Chapter XX: Struggling Down to Georgetown (2)

A generation before, he had found the Indians of the interior all “blow-gun men,” every man and boy carrying a long reed tube, a quiver of arrows, and the lower jaw of the fish known as _pirainha_. The arrows were made of the midrib of the large leaf of the _carúa_ palm, were pointed by drawing them between the razor-like teeth of the fish-jaw, made poisonous with _urali_, and notched in such a way that the point broke off in the victim and the arrow itself could be repointed and used again. _Urali_, obtained from a tree up in the Kanuku hills, acts on the nerves governing respiration and kills simply by halting the lung action, without poisoning the flesh of the victim. If respiration can be kept up artificially until the poison has run its course, death does not result. It is rarely fatal to salt-eating white men, and can be cured by rubbing salt on the wound at once. Melville had tried some of the arrow-points as phonograph needles and found them excellent, eliminating all harshness and giving the illusion of distance. Gradually he had broken the Indians of the blow-gun custom, so that now only a few old Indians know how to prepare the poison. He had long been accepted as the chief of all the tribes of the region, who have become so meek under this single-handed British rule that they now obey even a negro. Either Melville or his Scotch assistant and deputy had only to drop in at a village, call some Indian aside, and talk to him a few moments in a confidential tone to have him accepted as chief by all the rest, who thereafter took through him all orders from the government by way of Melville.

The Macuxys and Wapushanas (or “Wapusianas”) are, according to this authority, roughly of the Carib and the Arawak families respectively, with different linguistic roots, the former being cannibals up to a generation or two ago. The two tribes have always been enemies, with little in common, and habitually regard each other with aversion. The Wapushanas, in particular, are fatalists of passive demeanor. As an example our host mentioned the case of an Indian who had recently walked in upon another, lolling in his hammock, and announced in a conversational tone, “I have come to kill you.” “Very well,” said the other, throwing the two sides of the hammock over his face and allowing himself to be killed without making the slightest resistance. The religion of the Indians Melville had found entirely negative. They believe the Good Spirit will never do anything but good, hence give all their attention to placating the evil spirits, swarming everywhere, even in various pools of the rivers, which boats must therefore avoid. They call the rainy season the “Boia-assú,” or “Big Snake,” because the constellation we know as the Scorpion and they as the “large serpent” is then in the ascendancy.

When he planned to leave the region to return to civilization some years before, the government had induced Melville to remain, by certain concessions, including his appointment as commissioner for all the Rupununi district, so that now he was virtually the whole British Empire in the very sparsely inhabited southern half of the colony, being deputy chief of police, deputy customs inspector, deputy judge trying all cases in the back end of the country, and deputy almost anything one could name. A most earnest and efficient government officer he was, too, one of the few who rule well in the wilds without constant supervision and overseeing. He was the only man, also, who owned land in the far interior, another concession wrung from the unwilling government. The latter prefers that the territory remain crown land, so that the College of Keisers or Court of Policy, mainly made up of dark-complexioned natives, cannot interfere with it. His homelike dwellings overlooked what would be broad acres again as soon as the immense lake covering all the surrounding region subsided, with a golf links and half the sweep of the horizon beautified by blue range behind range of hills, the nearest peak four miles away, the others isolated mounds and hillocks scattered across the bushy but splendid grazing plains to far-off Mt. Roraima, highest in the colony. When we arrived the houses were on an island in a vast lake extending in all directions, with here and there the tops of trees appearing above it and the huts of most of the Indians inundated. Next morning more than half the lake had disappeared, and the river, which had been completely lost in the inundation, so that thirty hours before a boat could travel miles beyond it on either side, now showed ten feet of sheer bank. Nowhere have I ever seen water rise and subside with such rapidity.

