Chapter II (2)

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. You can picture it. Paths that go at noon but a little way into the jungle which overshadows an isolated community of strange but kindly folk, paths that end in a twilight stillness; ardent hues, flowers of vanilla, warm rain, a luscious and generative earth, fireflies in the scented dusk of gardens; and mystery--every outlook disappearing in the dark of the unknown.

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 Latins, was a surprise to one of a stronger race. We stopped at a street corner, and this was Nazareth. Bates' pleasant hamlet is now the place of Para's fashionable homes--pleasant still, though the overhead tram cables, and the electric light standards which interrupt the avenues of trees, place you there, now your own turn comes to look for the romance of the tropics, in another century. But the villas are in heliotrope, primrose, azure, and rose, bowered in extravagant arbours of papaws mangoes, bananas, and palms, with shrubberies beneath of feathery mimosas, and cassias with orange and crimson blooms. And my last walk ashore was in Swansea High Street in the winter rain! From Nazareth's main street the side turnings go down to the forest. For, in spite of its quays, its steamers, and its electric trams, Para is but built in a larger clearing of the wilderness. The jungle stood at the bottom of all suburban streets, a definite city wall. The spontaneity and savage freedom of the plant life in this land of alternate hot sun and warm showers at last blurred and made insignificant to me the men who braved it in silk hats and broadcloth there, and the trams, and the jewellers' shops, for my experience of vegetation was got on my knees in a London suburb, praying things to come out of the cold mud. Here, I began to suspect, they besieged us, quick and turbulent, an exhaustible army, ready to reconquer the foothold man had hardly won, and to obliterate his works.

We passed through by-ways, where naked brown babies played before the doors. We happened upon the cathedral, and went on to the little dock where native vessels rested on garbage, the tide being out. Vultures pulled at stuff beneath the bilges. The crews, more Indian than anything, and men of better body than the sallow fellows in the town, sprawled on the hot stones of the quays and about the decks. There was a huge negress, arms akimbo, a shapeless monument in black indiarubber draped in cotton print, who talked loudly with a red boneless mouth to two disregarding Indians sitting with their backs to a wall. She had a rabbit's foot, mounted in silver, hanging between her dugs. The schooners, ranged in an arcade, were rigged for lateen sails, very like Mediterranean craft. The forest was a narrow neutral tinted ribbon far beyond. The sky was blue, the texture of porcelain. The river was yellow. And I was grievously disappointed; yet if you put it to me I cannot say why. There was something missing, and I don't know what. There was something I could not find; but as it is too intangible a matter for me to describe even now, you may say, if you like, that the fault was with me, and not with Para. We stood in a shady place, and the doctor, looking down at his hand, suddenly struck it. "Let us go," he said. He showed me the corpse of a mosquito. "Have you ever seen the yellow fever chap?" the Doctor asked. "That is he." We left.

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 him what we thought of Para. It did not seem much of a place. It was neither here nor there.

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, going up river. We have a drink in here, and they go up river, and don't come back.

"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 of him, and his face was screwed up as if he was always annoyed about something. You have to take things as they come, here, and let it go. But this Davis man was an irritable old boy, and most of his talk was about money. He said he was through with the boat running jobs. No more of 'em. It was as bare as boards. Nothing to be made at the game, he said. Over his left eye he had a funny hairy wart, a sort of knob, and whenever he got excited it turned red. I may say he let me pay for all the drinks. I reckon he was pretty close with his money.

"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 gums, and let 'em dry in the sun. They don't look nice. I've seen one or two.

"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 hotel with the fellows to see him one evening. He was on his knees packing his trunks. 'Say, boys,' he said, sitting on the floor, 'I brought a whole lot of truck from way up, and now it hasn't got a smile for me.' He offered me his collection of butterflies. Then the Yankee picked up a ball of newspaper off the floor, and began to peel it. 'This goes home,' he said. 'Have you seen anything like that? I bet you haven't.' He held out the opened packet in his hand, and there was a brown core to it. 'I reckon that is thousands of years old,' said the American.

