Chapter XX: Struggling Down to Georgetown (1)

Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a river that had changed its name from the Mahú to the Ireng while we were crossing it, strolled through a bit of bone-dry, bunch-grass prairie, and turned in at the first house. We could scarcely have missed it, for there was not another for many miles within the colony. Hart had built it himself, with the help of his “siwashes,” as he called the Indian boys who made up his indefinite retinue,—a temporary structure in the approved style and only available material of the region, the walls of brush and mud, an earth floor, and a thick, top-heavy roof of palm-leaves. Later on he planned to build a real house a few miles up the river. Cow-hides, worth nothing whatever in this region, but which his employees were obliged to turn in to prove that an animal was dead, were used for every imaginable purpose,—as doormats, wind-shields, rugs, even to stand on down at the “old swimming-hole” where we took a dip every night, though _pirainhas_ abounded and an alligator had recently eaten Hart’s best dog.

He lived as everyone does and must in those parts, with certain improvements of American ingenuity. A fire built on the ground was his cook-stove, though he made a kind of bread-cake in an iron pot turned into an oven, the only bread in all that region. We, too, ate _farinha_, however, either dry or wet down with beef broth. This Brazilian staff of life tastes exactly like sawdust, but swells to several times it original size and is very filling and evidently nourishing. Then his Indian boys cut up dried beef and boiled it; now and then Hart let go a gun at a chicken, and occasionally a steer was killed, when everyone—neighbors, servants, Indians, dogs, chickens, and buzzards—gorged themselves for a day on fresh meat, after which the rest was cut into strips, salted, and sun-dried. The dessert common to all that region was “coalhado,” milk turned sour and thick as pudding and eaten with sugar. Then there were plenty of eggs, and milk without limit was to be had for the milking, since Hart already had hundreds of cattle, as well as many horses, few of which he saw once a month. Hammocks hung under the long protruding roof, as well as inside the house, and a cool breeze was always blowing across the savannahs, as the British call what the rest of South America knows as _campo_ or _pampa_, in this region between three and four hundred feet above sea-level.

Hart’s closest companions were a pair of hounds, now with a litter of pups. As the cur dogs of the Indians make a great hullabaloo at sight of a white man, so breed dogs are at once friendly with an Englishman or an American, but will not let an unknown Indian approach the house while the master is away and never make friends with the aborigines. About the hut hovered three dog-like Macuxy Indian boys, who did all the odds and ends of work and lived on the odds and ends of beef and _farinha_, neither getting nor expecting any wages, except a place they might call home. They hung their hammocks under a thatched roof on legs some distance away and now and then received a few yards of cotton cloth which they turned into clothing, for it is surprising how these children of the wilds can make even a tolerably fitting jacket. These Indian boys were never hired, but were unconsciously acquired. One of them would turn up and go to work without a word, cooking, washing, milking, and doing the other tasks, all of which took perhaps four hours a day, and it would not be until they had remained longer than is customary for visitors that Hart realized they were permanent employees. Brazilians in this region may during the course of a year give a cowboy or an Indian servant a cast-off cotton suit; hence word of the greater generosity of the American had quickly spread and the difficulty was not how to get help, but how to keep rid of too much of it. There were also fourteen _vaqueiros_, who lived with the cattle and were rarely seen at the house, and to these Hart furnished _farinha_ and paid two milreis a day, not in money but in cloth and other goods, for though the milreis serves as a basis of computation, there is no fixed medium of exchange and barter is still almost universal. The little actual money with which he had arrived Hart had laid away months before and never seen since, and he had no fear of its being stolen, though he kept well-locked the back room in which he stored his piles of cloth. Indeed, when he set out with me on a trip that might have lasted two or three weeks, it never occurred to him to take money with him. The _vaqueiros_, of course, killed a steer whenever they wanted meat, turning in the hide to show that they had not sold the animal over the border. Neither Hart nor his “siwashes” spoke any Portuguese worth mentioning, so that their conversation consisted chiefly of grunts and brief gestures, with now and then an American or Portuguese word which happened to be familiar to both sides. The Indian boys had found that certain sounds represented certain actions, so that when they were told to “build fire” they knew what was wanted, though the separate words meant nothing to them. They had learned a few expressions so well that they even ventured to pronounce them, and each evening after the dishes had been washed and the fire put out, they filed solemnly past us, each emitting a dubious “Goot neety” on the way to their _barracão_. Their general attitude was about like that of a cat. They drifted in from nowhere and stayed unasked, quiet and unaggressive, yet in a way independent and in no way affectionate. They knew that some day Hart would give them a hat or a few yards of cloth, and even without that reward they were quite pleased to have the prestige of living with so “rich” a man.