We were still in the Land of Uncertainty. Melville expected any day a cargo-boat he had sent down to Georgetown months before, bringing him orders to go down a few days later; but though it might arrive to-morrow, it might also not be here in a month. It would have been a great advantage to continue my journey in a covered, well stocked government boat, with the greatest authority in southern British Guiana. When several days had passed without any news of the expected craft, however, I decided to push on alone, and Melville loaned me the only boat available—a fairly large but very ancient, worm-eaten dugout, with the usual submerged gunwales protected by boards nailed along the sides, through which water seeped constantly. With this he let me have a tarpaulin to cover the baggage by day and serve as a tent by night, a lantern, and necessary eating utensils, all of which, with the boat, I was to leave at the mouth of the Rupununi for his men to bring back with them. In his combined capacity as the government of the southern end of the colony, the commissioner required me to fulfill all legal formalities, writing out a detailed account of my arrival in the colony and an explanation of why I carried a revolver and how many cartridges I had. The onus for this I put on the Brazilians, rather than imply that they might be needed in so modelly governed a country as British Guiana, and formally asked permission to “carry them through the colony.” In reply, the one-man government examined my belongings, gave me an official letter saying I had reported to the constituted authorities, had been found harmless and in proper form, and need not be waylaid and examined by officials along the way, issued me a license to carry a revolver, gave me an unofficial sealed letter to the governor, which no doubt contained private opinions as to the reasons for my existence, and finally, inasmuch as I was “going down to town” anyway, intrusted to me several letters on official business, so that I was raised to the dignity of being “On His Majesty’s Service.”

All this took time, and even then I could not go without supplies, but must wait until they rounded up and killed a steer, sixty pounds of which was cut into large slices and packed in a drygoods box, with salt between, while every living carnivorous creature in the vicinity gorged himself on the rest of the carcass. A half-bushel basket of _farinha_, a can of matches, and two novels completed my outfit. All this was piled on saplings laid across the bottom in the center of the boat and covered with the tarpaulin. Our two Indians had not the slightest desire in the world to be transformed from carriers into paddlers, but preferred to go directly home as fast as their now restored legs could carry them. But a judicious mixture of moral suasion and enlarging upon the danger of being “blown on” if they traveled alone finally caused them to agree to go as far as the Protestant mission on the Yupucari, which was really nearer their own and from which Hart would return with them.

Several days after our arrival, therefore, we were off down a much swollen and hence swift river that carried us, without seeing them, over what most of the year were rapids with laborious portages and waterfalls, that were now only ripples and small whirlpools through which we raced at express speed. Hart and I, and a negro boy loaned us as guide through the first nine miles of rapids, sat in the stern, and our metamorphosed carriers steadily plied their paddles in the bow. There was a strip of forest along the bank, but sometimes only the tips of the trees were visible above the flooded savannah. At ten o’clock we stopped to cook beef and to exchange the negro boy, who was to walk home, for “Solomon,” an Indian chief and henchman of Melville’s, and the first aboriginal South American I ever met who spoke any considerable amount of English. We dropped him a few miles farther down, past what in the dry season would have been half a day of portaging. Travel and commerce in this region, I reflected, are about what they were in all the world before the age of money; it was not only like going back to nature, but back to the Stone Age. There was a good breeze, though not enough to drive off the clouds of _puims_ or _jejenes_, here simply called “gnats,” which seemed a weak term for those almost invisible pests with a bite that leaves a torturing red itch for a week afterward. Some name with a wide blue border would have been more appropriate.

We skirted close to the densely wooded Kanuku Mountains, now and then glimpsing a small monkey and a few birds, but otherwise finding nothing except insects and primeval solitude. About four o’clock we began to look for a place to land, cook supper, and camp, but this was by no means so easy as it sounds. The banks consisted of unbroken forest with little more than the tops of the trees above water and with no signs of land, the swift current making a halt doubly difficult. We did, however, finally drag ourselves up to a bit of elevated ground, where the jungle was so thick there was barely room for all of us to stand, to say nothing of lying down. Moreover, it seemed a pity to lose the swift, rapid-defying current that might be gone by morning, so after building a fire of green wood with great difficulty and roasting a few slabs of beef, we decided to travel until an hour or two after dark. We probably never will again. The plan would have been all right had there been landing-places; but surrounded on both sides by an absolutely unbroken forest-jungle without a foot of land above water, except far back among the flooded tree-tops where we could not penetrate, we soon found ourselves in a precarious situation. The stars were out, but there was no moon and a suggestion of mist, so that the darkness seemed a solid wall on either side of us. Only with the greatest difficulty could we see the river ahead or tell the shadows from the trees, and we were constantly on the point of smashing full-tilt into some snag or submerged tree-trunk that might easily have sunk the boat and all it contained, leaving us floundering in the trackless forest-sea.