"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 wharves there; and Thames tugs and mudhoppers, flying the Brazilian flag, as the law insists, but bawling London compliments as they pass your ship, help the native schooners with their rakish lateen sails, blue and scarlet, to make the anchorage brisk and lively. Looking out from the "Capella's" bridge she appeared to be within a lagoon. The lake was elliptical, and so large it was a world for the eye to range in. It was bound by a low barrier of forest, a barrier distant enough to lose colour, nature, and significance. Para, white and red, lay reflecting the sunset from many facets in the south-west, with a cheerful array of superior towers and spires. From the ship Para looked big, modern, and prosperous; and with those vast rounded clouds of the rains assembling and mounting over the bright city, and brooding there, impassive and dark, but with impending keels lustrous with the burnish of copper and steel, and seeing a rainbow curving down from one cloud over the city's white front, I, being a new-comer, and with a pardonable feeling of exhilaration which was of my own well-being in a new and a wide and radiant place, thought of man there as a conqueror who had overcome the wilderness, builded him a city, bridled the exuberance of a savage land, and directed the sap and life, born in a rich soil of ardent sun and rain, into the forms useful to him. So I entered the chart-room, and looked with a new interest on the chart of the place. Then I felt less certain of the conqueror and his taming bridle. I saw that this lagoon in which the "Capella" showed large and important was but a point in an immense area of tractless islands and meandering waterways, a region intricate, and, the chart confessed, little known. The coast opposite the city, which I had taken for mainland, was the trivial Ihla des Oncas. The main channel of the river was beyond that island, with the coast of Marajo for the farther shore; and Marajo also was but an island, though as large as Wales. The north channel of the Amazon was beyond again, with more islands, about which the chart confessed less knowledge. One of the pilots was with me; and when I spoke of those points in the ultimate Amazons, the alluring names on maps you read in England, here they were, at Para, just what they are at home, still vague and far, journeys thither to be reckoned by time; a shrug of the shoulders and a look of amusement; two months, Senhor, or perhaps three or four. The idea came slowly; but it dawned, something like the conception of astronomy's amplitudes, of the remoteness of the beyond of Amazonas, that new world I had just entered.

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 which topped our mast-heads. Our steamer was enclosed within resonant chasms, and the noise and incongruity of our progress awoke deep protests there.

"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 upper structure appeared based on low green arches, the pennate fronds of smaller palms flung direct from the earth.

"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, to watch us go by. Behind them was the impenetrable foliage. I thought of the precarious tenure on earth of these brown folk with some sadness, especially as the day was going. The easy dominance of the wilderness, and man's intelligent morsel of life resisting it, was made plain when we came suddenly upon one of his little shacks secreted among the aqueous roots of a great tree, cowering, as it were, between two of the giant's toes. Those brown babies on the jetties never cheered us. They watched us, serious and forlorn. Alongside their primitive hut were a few rubber trees, which we knew by their scars. Late in the afternoon we came to a large cavern in the base of the forest, a shadowy place where at last we did see a gathering of the folk. A number of little wooden crosses peeped above the floor in the hollow. The sundering floods and the forest do not always keep these folk from congregation, and the comfort of the last communion.

"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 Doctor was with me. I thought we were still on the Para River, and was waiting for our vessel to emerge from that stream, as through a narrow gate, dramatically, into the broad sunlight of the greatest river in the world, the king of rivers, the Amazon of my picture. We idly scanned the forest with binoculars, having nothing to do, and saw some herons, and the ciganas, and once a sloth which was hanging to a tree. Para, I felt, was as distant as London. The silence, the immobility of it all, and the pour of the tropic sun, were just beginning to be a little subduing. We had come already to the wilderness. There was, I thought, a very great deal of this forest; and it never varied.

"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. It would be difficult to find, except by luck, a word which would convey the immensity of the land of the Amazons, something of the aloofness and separation of the points of its extremes, with months and months of adventure between them. What a journey it would be from Ino in Bolivia, on the Rio Madre de Dios, to Conception in Colombia, on the Rio Putumayo; there is another "Odyssey" in a voyage like that. And think of the names of those places and rivers! When I take the map of South America now, and hold it with the estuary of the Amazon as its base, my thoughts are like those might be of a lost ant, crawling in and over the furrows and ridges of an exposed root as he regards all he may of the trunk rising into the whole upper cosmos of a spreading oak. The Amazon then looks to me, properly symbolical, as a monstrous tree, and its tributaries, paranas, furos, and igarapes, as the great boughs, little boughs, and twigs of its ascending and spreading ramifications, so minutely dissecting the continent with its numberless watercourses that the mind sees that dark region as an impenetrable density of green and secret leaves; which, literally, when you go there, is what you will find. You enter the leaves, and vanish. You creep about the region of but one of its branches, under a roof of foliage which stays the midday shine and lets it through to you in the dusk of the interior but as points of distant starlight. Occasionally, as we did upon a day, you see something like Santarem. There is a break and a change in the journey. Moving blindly through the maze of green, there, hanging in the clear day at the end of a bough, is a golden fruit.