More than 12,000 square miles of this back end of British Guiana is high, open savannah, splendid for cattle; but the government refuses to sell it and merely issues “permissions to graze” on little patches of fifty square miles, or 36,000 acres each, at the exorbitant rental of three pounds a year! Hart was the sixth man to be issued such a permit, one of the others being a German and the rest Englishmen, while in all the immense savannahs of British Guiana only four Brazilian _fazendeiros_ had chosen to remain after the boundary award. Hence, in addition to his legal holding, there were some 200,000 acres more over which his cattle might freely roam. The cattle, too, were obtained by barter. Soon after his arrival, by way of Brazil, Hart had an entire boatload of goods brought up from Georgetown,—dozens of cheap felt hats, belts, soap, particularly many bolts of coarse, strong cotton cloth in gaudy patterns. No one else for many miles roundabout had any such stock on hand; hitherto the Brazilians over the border had been obliged to go to Boa Vista, or even to Manaos, to get such things. Moreover, Hart did not take unfair advantage of them, but charged the same prices as prevailed in Manaos; that is, he asked 3$ or 3$500 for a yard of cloth that cost perhaps six pence in Georgetown, so that they were delighted to do their shopping so near home, and as they rarely had anything but animals to pay with, he had already bought twelve hundred head of cattle and eighty horses without making serious inroads on his boatload of cloth. A Brazilian rancher anxious to give his wife or his own legs a surprise would ride fifty miles or more across country, driving before him a cow and a calf, and sell them to Hart for 60$—that is for twenty yards of cloth which had cost Hart $2.50. The visitor would depart highly satisfied with the exchange, while Hart branded the animals and added them to his stock on “Good Luck Ranch,” known across the river as “Fazenda Americana.” A horse and colt came to about 350$, say a hundred yards of the best cloth, at an original cost of $14; a plump steer might be worth two felt hats and a belt; yet Hart’s prices were considered so reasonable that people flocked in upon him from all directions. Now it might be an Indian of some property, who dined while his wife and child waited out in the rain until he was done and called them in to eat what he had left; or it might be a fellow-rancher who had neglected to keep up his own supplies. Occasionally payment was long delayed, but was almost always sure. Sometimes he was paid beforehand, as when a _fazendeiro_ with whom he might spend the night would tell him to drive such and such animals home with him, promising to come over later and get some cloth. There was nothing of the skinflint about Hart. He followed the time-honored custom of the region, with an American generosity added; and of course there was the high expense and risk of boating the stuff up the rivers, keeping it under lock and key in his back mud room, and the shopkeeping bother of selling it. Once he lost an entire cargo worth $2000, when the Indians who were bringing it to him let the boat go over some falls. But he hoped to have four or five thousand head of cattle in as many years, and to come to the rescue of the world’s scarcity of beef and leather as soon as some means was provided for reaching the markets. Just now the greatest drawback was lack of transportation. The governor of the colony had recently made a trip to the savannahs, and a railroad was planned, but the war had postponed it. American capital would build the line, but only on condition of certain land grants, and the governor was set on having it a government railway.

Meanwhile, I soon discovered, it was much easier to come in at the back door of British Guiana than to get from there down to the front portal. Small as it looks on a map of the whole continent, England’s South American colony is more than twice the size of Great Britain. It was 340 miles down to the coast as the crow flies, and vastly more than that to any but winged creatures. With 78,500 square miles of unbroken forest and matted jungle, only the four-hundred-and-sixtieth part of which was even under woodcutter’s license, there is no means of travel back of the fringe of coast except by the rivers, and these are much broken by falls and dependent on the season. Hart’s latest letter from the United States had been five months on the way.

The first leg of a journey to Georgetown was to cross the divide between the Brazilian and Guianese river systems, some fifty miles in its narrowest part, but much more than that to the home of Commissioner Melville on the upper Rupununi, which for several reasons was the logical starting-point of a journey down to the coast. Hart had been planning to go over to Melville’s within the next few weeks, and we compromised on his getting ready as soon as possible, which was to be within ten days. The delay I spent to advantage, for Hart was a pleasant companion and the region full of interest. Now we trotted over several hundred of his acres looking for a troop of mares in charge of a tyrannical stallion; twice we roamed the lightly wooded savannahs checking up on his cowboys and their charges. One day we went back to Brazil to visit Antonino and his family, the only near neighbors and the most nearly educated and civilized people in the vicinity. We brought back with us twenty cows and as many calves, driving them to the river, lassooing and dragging them down the bank, rolling in mud and drenched with perspiration and tropical downpours, and taking each calf across in the leaky dugout, the mother swimming behind. There are no frontier formalities, the ranchers of both sides being their own sovereigns in all matters, and Hart was as free to import cattle as he was to drive them over to the Takutú at the beginning of high water and sell them to the barges from Manaos.