Toward midnight we decided we must get a bit of rest somehow, and in the black darkness, increased by gathering storm clouds, we shot for the bank and grasped wildly at the endless, impenetrable forest-jungle as the river tore us past it at boat-smashing speed. The stupidity and fear of our Indians made the task doubly difficult. Several times we clutched at the slashing branches and tried to drag ourselves far enough into the flooded forest to get out of the current, for there was no hope of getting land under our feet; but each time we had to give up and tear on down the river, to risk all our possessions, if not life itself, by trying again. It was like attempting to catch an express train on the fly. In one such effort we smashed into a great tangle of immense branches through which the water tore and dragged us until we were certain the boat would be knocked to pieces, or at least that some refugee snake would drop upon us. Somehow we got through this, only to strike instantly a whirlpool that sent us spinning into the tops of several more trees out in what seemed to be the middle of the stream.

Then, unexpectedly, we struck a sluggish corner and were half an hour dragging ourselves in among the bushes. Once fire-ants drove us out, swiftly. Finally we tied up to a branch, from others of which I managed to hang our hammocks while Hart steered the craft in and out among the tops of the submerged trees. His own hung over the boat, but mine was far out from it, with no one knew how many fathoms of water beneath me and splendid chances of falling out among _pirainhas_, if not alligators. Should the water recede during the night, we might be left a hundred feet or more aloft.

The old Indian threw himself down on the cargo; the young one squatted out the night in the boat, bailing it occasionally. All night long an awful roaring came from off in the forest, a sound with which there is none to compare, though an enormous engine blowing off steam in short blasts, or an immense multitude of insane people screaming at some little distance might faintly suggest it. It came from howling monkeys, black apes about half the size of a man, according to Hart, who insisted that there was only one of them, though it sounded like at least a hundred in angry chorus. Everything portended an all-night downpour to add to our pleasures, but this did not come until the first peep of gray, just as we had gotten our hammocks down and stowed away under the tarpaulin. Then a roaring deluge, cold as ice-water, drenched us in an instant; but we could only sit and paddle and take it hour after hour. There was room for one of us under the tarpaulin, but that would have been selfish to the other. The rain beat so hard on the surface of the water that thousands of little fountains sprang upward under the impact. As it showed no signs of let-up, we decided we must build a fire and get something hot down our throats before we froze or shook ourselves to death. We grasped a piece of overhanging bank, which luckily did not pull loose and drop us into the racing stream, and dragged ourselves ashore. There was barely standing-room for the four of us, huddled and streaming in the pouring rain, the teeth of all chattering audibly. It was then that Hart and I broached the bottle of Dutch rum from Curaçao. It would have given us exquisite pleasure to have let a prohibitionist stand there without his share until he was convinced that “demon rum” sometimes has its uses. The fiery stuff may not have saved our lives, but it came very near it. He who has never tried in a raging downpour to light a fire of wood soaked through and through on ground an inch deep with water, himself running like a sieve and shaking until he can scarcely hold a match, has no notion of the high value of profanity. We fought tooth and nail for almost two hours before we finally got some hot tea, and more or less roasted four slabs of beef. The Indians had very little strength, and though it took most of my time to bail out the river- and rain-water, the rest of it I paddled hard in an effort to restore my warmth.

All things have an end, however, and at last the sun came out and, broken by a couple of showers that drenched us again, stayed with us the rest of the day. In mid-afternoon we sighted the first human beings, a group of Indians with file-pointed teeth and wearing more or less clothes, who stood in the edge of the jungle beside two small deer they had shot with ancient muskets, and which they were now skinning and preparing to roast or smoke over a fire on the ground. We tried to buy one of the chunks of venison, of some ten pounds each, that lay about them, but we had no money except gold and paper. Any coin would do; in fact, the chief Indian asked “one coin”; but he was a wise old trader of some experience with civilization, and refused even my pocket-mirror. As a last resort we offered him two boxes of matches, a very high price; but he had evidently once been in Brazil and had set his heart on a milreis. We had none, nor any coin that resembled one, so we tossed the meat back at them and went on. Though we wore socks against the insects, shoes would have been a burden in the ever possible necessity of swimming for our lives, and our feet were constantly in water. We were now past the Kanuku Range, and one side of the river broke into savannah, though it was bushy along shore, while on the other side stretched the unbroken forest wall. Along this little monkeys dropped from high trees to the branches of others much lower with a crash that set them swiftly to vibrating. Big noisy toucans now and then flew past in gorgeous couples, their tails streaming. We heard the howling monkeys again, but by day their uproar was nothing like so weird and terrifying as it had sounded high up in the flooded tree-tops of the boundless forest the night before.

