadow on the mind. It stands over us, an insistent riddle, every morning when I look out from my bunk. I watch it all day, drawn against my will; and as day is dying it is still there, paramount, enigmatic, silent, its question implied in its mere persistence—meeting me again on the next day, still with its mute interrogation. We have been passing it for nearly a week. It should have convinced me by now that it is something material. But why should I suppose it is that? We have had no chance to examine it. It does not look real. It does not remind me of anything I know of vegetation. When you sight your first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye. The mind is not deceived by what merely shows. Wherever the steamer The jungle gains nothing, and loses nothing, at noon. It is only a sombre thought still, as at midnight. It is still, at noon, so obscure and dumb a presence that I suspect the sun does not illuminate it so much as reveal our steamer in its midst. We are revealed instead. The presence sees us advancing into its solitudes, a small, busy, and impudent intruder. But the forest does not greet, and does not resent us. It regards us with the vacancy of large composure, with a lofty watchfulness which has no need to show its mind. I think it knows our fears of its domain. It knows the secret of our fate. It makes no sign. The pallid boles of the trees, the sentinels by the water with the press of verdure behind them, stand, as we pass, like soundless exclamations. So when we go close in shore I find myself listening for a chance whisper, a careless betrayal of the secret. There is not a murmur in the host; though once a white bird flew yauping from a tree, and then it seemed the desolation had been surprised into a cry, a prolonged and melancholy admonition. Following that the silence was deepened, as though an indiscretion were regretted. A sustained and angry protest at our presence would have been natural; but not that infinite line of lofty trees, darkly superior, silently watching us pass. One night we anchored off the south shore in twenty fathoms, but close under the trees. At That morning was no inducement to exertion, but when an Indian paddled his canoe alongside our anchored steamer the Doctor and the Purser got into it, and away. The hot earth would be a change from hot iron. Besides, I was eager for my first walk in equatorial woods. Our steamer was anchored below the town, off a small campo, or clearing. The native swashed his canoe into a margin of floating plants, which had rounded leaves and inflated stalks, like buoys. I looked at them, The clearing was a small bay in the jungle. A few statuesque silk-cotton trees, buttressed giants, were isolated in its centre. A bunch of dun-coloured cattle with twisted horns stood beneath them, though the trees gave them no shade, for each grey We approached the wall to the west, as a path went through the harsh swamp herbage that way, and entered the jungle. The sun went out almost at once. It was cellar cool under the trees. We had no idea where the path would lead us. That did not matter. No doubt it would be the place desired. The Doctor walked ahead, and I could just see his helmet, the way was so narrow and uncertain. I kept missing the helmet, for everything in the half-lighted solitude was strange. One could not keep an eye on a white hat on one’s first equatorial ramble, and only when the quiet was heavy enough to be a burden did I look up from a puzzling leaf, or some busy ants, to find myself alone. There was a feeling that you were being watched; but there were no eyes, when you glanced round quickly. Do you remember that dream which sometimes came when we were children? There were, I remember, empty corridors prolonging into the shadows of a nameless house where not a sign showed of what was there. We went on, and no words we could think of when we woke could tell what we felt when we looked into those long silent 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, buttressed roots of the tree formed a steep climb to begin with, but the buttresses 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 butterfly, a black and yellow fellow, which settled near us, slowly open and shut his wings, I jumped, because it felt as though a 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 butterflies, which had transparent wings with opaque crimson spots, such as might have been served Titania 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 embarrassing 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 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 passage 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 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 larvÆ. 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 grass, 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 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 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 partitioned 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 grass 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 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 breasts. 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 shells. 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 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 cocked 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 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 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-MamorÉ railway undertaking had placed a depÔt a little to the west of the village. The Doctor and I spent many memorable days in its neighbourhood, butterfly-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 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 butterflies are abroad, and the grasshoppers 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—nobody knows what; not even the Royal Geographical Society. One heard of a large and mysterious lake a day’s journey inland. Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody cared. One old man once, when hunting, saw its mirror through The foreshore 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, grass-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 foreshore were the cabins, of mud and wood, of the negroes. Beyond the town, the roads run through the clearings, and end on the forest. 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, 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 chink a yellow light streamed, and traced shapes on the lurid walls and roof which narrowly The day before we left for the Madeira we took aboard sixty head of cattle. They were wild things, 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 upanchored next morning; and 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 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 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 grass 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 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 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 latitude 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 |
|