We set out for Melville’s on June 5. Hart said it was a four-hour ride to the St. Ignatius Mission, but I knew how deceiving distances can be in South America, as well as the many unexpected obstacles that often turn up in wilderness travel, and was not too pleased when we put off the start until some time after noon. Hart rode a gray stallion with Texas trappings and led a pack-horse carrying our baggage, as awkward as packs always are and requiring frequent halts for adjustment. My bay horse had plenty of life, but with only the precarious monkey-seat the English call a saddle I was kept busy thwarting his frequent attempts to leave me behind. The first hour across Hart’s broad grazing-lands was fairly dry, though our delay had brought on the rainy season again. Endless stretches of fine prairie-grass, alternating with thin scrub forest, lay beyond. The first house was a ruin in thatch once occupied by a Scotchman and his squaw; the next had belonged to an exiled Brazilian. Every ruined hovel had its story. There was, for instance, the one in which Hart had met and tamed the “Ocean Shark.” A giant negro from the thickly settled coast, charged with two murders and many lesser crimes, had so named himself when he fled to the interior. However good a government may be, it is far away and hard to reach in so sparsely populated a country, where every man must be his own law and protection. When Hart first came, this black outlaw was roaming these upper plains with a band of servile and frightened Indians, bullying even white men, if they would stand for it. An Australian had picked up the Indian woman abandoned by the Scotchman, with her daughter and son, and settled down with her in the hut in question. One day he came home and found the “Ocean Shark” already occupying his hammock.

“You see dat tree over dere?” said the negro. “Well, jes’ yō swing yō hammock out dere. _I’se_ here now.”

The Australian, being a man who valued his skin more than his honor, complied, and the negro acted as his domestic substitute for a week before whim or rumor caused him to move on. He was constantly bullying the smaller ranchers and killing their cattle, and at length he let word drift out that he was going to do the same for Hart. The American, however, well over six feet and weighing 190 pounds without an ounce of fat, was built on “shark”-taming lines. Moreover, his partner had just left for the war and he was feeling very blue and spoiling for a fight when, on his way home to his new ranch, it was his good luck to find that the “Ocean Shark” had camped in the chief hut of a nearby Indian village. With him was his “secretary,” a small yellow negro named Cecil, for the “Sha’k” could not read or write.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Hart, riding up to the hut.

“Ah don’ know what dat got t’do wid yō,” answered the “Sha’k.”

“You black ——!” said Hart. “I asked you what are you doing here.”

“Don’ yō curse me!” screamed the negro, in the bold terms of the British “object” the world over, though already a bit tremulous from the seriousness of his situation.

Hart was by nature anything but a belligerent man, but his future in the colony depended on the evidence he gave at the start of being able to take care of himself. He sprang from his horse, drew his heavy revolver, and rapped the “Ocean Shark” over the head with the butt of it. Then he thrust the weapon back into its holster and waded into the negro in approved mining-camp style, rapidly changing his color from black to red, and ended by giving him ten minutes to pack his traps and remove his battered face forever from that corner of British Guiana. During that time the Indians who formed the negro’s band ran back and forth “just like ants” collecting his belongings, and every time his “secretary” had to pass the American he took off his hat, ducked as if to dodge a blow, and said, “Yessir! Yessir!” Soon the whole caravan was on the move and the “Ocean Shark” had never been seen in this region since, though fanciful tales continue to drift in of the “free city” he and his obsequious followers have founded in another corner of the colony.

At two in the afternoon we reached the Manarí Creek and found it too deep to cross on horseback, though when Hart had passed that way a week before it had not been knee-deep. That is the greatest difficulty of the overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown; one can only get up the Rio Branco in the rainy season, which is the very time when the savannahs are flooded and virtually impassable. Luckily I am fairly tall, and Hart was taller. We unloaded, stripped, and carried everything, including the saddles, across on our heads, the water just reaching my nostrils. Then we gave the horses a bath, for which they seemed grateful, went through all the loading process again, and rode on, the crossing having cost us more than an hour. There were more bogs and creeks, but all were passable, and we had only to stop occasionally to adjust the pack. All the time we kept drawing nearer the Kanuku Mountains, now a long blue range across the southern horizon. We had to pass around the end of this to get to Melville’s, which was almost due south, though I was supposed to be traveling north.

It was five o’clock when we reached the first inhabited house, that of a Brazilian family on a bank of the Takutú. The usual formalities included insistence that we wait for coffee, and as Hart did not care to risk making an enemy, we complied. These people assured us that all the _igarapés_ were so swollen from the recent rains that it would be impossible to get to Melville’s at this season. Not far beyond we came to a stream which Hart had easily forded the week before. I drove my horse in, expecting the water to come at most to his belly, when the animal suddenly dropped and took to swimming, with the water about my waist. There was no way of getting our pack-animal across without ruining everything. We returned to the Brazilian hut, and while I took such measures as my soaking and that of the saddle-gear demanded, Hart stripped, tied his clothes around his head with a strap under his chin to hold them, and swam the _igarapé_ to an Indian hovel where he arranged for a canoe and two paddlers. These dropped down the stream to us, and having hobbled the horses and put the saddles astride a pole always provided for such purposes under the eaves of rural Brazilian huts, we and the Indians lugged our baggage to the canoe and finally set out in pitch darkness to paddle up the river to what Hart called the “padre’s house.”