* * * * *

"_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 skeletons of trees and entanglements of vine. There is rarely a sign of life. Once this morning a bird called in the woods when we were close. Butterflies are continually crossing the ship, and dragonflies and great wasps and hornets are hawking over us. The sight of one swallowtail butterfly, a big black and yellow fellow, sent the cook insane. The insect stayed its noble flight, poised over our hatch, and then came down to see what we were. It settled on a coil of rope, leisurely pulsing its wings. The cook, at the sight of this bold and bright being, sprang from the galley, and leaped down to the deck with a dish cloth. To our surprise he caught the insect, and explained with eagerness how that the shattered pattern of colours, which more than covered his gross palm, would improve his firescreen in a Rotterdam parlour.

"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, Velha Pobre, and Serras de Tapaiunaquara and Paranaquara, their cones, truncated pyramids, knolls and hog backs, ranging contrary to our course. Bates says some of them are bare, or covered only with a short herbage; but all those I examined with a good telescope had forest to the summits; though a few of the inferior heights, which stood behind the island of Jurupari (the island where dreams come at night) were grassy. Those cobalt prominences rose like precipitous islands from a green sea. We were the only spectators. One high range, as we passed, was veiled in a glittering mesh of rain. The river, after we left Jurupari, bent round, and brought the heights astern of us. The sun set.

"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 heights I could see the sky through some of its trees. The light quickly gave out, and it was night.

"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 a huge cumulus cloud resting over it, and the evening light on all.

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 deg.. 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 sounding a profound volume on tropical diseases. This gives us but little confidence; though, as to our surgeon, recently I overheard one fireman to another, "I tell yer the--doc's a Man. That's what he is." (This is the result of the gin with the quinine.) Yet, good man as he is, his book on the consequences of the tropics is so large that we fear we all cannot escape so many impediments to joy. But our health's guardian is careful we do not anticipate anything from peeps into the mysteries. He never leaves his big book about, much as some of us would like to see the pictures in it, after what the donkeyman told us.

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, Cardiff, and the fairy lights of all its dock hotels. I know that in the Doctor's book there is a picture of a negro who acquired, in a superb way, a wonderful form of elephantiasis, for the Doctor showed it to me once, as a treat, when he thought I was growing slack and bored.

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 drives the forest recedes, as does the sky at sea; but it never leaves us.

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 daybreak we stood over to the opposite bank. The river here was of great width, the north coast being low and indistinct. These tacks across stream look so purposeless, in a place where there are no men and all the water looks the same. You go over for nothing. But this morning, high above the land ahead, some specks were seen drifting like fragments of burnt paper, the sport of an idle and distant wind. Those drifting dots were urubus, the vultures, generally the first sign that a settlement is near. To come upon a settlement upon the Amazons is like landfall at sea. It brings all on deck. And there, at last, was Itacoatiara or Serpa. From one of the infrequent, low, ferruginous cliffs of this river the jungle had been cleared, and on that short range of modest, undulating heights which displaced the green palisades with soft glowings of rose, cherry, and orange rock, the sight escaped to a disorder of arboured houses, like a disarray of little white cubes; Serpa was, in appearance, half a basketful of white bricks shot into a portico of the forest.

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, and indeed at the least thing, as keenly as though we were now going to land in the moon. Nothing should escape me; the colour of the mud, the water tepid to my hand, the bronze canoeman in his pair of old cotton pants split just where they should have been scrupulous, and the weeds and grass. I would drain my tropics to the last precious drop. I myself was seeing what I had thought others lucky to have seen. It was like being born into the world as an understanding adult. We got to a steep bank of red clay, fissured by the heat, and as hard as brickwork. Green and brown lizards whisked before us as we broke the quiet. From the top of the bank the anchored steamer looked a little stranger. Aboard her, and she is a busy village. Now she appeared but a mark I did not recognise in that reticent solitude. The Amazon was an immensity of water, a plain of burnished silver, where headlands, islands, and lines of cliff were all cut in one level mass of emerald veined with white. The canoe going downstream appeared to dissolve in candent vapour. Cloudland low down over the forest to the south, a far disorder of violet heights, waiting to fill the sky at sunset and to shock our unimportance then with convulsions of blue flames, did not seem more aloof and inaccessible to me than our immediate surroundings.

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 trunk was as bare of branches for sixty feet of its length as a stone column. The wall of the jungle was quite near, and as I stood watching it intently, I could hear but the throb of my own life. The faint sibilation of insects was only as if, in the silence, you heard the sharp rays of the sun impinge on the earth; your finer ear caught that sound when you forgot the ring and beat of your body. It was something below mere silence.

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 aisles of the house without a name; for we knew something was there; but there was no telling what the thing would be like when it showed. That is your sensation in a first walk in a Brazilian forest.

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 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 passage 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 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 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 lustrous 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.