The best time anyone had ever made from Melville’s to the Church of England Mission at Yupukari, even in high water, was four days. It was a most agreeable surprise, therefore, when long before sunset on this second day Hart suddenly recognized some landmark and swung us into a little back-water in which we soon tied up at a landing in the silent woods. Here, taking a Sunday afternoon stroll along a trail cut through the jungle, we met Parson White and his wife, the first Caucasian woman I had seen since leaving Manaos, followed by their baby and a Hindu nurse. The parson, being the upholder of civilization in wild regions, had not succumbed to bare feet, but wore stout shoes and golf stockings, with “shorts,” or knickerbockers, above them. His knees were bare in defiance of the swarms of gnats, perhaps as a sort of penance, but in spite of this and our unexpected appearance, he greeted us like an Englishman and a parson. He was a very effective man, his methods being quite the opposite of those of his Jesuit fellow-missionary. He believed in keeping a curb-bit on the Indians, never allowing them to come into his house and ruling them with military sternness. When I told him that I needed three Indians to go on with me as soon as possible, he did not go out and ask if there were any who wished to go, but answered, “Of course; you shall have them to-morrow morning.”

We swung our hammocks under a new thatched roof over a split-palm floor on stilts. The Church of England Mission to the Macuxy Indians, into whose territory we had come again, was built on high ground some little distance from the Rupununi, though mosquitoes and gnats were still so troublesome as to force us to put up our nets. Well built and clean Indian huts stood at a respectful distance from the parson’s bungalow, where there was an air of business efficiency. The mission had many cattle, and numbers of Indians worked for it, though they were also given a certain amount of instruction. In British Guiana the predominating church has some of the faults of unrestrained Catholicism in the other lands of South America, the bishop, for instance, owning personally large numbers of cattle; but having no confessional or oath of celibacy to spring leaks in weak vessels, the result is mild commercialism rather than widespread social corruption. The parson did not believe in teaching the Indians English, but in learning their mother tongue, perfecting it as much as possible, reducing it to writing, and using it as the medium of instruction. He had found its grammar excellent, with many things shorter and sharper than in English; but it was impossible to teach them arithmetic because of their awkward counting system. For “six” they said “a hand and one over on the other hand,” and larger numbers were whole sentences. A few Indian children he had found remarkably bright. He said that the tribe scarcely knew what it is to steal, but that those members who had come in contact with negroes in the “balata” camps quickly became expert thieves. Their greatest fault was irresponsibility. Show a man or woman how to do a thing every day for a month, then impress it upon them that it must be done that way daily, and at the end of three days it would be found that they had ceased to do it, had succumbed to atavism and sunk quickly back into the ways of their ancestors.

Two youths in the Indian prime of life and a boy of sixteen who looked about twelve, but who spoke English and was to act as my interpreter as well as steersman, were ready at dawn. The parson’s orders to them were concise. “You will take this gentleman down to the “balata” camps as rapidly as possible, and bring the boat back here,” he commanded, and the Indians showed no tendency to argue the matter. Out of their hearing he told me to pay them for six days,—two down and four back—and that five shillings each for the trip, either in money or goods, would be a fair wage. Hart was to walk back home—much nearer from here than from Melville’s—with our other Indians, carrying various things that had come up the river for him. Intrusted with the parson’s big tin letter-box, well padlocked, for the bishop in Georgetown—so seldom does anyone “go down to town” at this season—I became doubly His Majesty’s Royal Mail Train.