Like the one in which I had entered the colony, the canoe was a leaky old dugout with rotting boards nailed along the sunken gunwale, through which water gushed almost in streams. I had to hug the two bags on the seat beside me and at the same time bail water incessantly, while the Indian boys shoveled water at the bow and Hart made a poor job of steering in the stern, because it was impossible to tell the shadows from the tops of the trees under water near the bank, which we were compelled to follow closely in order to make any progress against the swift current. Even there and with the utmost effort we made barely a mile an hour, and every loss of a stroke for any reason left us so much farther down stream. The Takutú was about four times as deep as when I had last left it, and was now a real river. Several times I was nearly knocked off, bags and all, by unexpected branches of trees; then suddenly I discovered that the boat was filling faster than I could bail it out, the water quickly reaching my ankles and then my calves. It wouldn’t matter so much to Hart, who had brought only a few tramping necessities, but it was only a question of a very short time before all my South American possessions, including even my money in the valise, would be at the bottom of the Takutú, while I struggled ashore in my heavy brogans with only my hat and my reputation. I shouted to the Indians, who looked around and saw the water which they, being high in the bow, had not felt, and by sheer luck they managed in the darkness to tear a way through tree-tops and bushes to a spot on the bank with bare land enough to hold our baggage. Here we found that a snag had kicked a large hole in the stern of the rotten old craft and that water was pouring in as from a faucet. This repaired as best we could, we bailed out the boat and pushed on. For what seemed hours we fought against the current and bailed incessantly before a faint light far away in the night announced that we were approaching the mission. We could not seem to bring the light nearer, but finally managed to land in the mouth of a tributary, and, tearing through the jungle and stumbling over stony ground in the black night, lugging our baggage, we at last ended at nine o’clock the “easy four hours’ ride” from Hart’s ranch by entering the mission of an English Jesuit, Father Ignatius Cary-Elwess.

It was a big, two-story, thatched building on the bank of the upper Takutú, just across from Brazil. Indian men and boys, chiefly in loin-cloths, though some wore a shirt and some the remnants of trousers, swarmed about the place with perfect freedom, as the “padre” seemed to have an easy-going way that had weakened his control over them. He was a small, wiry man of middle age, dressed in an old soutane, quite English, yet also quite Jesuit, which made a curious combination. Eleven years before he had come out entirely alone and lived in their huts with the Indians, under exactly the same conditions as they, until he had learned the Macuxy tongue—at least as well as the average Englishman ever learns a foreign language. He knew no Portuguese, and the naked Indian youths spoke an amusing mixture of English and Macuxy, the former chiefly represented by “Fader, yes,” with which all statements began, usually continuing in the native tongue. The priest was “one of the boys” in the stories he told, but he often drifted away into dreams. After nearly four years in Latin-America it seemed strange to hear the English names of things I had only known in Spanish, Portuguese, or Quichua,—“bush” for _sertão_, “Savannah” for _pampa_ or _campo_, “’gator” for _jacaré_. It was sixty-three days since the padre had last heard a word of the world’s news, and the long time which elapsed before our generous supper was ready we spent in bringing him up to date, getting out of our soaked garments, oiling our revolvers, and swinging our hammocks.

When I rose in the early morning a cold wind was blowing across the open country. About the mission building was a cluster of huts for the converts, and many cattle were grazing nearby—for the good padre did not neglect the practical things of life. He was already saying mass before an outdoor altar set in the side of a mud house, assisted in his formalities by otherwise naked Indian acolytes in red robes. A creek near the mission, which one could generally step across, was so swollen that we had to borrow a canoe, and the top branches of high trees just peered out of the water. We soon came to another—whereupon Hart decided that we were sure to lose the horses if we tried to continue the trip with them. The only animal which can endure travel under such conditions is man, and we concluded to resort to the only means of locomotion left us. When we returned to the mission, the padre, who had been a famous athlete in his younger days, left off a cricket game he was playing in his flowing soutane with the Indian boys, and went with me to find us Indian carriers. His rule was too lenient, however, and the day drifted on without anyone offering to go. He would not order anyone to do so, as most of the Indians had come for some Catholic celebration and the padre felt that they could not be spared. “Anyway,” he mused, “by far the best carriers are the women—women”—his eyes fell suddenly on Hart, conspicuously masculine in his splendid frame and perfect condition—“we—er—well, I’ll send for the chief and see if he can’t get you two _men_”—the accent on the last word was probably unconscious.

It was afternoon before a father and his son were finally prevailed upon to make the one-day journey to the next village, and at two we were off across country. The man, about thirty-five in years, but already old for his race, was as ill-fitted for his task as the average white man of sixty, and was constantly being favored by his son of eighteen, in the prime of life. We were soon stripping to wade a stream neck-deep, clothes, revolver, kodak, and other odds and ends on our heads, and had barely dressed again when we came to a swamp of such extent that we swung our shoes over our shoulders for the rest of the day. It was stony here and there, but more often swampy, with bogs in which we sank to the knees and several streams waist or chest deep; but the water was lukewarm and the going almost pleasant, though we envied the Indians their natural leather soles. That evening we reached an Indian hut made entirely of palm-leaves, and swung our hammocks from poles with the family. Our carriers chattered long in the native tongue with our otherwise taciturn hosts, using the word “fader” in nearly every sentence. We made our own tea and ate our own _farinha_ and rather green bananas, to which the Indians added a square foot or more of mandioca bread, here called “cassava.” Gnats made life miserable for me, but Hart and the Indians took turns snoring all night, while the wife of our host stood or squatted in a far corner of the hut, stirring the fagot fire every half hour or so, darkness evidently being a cause for fear, and gently punching her fat husband every time his snoring grew uproarious. Not only the men and children, but cur dogs and fowls slept in the comfortable hammocks; but either it is immoral, by their tribal laws, for a woman to lie down while there is a stranger in the house, or it is the admirable custom for the woman to sit up all night and keep her lord’s fire burning. Yet there is a vast difference in the comfort of life between these tropical Indians and those of the Andes, a difference due mainly to one thing,—the hammock. Their floors may be as hard and as filthy, even as cold at times, but swinging above it in a soft, native-woven hammock is like living in another sphere. The hammock is the most important thing in the life of the Indian of this region, as, indeed, of all residents. He is conceived in a hammock, born in a hammock; a hammock is his chair, sofa, and place of siesta, it is his bridal bed and his death bed, and usually it is his shroud, for it is the custom to bury him in the hammock in which he dies. If he travels in light marching order, the Indian may leave everything else behind, except his loin-cloth, but he carries his hammock.

Rain fell heavily most of the night, and we did not once put on our shoes during the next day. Our feet were under water certainly half the time. Barely had we started when we had to wade a deep, muddy creek, followed by a long swamp; and similar experiences continued in swift succession. The vast savannah was dotted with scrub trees, but there was no sign of life except occasional birds. The Kanuku Mountains, everywhere heavily wooded and blue with the mist and rain that always hangs about them, drew slowly nearer on our left. This region might be dubbed the “Land of Uncertainty,” for one never knew what might be waiting a mile ahead, whether we would have to come all the way back, after struggling through most of the trip, because of some impassable obstacle. Particularly the Suwara-auru, a branch of the Takutú which foams down from the Kanuku range, was likely to prove such a barrier.

We were already soaking wet, so that we paid little attention to the roaring rain that soon began to fall, though I still strove to keep my kodak from being ruined. Even the shoes on our backs were as wet as if we had worn them. Our baggage, on the Indians’ backs, was covered with old pieces of canvas, but the rain poured down in cataracts upon it and promised to soak everything it contained. To make things worse, the Indians could not keep up with us. The aged thirty-five-year-old man was in sad straits, and we were in constant dread of his falling down in some mud-hole. At down-pouring noon we reached the base of the range of hills and began to skirt it, the storm making a tumultuous yet musical sound on the dense forest. In dry weather, no doubt, it would be screaming with parrakeets, though it is said always to be raining in the Kanukus. Deep in the woods we stopped among mammoth trees at the bank of a creek to assuage our gnawing hunger. It was pouring incessantly, yet the older Indian got a fire started, roofed by green banana-like leaves, and into this we thrust slabs of sun-dried beef spitted on sticks. We made tea, also, and each ate his rationed half-pint of _farinha_, which would soon swell to a quart. All this time we had not a suggestion of shelter and the water ran down us in streams throughout the meal, washing our fingers as rapidly as we soiled them. Yet somehow we felt in unexpectedly good spirits. Hart rolled three cigarettes, handed two of them to the Indians, and we were off again. The forest grew ever denser, and the rain became an absolute torrent. Only in crossing the Malay Peninsula years before had I bowed my back to such volumes of water, water which, as the ground grew a bit hilly, rushed down the narrow ruts worn by former travelers so swiftly as almost to sweep us off our feet.

With every step forward I grew more uneasy. We were drawing near the notorious Suwara-auru, situated where the forest that spills down a spur of the mountains is thickest and the rainfall is said to be the heaviest in all British Guiana, and which, according to Hart, “the devil himself often could not pass.” It may be knee-deep in the dry season, and a week later fill up the whole gorge or valley with a rushing current half a mile wide—a gorge still densely forested, too, for there are trees everywhere, except in the bit of space occupied by the creek in the dry season, and horses have been killed by the force with which the current hurls them against the trunks. Of course man himself can pass under almost any conditions; but it might well be impossible to get even such baggage as I carried across, and I might have to go clear back to Manaos, or wait for months until the rains subsided.