It began to rain the instant we set off, but this time I could crawl under the edge of the tarpaulin, though huddled and cramped as I had not been since I hoboed under the hinged platform over Pullman steps. The Indians, of course, got wet, but having stripped to their red breech-clouts as soon as they were out of sight of the mission, this seemed to trouble them little. Notwithstanding their rounded stomachs, full to capacity of that miserable hunger antidote made of the mandioca, they showed some energy. It is a fallacy, however, that wilderness people are necessarily robust because they lead simple lives. They are patient and enduring, but exposure and alternate stuffing and fasting are not conducive to robust health. Sunshine and showers alternated throughout the day. Here and there were patches of savannah, but most of the time we were surrounded by endless forest walls and utter solitude. When I felt it must be near noon, I gave orders to land at the next opportunity and start a fire. We were doing so when I heard curious mutterings and stealthy movements among the Indians and to my question “Vincent” replied in a low voice, “Black men.” The story of the “Ocean Shark” still fresh in memory, I at once buckled on my revolver and took the direction indicated, only to find a group of negroes of the West Indian type, who rose to their feet as I approached and addressed me as “sir.” They were part of the crew of Melville’s long expected boat, which had left Georgetown three weeks before, and they were waiting for the black policeman in charge, who had gone up an estuary with twelve paddlers to arrest a native. We boiled some beef, which my boys ate with dry _farinha_, refusing beef-broth, and pushed on.

During the day we thoroughly boxed the compass, running to every point of it with the winding river. It was broader and more placid down here, though still swift and reaching to the tops of many good-sized trees. Hour after hour the steady, rhythmic thump of the paddles against the boat continued with the glinting lift of the gleaming blades as the two boys in the bow shoveled water behind them. Their idea of good paddling appeared to be to throw as much water into the air with each stroke as possible, and this sort of “grandstand play” and the constant monotonous scrape of the paddles on the edge of the boat seemed much wasted effort. Yet we bowled along much faster than the swift current. I paddled considerably myself, but though I was visibly much stronger than the Indian youths, and gave much more powerful strokes, I could not hold their pace. They were remarkably constant in keeping it up, going faster and faster until the bowman gave a signal by throwing water higher than usual, whereupon they started anew with a deeper and more measured stroke, which in a few minutes became fast and forceless again. They did very little talking, though they were natural and unembarrassed enough. “Soldiering,” such as letting go the paddle to feel of a toe or caress a scratch, never brought protest from the others, as it would under like circumstances from civilized workmen. Clothing was still largely ornamental and a fad with them, and their wrecks of shirts and trousers were more often discarded than worn, except in the case of “Vincent,” with whom they seemed to be a sign of his higher social standing. But under the useless garments forced upon them by the missionaries each wore a bright-red loin-cloth always kept carefully in place by a stout white cord about the waist. Like most savages, though they were indifferent to the lack of other clothes, they were far more careful not to show complete nakedness than are most civilized men.

I had planned to camp at dark, but to my surprise the Indians preferred to go on, saying that the mosquitoes and gnats were too thick to make sleep possible. Near sunset, therefore, we stopped to cook, and were off again at dark. The deadly stillness of night at times was not broken even by the faintest sound from the floating boat, but only by the occasional howling of some animal, evidently a “tiger,” off somewhere in the jungle. It was too cold to sleep; besides, my back ached with much sitting and there was not room to stretch out. Hour after hour the boys went on, sometimes paddling, sometimes floating and talking. Then the clear sky grew overcast, distant lightning flashed, and the rain began again. I crawled under cover, though too cramped to sleep. It must have been at least midnight when I heard the Indians snatching at bushes while it still rained, and peered out to find them on land looking for a place to sling my tarpaulin. They got it up after a fashion in the dense darkness and constant drizzle, though with barely room under it for my hammock and net. Then they swung their own hammocks outside and dug good clothes and blankets from their bags; but though they had made their own hammocks, insect pests did not seem to trouble them enough to induce them to make themselves nets.

I was aroused by the bashful, girl-of-twelve voice of “Vincent,” whose English was probably similar to the soft language the Indians use to one another in their own tongue, in which there never seems to be a harsh word, telling me that it would soon be daylight. We bailed out the boat and reloaded it, all in wet weeds, sore feet, and constant drizzle, and were off in the phantom of false morning. The soft, velvety tropical dawn came quickly, as if fleeing before the mammoth red ball that pursued it up over the horizon. Pairs and trios of parrots flew by in the fresh morning, chattering cheerily to one another. Chirruping black birds with long queenly tails were the most conspicuous of many little singing birds; a big white or gray, ponderously moving bird, like a heron, was the largest of many species. Trees and bushes of innumerable kinds were interwoven into solid walls along either bank, “monkey ropes” galore swinging down the face of it, but they were peopled with none of the playful creatures of our school geographies. I gave the boys a big dinner, which was unwise, for feast or famine is their natural way of life and, like hunting dogs, they were of little use when gorged. The river was lower and had turned far more sluggish for lack of fall, and our speed depended mainly on paddling. I ached from head to foot from sitting cramped for four days, particularly from the “jiggers” that had burrowed into my bare feet on the tramp to Melville’s, a tiny insect which lays its eggs under the skin and especially under the edges of the nails, where they begin to swell and produce acute pain until they are cut open and squeezed out. No one had any notion where we were or whether we would get anywhere that day; but it was evident that we could not make the mouth of the Rupununi, and at dusk we pitched camp in a site cleared by other travelers in the edge of the sloping woods, where the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I took refuge under my net while supper was cooking.