The gorge promised to be at its worst that day, for most of the streams we had passed were near their high-water mark. Yet the Suwara-auru was not. When we finally came to it I shouted above the storm to ask Hart if this almost placid stream, which barely reached the lower branches of the trees, was the mighty obstacle about which I had been hearing for days. But such is the tenacity of a bad reputation that my companion, never attempting to cross it as we had many others, tore his way upstream with great difficulty, gashing his feet and tearing his clothing in his fight with the jungle, to a half-submerged tree-trunk that offered a possible but precarious crossing. Meanwhile I, skeptic from birth, had thrown off revolver and kodak, waded in—and crossed with the water barely to my armpits! Before Hart could fight his way back I had taken the Indian youth over twice, with all my belongings on his head, though he was so much shorter that the water came to his nostrils and I had to walk close to him on the downstream side to keep him and, what was more important, my possessions from being washed away. Then, with my help, he carried his father’s load across, and the old man managed to cross “empty.” Through it all it kept raining as I had never seen it rain before, except once in the jungles of the Far East. Perhaps the most surprising part of the whole episode was the much greater fear of the elements shown by these children of the wilderness than was our own. The superiority of savages in struggles with nature, as compared with civilized man, is all very well in popular novels, but my own experience has been that in real life the balance tips the other way.

Evidently the sources of the Suwara-auru were so far up in the mountains that it did not respond to the rains as quickly as the other streams; and a day or two later it might have been quite as impassable as it is by reputation.

On the opposite bank was an immense rock with a sheer side up which we could never have pulled the horses, even had we succeeded in getting that far with them. Yet their loss on the trail would not have made Hart any poorer, for when he returned one had died of snake-bite and the other had injured itself so badly that it had to be killed. We coaxed the worn and frightened Indians under their packs again and pushed on in the drenching roar. For an hour or more we plunged on through dense forest; then, as the nose of the mountain we were flanking receded, the rain decreased and at length subsided almost to a drizzle, though the rest of the day was bathed in successive showers. Having flanked the range, our trail now turned more to the east and came out on swampy scrub savannah again. All day it had been barely a foot wide, and so seldom was it traveled, even by animals, perhaps not in months by a human being, as to be almost invisible, except where it was deep enough to be filled with water. But that was not the worst of it. Lack of travel had let the long, sharp prairie-grass grow out over the path from both sides so as almost to cover it, and the saw- and razor-edges of this cut and gashed my bare feet until the tops of them were a mosquito-net of bleeding scratches.

We expected to get a welcome and a plentiful meal that evening in “George’s Village,” a small settlement since the oldest foreign resident could remember, of which “George” was the Indian chief. Life itself depended on the food and supplies we were to get there. Our feelings may easily be imagined, therefore, when we came in sight of the village and found it only half a dozen patches of charred timbers and broken pots, even the heavy red-wood uprights that would not burn having been cut down. It turned out that “George” had recently died, though news is so sluggish in this region that few knew it. In much of tropical South America it is the custom, upon the death of a chief, to burn down his house, or even the whole village, after burying him in and under the hammock in which he has died, and then to abandon the locality to escape the “evil spirit” that has killed him. For no Indian of these regions ever dies a natural death. He is always killed by some supernatural spirit. “Did the spirit hurt him much?” the civilized man will ask the Indian informant. “Why, he broke every bone in his body,” the Indian will answer—no doubt because of the limpness of the corpse.

Miles farther on, across another thigh-wearying swamp, we sighted a cluster of huts, and our spirits rose, only to fall again, for these, too, had been abandoned, though not burned. There were half a dozen of them, including two large ones of oval shape made entirely of thatch palm, except the rounded ends, which had been plastered with mud. I arrived with a tooth-rattling chill, but our Indians had faded away behind us and we had no dry clothing. I stripped naked and rubbed down with my wet garments, that being at least preferable to standing in them in the penetrating chill of evening. We forced the door of the largest hut, which was no great task, and found it a single room large enough for fifty men, but chiefly full of emptiness. The only things left were some cracked water-gourds and a few woven palm-leaf fire-fans, scattered over a broad expanse of hard, uneven earth floor. When the carriers at last arrived, we built a fagot fire inside, swung our hammocks, and made tea of swamp- and rain-water with which to wash down our dry _farinha_, wondering the while what we would live on ahead. The old man was shivering with fever, and we feared he would not last much longer, even if both did not refuse to go any farther. They swung their hammocks side by side at some distance from ours and built another fire between them, which the youth kept going all night. Whenever they had occasion to go outside they went only in close company, like children afraid of the dark. The hut had no windows, and both doors were closed against insects, night air, and evil spirits. Yet the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I used my _mosquitero_ for the first time since buying it in Manaos. Also the tiny _mucuim_, or “red bug,” crawled up from the floor and bit our legs fiercely.

The moment I saw the darkness begin to gray through the many lapses in the grass wall I tumbled out and aroused the others. Hart and I had tea and dry _farinha_, but the carriers only the latter, for they did not “know” tea and preferred to breakfast on mandioca meal alone. Our great difficulty now was to get them not to abandon us. They had agreed to carry our stuff only to “George’s Village,” and now insisted on returning. They were at the outskirts of the Macuxy tribe, and to go farther was to run the risk that their enemies, the Wapushanas, would “blow on them”—not in the Bowery sense, but in correct English—and thereby cast a spell over or an evil spirit into them which would cause them to die soon after they reached home. It is likely that the superstition comes from the former custom of using blow-guns with poisoned arrows. The Wapushanas take up all the southern end of British Guiana and once fiercely warred against the neighboring tribes; and though they rarely resort to violence now, the younger generation, being meek and unwarlike, thanks largely to the man we were trying to reach, the ancient enmities remain and members of one tribe rarely enter the territory of the other for fear of being “blown on.” We had the one weapon of refusing to pay them anything if they left us in the lurch, which was not a particularly powerful one. Luckily, the youth had made one trip to Manaos and had not only learned enough Portuguese so that I could talk to him, but had dulled the edge of his superstitions, which eventually brought him on our side against his father. But all this would have been inadequate without the most powerful aid of all, the white man’s will-power, which, when brought into conflict with that of the aborigines, will almost always win out, if one has patience. For will-power, whether over fear or in argument, is rarely strong among savages.

Having lost two hours in discussion, therefore, our caravan got under way again, Hart and I, knowing a long and hungry day was before us, setting a sharp pace. Swamps began again at once, and more than half the day’s walk was under water, from ankle- to chest-deep. In time this weighed so heavily on the thighs and the small of the back that they ached severely. The razor-like prairie-grass was almost incessant, even under water, and a tiny twig, thorny and sharp as a keyhole saw, hung everywhere across the faint path. In consequence, the tops of my feet were virtually flayed and every step was more painful than the last. Yet we could not have worn our shoes, for that would have been to lift some twenty pounds of water with every step. Rain began again almost as soon as we started, and kept up all the morning. The worry about my baggage was constant, for in it was nearly all I possessed, including twenty pounds in gold, and the will-power by which we had forced the Indians to continue might lose its strength, once they were out of our sight. Yet they could or would not keep up with us. If we waited for them, they grew slower and slower; if we took our own pace, we were soon out of sight of them, and I at least expected them to drop the stuff in the trail and flee from the “blowing” Wapushanas. Yet as between having to sleep out here on the flooded savannahs without food and losing a few paltry possessions, there was only one choice. So after several delays on a day when delay might be serious, until we caught another glimpse of two specks crawling along across the vast, scrub-wooded plains behind, as hard to see as an animal of protective coloring, we strode unhesitatingly on. By and by we came to some of the undulations of the Kanukus, hard and stony ridges that were torture to our feet, yet these were now so swollen that it would have been worse torture to put on our shoes. Down in a rocky hollow called the “Point of the Mountains” we managed to build a fire of wet wood, but waited in vain for our Indians. When we felt sure for the tenth time that they had abandoned us, they came snailing over the rise behind us and dropped down as if utterly exhausted. We divided with them the handful of _farinha_ left, and took a long time to coax them to their feet again. Swamps disagreeably alternated with stony patches. A hill in the blue distance was still three miles short of our goal. The sun came out for the first time in three days and quickly added sunburn and stiffness to our other troubles. The country was faintly rolling in places, and on the tops of slight ridges between lake-like swamps we glanced back, but though our carriers had disappeared from the landscape, we dared not halt. Hart assured me they would not abandon the stuff, and that if they did, it would sit safely on the trail, even in the unlikely event of anyone else traveling this route at this season, until other Indians were sent for it; but I had not so high a faith in human virtue.

In mid-afternoon we sighted the Rupununi, a branch of the Essequibo River that is the chief outlet to the coast; but Melville lived ten miles upstream, and the trail was almost completely lost on these deeply flooded savannahs. This greatly increased the chances of losing our baggage, for the carriers, being in enemy territory where they had never ventured before, could only guess at the road, while their fear of being “blown on” would be greatly increased by our absence. We struggled on through swamps and rocky spurs of hills, straining our thighs and backs against water made doubly burdensome in many places by bogs and mud. I seemed to be lifting a ton with every step, yet we were forced to make wide detours. Several times I reached what I thought was the point of exhaustion, yet kept on by force of will, that determination which Indians and other primitive peoples lack in comparison with the white man, because it is allied to reason. Toward sunset we came upon the first footprints we had seen in two days, during which the only signs of life had been the birds and a scattered herd of half-wild cattle. A line of trees ahead showed the edge of the Rupununi, which we could not pass, even in a boat, if we arrived there after dark. Just at dusk we reached an Indian hut on the bank, and even before we asked for it a woman brought us a bowl of _farinha_ wet with cold water, which we gulped down like starved savages. This quickly put new kick into our legs. But there was no boat on this side of the river, now miles wide and covering a large forest. An Indian youth climbed to the top of a tree and hallooed a peculiar musical call and the most pleasant sound I had heard in a long time was a faint answering hail. I fired my revolver to suggest the presence of white men, and by and by, after we had several times given up hope, there grew out of the night the peculiar thump-thump of paddles against a boat, common to all Amazonia, and then the voices of the paddlers fighting against the forest. At last there crept out of the flooded tree-tops a large canoe manned by four Indians, with a negro boy of West Indian speech in the stern. His was the first native English I had heard in the colony. We had crossed the divide between the Brazilian and the Guianese river systems.

The paddlers were a long hour fighting the trees and recrossing the swift river, born barely thirty miles above in the high forest and rising and falling many feet in a single day; but we were finally welcomed by Commissioner Melville in the best house I had seen since leaving Manaos, and I dropped into my first “Berbice chair,” joyfully stretching my weary legs out on the long folding arms of it. Two-story houses are rare sights in these parts, but here was one with good hardwood floors and all reasonable conveniences, of open bungalow build and covered with “shacks”—that is, un-tapered singles split with a “cutlass,” or machete—the servant quarters, kitchen, dining- and store-rooms below, and a real white-man’s home above. We were loaned dry clothing and given a mammoth supper, which left me highly contented with life, even though all I had left in South America was a soaked revolver and kodak and thirty pounds in five-pound bank-notes in an oilcloth pouch about my neck. I painted my feet with iodine, but could not wash them, though they were grimy and black as those of any Indian who had never known shoes. Then we swung our hammocks in the “guest-house,” a bungalow on stilts a few yards from the main building, and were heard no more until late the next morning.

All that day I hobbled about barefoot, as was every person in the region. To my astonishment and delight our Indians walked in toward noon with our baggage, though most of it was dripping, and even my indispensable kodak-tank, made of flimsy materials evidently stuck together with flour paste, after the hasty American manner, had fallen apart and warped out of shape. The bank-notes about my neck had been soaked, too, and had run with color until they were all but illegible. I spread them out in the sun to dry with the rest of my belongings, much more pleased to have water-soaked possessions than none at all. To the Indians I gave a gold sovereign, an exceedingly high reward for the region, where the white settlers pay native carriers three or four shillings for such a trip; but my generosity did them little good, for Melville’s half-Indian son took the coin, to which the Indians seemed to attach little value, and gave them each five yards of cotton cloth for it. The unadvised traveler cannot know until he gets there that what he should have brought to interior British Guiana is not money but goods.

Melville was an Englishman born in Jamaica, of good family and well educated. Some thirty years before, in his early manhood, he had come to British Guiana, soon striking out for the then unknown savannah. Here he had lived for fifteen years without a single civilized neighbor, often unable for a year at a time to hold communication with the coast. He spoke the native tongue so well that he was now an authority on it, even among the Indians, with whom he ranked as the “Big Chief.” No white woman had ever yet been in this region, nor, until recently, anyone with authority to perform marriages, so that the exiled Englishman could only seek companionship among the Indians. Of the several mothers of his children, none had ever spoken English, but the children themselves had been sent to school not only in Georgetown, but in England. John, the oldest, was a well-built man in the early twenties, as much Indian as Briton in manners and features, speaking his fluent English with a West Indian or Eurasian twist. All except this young man and a little girl of three were away at school. John gave the impression of being an improvement on the native stock, but his father, who was in a position to know, said it was his experience that there is no essential difference between an Indian and a half-Indian. Melville unconsciously had come to treat his women much as the Indians treat theirs, with a sort of servant-like indifference. The latest one he always referred to as “my cook,” and even then not unnecessarily, leaving her in her place below stairs, never unkind to her, yet never treating her as an equal.

Melville was a remarkable and rare example of a white man who has spent most of his life alone in the tropics without letting himself go to seed. Not only that, but he had made his isolation an opportunity to improve himself, until his mind was as keen, his will as firm, and his interests as wide as the best of his race living in civilization—with an added something of New World initiative which the average Englishman does not develop at home. With a large library on all subjects, considerably traveled in Europe and the United States, and apparently gifted with a remarkable memory, he had a veritable fund of sound, thorough, and ever-ready information about all parts of the earth and all the activities of mankind, and was practiced in everything from photography to astronomy, from medicine to British law. His isolation seemed to have rid him of the common trait of superficiality, and as soon as he found interest in, or reason to know, anything, he went at once to the bottom of it and did not stop until he had every detail at his tongue’s end. He spoke Portuguese as well as Wapushana, and was plainly a man equally at home barefooted among Indians or silk-hatted in London. Naturally, having lived nearly all his life among inferiors, Indians, negroes, and his own half-breed children, he had grown assertive, but his information was so wide, exact, and fluent that his dogmatism was rarely oppressive.