Monotonously the wide river, now placid and mirror-like, with very little current, slipped slowly along into the vista of endless forest walls. The sun poured down like molten iron. In mid-morning we passed the only boat we had thus far met on the trip, carrying an Indian family, the woman steering, two full-grown girls with no visible clothes, and several men paddling, a cur dog gazing over the gunwale. They, too, tossed water high in the air with every stroke. I alternated between paddling, bailing the boat, soaking salt meat for the meal ahead, reading, writing, and sitting stooped forward or leaning back to ease the cramp of my position. At least one did not need to go hungry on such a trip, as does frequently the traveler on foot through the wild places of the earth. Not half an hour below where we stopped to cook dinner beneath a majestic tree in the cathedral woods we passed the first human habitation I had sighted from the river since leaving Melville’s, though I had expected to see scores. It was an Indian hut, or rather shelter, for it had no walls; and close beyond were two or three more, one of two stories, though consisting merely of thatched roofs on poles. The women were naked as the men, except for bead bracelets and anklets, and sometimes an old skirt, though more often they had only a beaded apron a foot or more square in lieu of the fig-leaf. Little girls wore the same ornaments, including a smaller apron, as they began to approach puberty. Formerly all the native women confined themselves to this costume, but the advent of missionaries and ranchers, with their “civilizing” influence and the payment of everything in cloth, has begun to breed an unnatural prudery.

It was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon when the Chinese wall of forest was broken, or rather spotted, by a large, rough wooden building with a sheet-iron roof, a cluster of smaller ones about it. This was “The Stores,” headquarters of three rival “balata” companies, and the only place, except Boa Vista, on the journey from Manaos where goods are professionally for sale or buildings are made of imported material. We halted at the third and last among many canoes and “perlite” negroes, just before the Rupununi flows into the Essequibo.

The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter, was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation. I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it, the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks, perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness. I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his own individuality.

Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who gather a cheap rubber similar to the _caucho_ of Brazil. “Balata” boats had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over, as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks; and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host.

Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off” year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before.

We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move, and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again. We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong, good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English, which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later, lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris” wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs. Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men, but she knew only an academic reason for doing so.

Our errand was not allowed to interfere with household duties, so while “Harris” lolled in his hammock and the rest of us squatted on stumps and stones in the shade of his roof, the woman peeled the mandioca-roots, washed them, grated them on a native implement, and ran the mash into the open end of a snake-like _matapi_, or press made of woven flat fibers. This she hung by the upper loop from a beam-end and attached a weight to the lower end, thus squeezing out a yellowish juice that is deadly poison. This is carefully guarded from children and dogs, but, being volatile, is easily eliminated by boiling. The residue is then dried, sifted through basket sieves, and finally baked into cassava bread, the most horrible imitation of food extant, great pancake-like sheets of which were even then spread about the thatch roofs. Though similar in origin, cassava is far more trying to the civilized stomach than the bran-like _farinha_ of Brazil.

Negotiations were opened again in due season. I agreed to the princely price of ten dollars, food down and back for the whole party, even including the wife, and promised of my own free will a premium of a dollar for each day gained over the usual time for the trip. But here we struck another snag. The only paddlers available were the three I had brought with me; and they absolutely refused to go. They insisted that the Reverend White had told them to come straight back from “The Stores,” and that he was a man to be obeyed. I knew it; yet I was not going to be held a prisoner in the jungle for months to suit the convenience of three Indians, even with a parson thrown in. I put it to them strongly. If they would go down to Potaro mouth with me, I would pay them good wages and give them good food for both the down and the up trip and write a letter of explanation for them to carry back to the missionary. If they did not go, they could sit here twirling their thumbs without food, for I would not let them have the dugout until I was done with it. They had a gun and bows and arrows with them, and no doubt other Indians would not let them starve and might even lend them a boat; yet I felt that if I made my bluff strong enough, the pressure of the white man’s will would win in the end, barring some untoward incident. So I assured “Harris” that I could get plenty of paddlers, if these wished to starve, assuming great indifference, though fearing all the time that I might not be able to coerce them, and told him that it would save me paying what I owed them, though of course I should have given them what I had agreed upon with the parson. Leaving that bug in their ears, we finally ended our long and leisurely diplomatic conference, “Harris” agreeing to come down to “The Stores” next morning with his neighbor’s new boat, his own wife, and one man, while I was to furnish four paddlers, including Langrey, to provide all supplies, and to advance him five dollars upon his arrival.

All the way back I let the paddlers stew in their own thoughts, purposely saying nothing and reading a novel, as if my mind were at peace. Like all children, whether of the wilderness or merely in age, coaxing, I felt sure, would be far less effective with them than moral pressure. Time, patience, and, above all, propinquity would eventually cause their primitive wills to yield to mine. As we passed one of the huts along the bank, they shouted a conversation in Macuxy at those about it, perhaps getting some promise that a boat would be sent for them. Ignoring this and their former vociferous refusal, however, I called “Vincent” aside when we landed and said, in the tone one might use to a pouting child, “You talk it over with the other boys, and when you have made up your minds, come and tell me and I will get you food to cook.” As they had not eaten at all that day and were, if my own appetite was any gauge, half-starved, I depended on hunger as my most important ally.

The Scotch-Irish native, who addressed his negroes as “Mister,” and was chary of running foul of the official “Protector of the Indians,” as well as having the Englishman’s fear, several times multiplied, of the unprecedented, could not for a long time be talked over. Finally he agreed mildly to lend his aid, and sitting down on his doorstep, like a justice holding court, he called the three boys before him and addressed them in laborious pidgin-English. “Now can’t leave gentleman here, you see. Me going supply provisions. You paddle he down ...” and so on; after all of which they mumbled and went back to the bank of the river. But my most powerful ally eventually got in its work, and about sunset, having meanwhile visibly wept, they came to me and said they had decided to go—whereupon I gave them a meal that left “Vincent’s” little paunch protruding like a chicken’s crop. Then they came again, in a far more cheerful mood, and wanted a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a belt respectively, whether to gloat over them or merely to see the color of my coin I do not know. These things I gave them on account from the storehouse, and they were soon beaming and gay as happy children.

But I was not yet done. The law required a certified bowman and more paddlers. “Had you not been recommended to me by Melville, I could not let you go on without a permit from the Protector of the Indians,”—who never stirs out of Georgetown—added my charming host, much impressed with himself as an officer of the law, like all wooden-headed authorities. We debated another hour or more before he agreed, with the air of doing my whole nation an extraordinary favor, to consider me one of the paddlers and my best boy an experienced bowman. Then, out of the kindness of his heart, he permitted me to buy from his store—at prices I found later to be between five and six times those of Georgetown—the rations required by law,—seven days’ supplies for seven people, or forty-nine rations, each of which must include a pound of flour, half a pound of rice, two ounces of pork, ditto of beef, twice that of fish, two ounces of sugar, and so on through about twenty items, not to mention milk and cocoa and many other extras for “the captain, Harris” and myself. The fact that the manager himself gets twenty per cent. on all sales from the store may or may not have made him so insistent on full compliance with the law. When the list was completed he handed me a bill for $22.71, and then growled because I paid him with a five-pound note, instead of in gold.

When I fancied everything settled at last, Langrey came to me with tears struggling over his eyelids and said, “So sorry, sir. I was so _interested_ in this trip. But I can’t go.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because, sir, I have not the passage money from Potaro mouth down to Georgetown.”

“How much will that be?”

“$2.08, second-class, sir.”

“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have earned that much?”

“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.”

“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you to that extent to get back home?”

“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into his more habitual speech.

This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars.

These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store. Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were 48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices, because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This is a very large member of the _sapote_ family, the bark of which the “bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough, yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata” concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia.