A NEW WORLD
A week later found the whole party aboard of one of the great South
American liners bound for Belem. The voyage across was uneventful except
for the constant bickerings between Jud and Professor Ditson, in which
Will and Joe acted sometimes as peace-makers and sometimes as
pace-makers. Then, one morning, Will woke up to find that the ocean had
changed overnight from a warm sap-green to a muddy clay-color. Although
they were not within sight of land, the vast river had swept enough
earth from the southern continent into the ocean to change the color of
the water for a hundred miles out at sea. Just at sunrise the next day
the steamer glided up the Amazon on its way to the old city of Belem,
seventy miles inland.
"The air smells like a hot, mouldy cellar!" grumbled Jud; and soon the
Cornwall pilgrims began to glimpse things strange and new to all three
of them. Groups of slim assai-palms showed their feathery foliage;
slender lianas hung like green snakes from the trees; and everywhere
were pineapple plants, bread-fruit trees, mangos, blossoming oranges and
lemons, rows of enormous silk-cotton trees, and superb banana plants,
with glossy, velvety green leaves twelve feet in length curving over the
roof of nearly every house. Beyond the city the boys had a sight of the
jungle, which almost without a break covers the greater part of the
Amazon basin, the largest river-basin on earth. They landed just before
sunset, and, under Professor Ditson's direction, a retinue of porters
carried their luggage to the professor's house, far down the beach, the
starting-point for many of his South American expeditions.
As the sun set, the sudden dark of the tropics dropped down upon them,
with none of the twilight of higher latitudes. Jud grumbled at the
novelty.
"This ain't no way to do," he complained to Professor Ditson. "The sun
no more than goes down, when bang! it's as black as your hat."
"We'll have that seen to at once," responded the professor,
sarcastically. "In the meantime, be as patient as you can."
With the coming of the dark, a deafening din began. Frogs and toads
croaked, drummed, brayed, and roared. Locusts whirred, and a vast
variety of crickets and grasshoppers added their shrill note to the
uproar, so strange to visitors and so unnoticed by natives in the
tropics.
"Hey, Professor!" shouted Jud, above the tumult, "what in time is all
this noise, anyway?"
"What noise?" inquired Professor Ditson, abstractedly.
The old trapper waved both hands in a circle around his head and turned
to the boys for sympathy. "Sounds like the Cornwall Drum and Fife Corps
at its worst!" he shrieked.
"What do you mean, Jud?" said Will, winking at Joe.
"Poor Jud!" chimed in the latter, shaking his head sadly, "this trip too
much for him. He hearing noises inside his head."
For a moment, Jud looked so horrified that, in spite of their efforts to
keep up the joke, the boys broke down and laughed uproariously.
"You'll get so used to this," said Professor Ditson, at last
understanding what they were talking about, "that after a few nights you
won't notice it at all."
At the professor's bungalow they met two other members of the
expedition. One of these was Hen Pine, a negro over six feet tall, but
with shoulders of such width that he seemed much shorter. He had an
enormous head that seemed to be set directly between his shoulders, so
short and thick was his neck. Hen had been with Professor Ditson for
many years, and, in spite of his size and strength, was of a happy,
good-natured disposition, constantly showing his white teeth in
irresistible smiles. Pinto, Professor Ditson's other retainer, was short
and dark, an Indian of the Mundurucu tribe, that warlike people which
early made an alliance of peace with the Portuguese pioneers of Brazil
which they had always scrupulously kept. Pinto had an oval aquiline
face, and his bare breast and arms had the cross-marks of dark-blue
tattooing which showed him to have won high rank as a warrior on the
lonely River of the Tapirs, where his tribe held their own against the
fierce Mayas, those outlawed cannibals who are the terror of the South
American forest.
That evening, after dinner, Professor Ditson took Jud and the boys out
for a walk along the beach which stretched away in front of them in a
long white curve under the light of the full moon. The night was full of
strange sounds, and in the sky overhead burned new stars and unknown
constellations, undimmed even by the moonlight, which showed like snow
against the shadows of the jungle. Professor Ditson pointed out to the
boys Agena and Bungula, a noble pair of first-magnitude stars never seen
in the North, which flamed in the violet-black sky. As they looked, Will
remembered the night up near Wizard Pond before the bear came, when Joe
had told him Indian stories of the stars. To-night, almost overhead,
shone the most famous of all tropical constellations, the Southern
Cross.
Professor Ditson told them that it had been visible on the horizon of
Jerusalem about the date of the Crucifixion. From that day, the
precession of the equinoxes had carried it slowly southward, and it
became unknown to Europeans until Amerigo Vespucci on his first voyage
saw and exultantly wrote that he had seen the "Four Stars," of which the
tradition had lingered. The professor told them that it was the
sky-clock of the tropics and that sailors, shepherds, and other
night-wanderers could tell the time within fifteen minutes of watch-time
by the position of the two upper stars of this constellation.
"It looks more like a kite than a cross," interjected Jud. "What's that
dark patch in the Milky Way?" he inquired, pointing to a strange black,
blank space showing in the milky glimmer of the galaxy.
"That must be the Coal-sack," broke in Will, before Professor Ditson
could reply.
"I remember reading about it at school," he went on.
"When Magellan sailed around Cape Horn, his sailors saw it and were
afraid that they would sail so far south that the sky wouldn't have any
stars. What cheered them up," went on Will, "was the sight of old Orion,
which stays in the sky in both hemispheres," and he pointed out the
starry belt to Jud and Joe, with the sky-king Sirius shining above it
instead of below as in the northern hemisphere.
As Jud and the boys stared up at the familiar line of the three stars,
with rose-red Betelgeuse on one side and fire-white Rigel on the other,
they too felt something of the same comfort that the old-time navigators
had known at the sight of this constellation, steadfast even when the
Great Bear and the Pole Star itself had faded from the sky. As they
continued to gaze upward they caught sight of another star, which shone
with a wild, blue gleam which rivaled the green glare of the dog-star,
Sirius. Professor Ditson told them that it was Canopus, Mohammed's star,
which he thought led him to victory, even as Napoleon believed that the
planet Venus, seen by daylight, was his guiding star. Then the professor
traced for them that glittering river of stars, Eridanus, and showed
them, guarding the southern horizon, gleaming Achernar, the End of the
River, a star as bright as is Arcturus or Vega in the northern sky. Then
he showed them Fomalhaut, of the Southern Fish, which in the North they
had seen in the fall just skipping the horizon, one of the faintest of
the first-magnitude stars. Down in the southern hemisphere it had come
into its own and gleamed as brightly near this northern horizon as did
Achernar by the southern. It was Will who discovered the Magellanic
Clouds, like fragments of the Milky Way which had broken up and floated
down toward the South Pole. These had been also seen and reported by
Magellan on that first voyage ever taken around the world four hundred
years ago.
Farther up the beach, Jud and the boys came to a full stop. Before them
towered so high that the stars seemed tangled in its leaves a royal
palm, one of the most magnificent trees on earth. Its straight, tapered
shaft shot up over a hundred and twenty-five feet and was crowned with a
mass of glossy leaves, like deep-green plumes. As it touched the violet
sky with the full moon rising back of its proud head, it had an air of
unearthly majesty.
Beneath their feet the beach was covered with "angel-wings," pure white
shells eight inches long, shaped like the wings of angels in old
pictures. With them were beautifully tinted tellinas, crimson olivias
with their wonderful zigzag, tentlike color patterns, large dosinias
round as dollars, and many other varieties, gold, crimson, and purple.
Some distance down the beach the professor kept a large canoe, in
which the whole party paddled out into the bay. As they flashed over the
smooth surface, the clamor of the night-life dwindled. Suddenly, from
the bushes on a little point, sounded a bird-song which held them all
spellbound, a stream of joyous melody, full of rapid, ringing notes, yet
with a purity of tone which made the song indescribably beautiful. It
seemed to include the ethereal quality of the hermit-thrush, the lilt
and richness of the thrasher, and the magic of the veery's song, and yet
to be more beautiful than any or all of them together. On and on the
magic melody flowed and rippled, throbbed and ebbed in the moonlight.
Suddenly it stopped. Then from the same thicket burst out a medley of
different songs. Some of them were slow and mellow. Others had silvery,
bell-like trills. There were flutelike calls, gay hurried twitterings,
and leisurely delicious strains--all of them songs of birds which the
Cornwall visitors had never even heard. Then Will, the ornithologist of
his party, began to hear songs which were familiar to him. There was the
musical chuckle of the purple martin, the plaintive call of the upland
plover, the curious "kow-kow" of the yellow-billed cuckoo, and the slow,
labored music of the scarlet tanager. Suddenly all of them ceased and
once again the original song burst out.
"That thicket must be chuck-full of birds," whispered Jud.
Professor Ditson shook his head.
"It's only one bird," he said, "but the greatest singer of all the
world--the white banded mocking bird."
Even as he spoke, the songster itself fluttered up into the air, a brown
bird with a white throat, and tail and wings broadly banded with the
same color. Up and up it soared, and its notes chimed like a golden bell
as its incomparable song drifted down through the moonlight to those
listening below. Then on glistening wings the spent singer wavered down
like some huge moth and disappeared in the dark of the thicket. In the
silence that followed, Will drew a deep breath.
"I'd have traveled around the world to hear that song," he half
whispered.
Professor Ditson nodded his head understandingly.
"Many and many an ornithologist," he said, "has come to South America
to listen to that bird and gone away without hearing what we have heard
to-night. Between his own two songs," went on the professor, "I counted
the notes of seventeen other birds of both North and South America that
he mimicked."
They paddled gently toward the shore, hoping to hear the bird again, but
it sang no more that night. As they neared the beach, the moonlit air
was heavy with the scent of jessamine, fragrant only after darkness, and
the overpowering perfume of night-blooming cereuses, whose satin-white
blossoms were three feet in circumference. Suddenly, just before them,
the moon-flowers bloomed. Great snowy blossoms five inches across began
to open slowly. There was a puff of wind, and hundreds of them burst
into bloom at once, glorious white salvers of beauty and fragrance.
"Everything here," said Will, "seems beautiful and peaceful and safe."
Professor Ditson smiled sardonically. "South America is beautiful," he
said precisely, "but it is never safe. Death and danger lurk everywhere
and in the most unexpected forms. It is only in South America," he went
on, "that you can be eaten alive by fish the size of small trout, or be
killed by ants or little brown bats."
Jud listened with much scorn. "Professor," he broke out at last, "I
don't take much stock in that kind of talk. Your nerves are in a bad
way. My advice to you is--"
What Mr. Judson Adams's advice was, will never be known, for at that
moment a dreadful thing happened. Into the beauty of the moonlight, from
the glassy water of the bay soared a shape of horror, a black, monstrous
creature like a gigantic bat. It had two wings which measured a good
twenty feet from tip to tip, and was flat, like an enormous skate.
Behind it streamed a spiked, flexible tail, while long feelers, like
slim horns, projected several feet beyond a vast hooked mouth. Like some
vampire shape from the Pit, it skimmed through the air across the bow of
the canoe not ten feet from where Jud was sitting. The old trapper was
no coward, but this sudden horror was too much even for his seasoned
nerves. With a yell, he fell backward off his thwart, and as his legs
kicked convulsively in the air, the monster came down with a crash that
could have been heard a mile, raising a wave which nearly swamped the
canoe. A moment later, the monstrous shape broke water again farther
seaward, blotting out for an instant with its black bulk the rising
moon.
"What kind of a sea-devil is that, anyhow?" queried Jud, shakily, as he
righted himself, with the second crash of the falling body still in his
ears.
"That," responded Professor Ditson, precisely, "is a well-nourished
specimen of the manta-ray, a fish allied to the skate family--but you
started to speak about nerves."
Jud, however, said nothing and kept on saying the same all the way back
to the house. Arriving there in safety, he went down to the spring for
some water with Pinto, but a moment later came bolting back.
"What's the matter now, Jud?" inquired Will, solicitously. "Did you find
another water-devil in the spring?"
"That's just what I did!" bellowed Jud. "When I started to dip out a
pail of water, up pops about six feet of snake. Now you know, boys," he
went on, panting, "I hate snakes, an' I jumped clear across the spring
at the sight of this one; but what do you suppose that Injun did?" he
continued excitedly. "Pats the snake's head an' tells me it's tame an'
there to keep the spring free from frogs. Now what do you think of
that?"
"He was quite right," observed Professor Ditson, soothingly. "It is a
perfectly harmless, well-behaved serpent, known as the mussarama. This
one is a fine specimen which it will be worth your while to examine more
carefully."
"I've examined it just as carefully as I'm goin' to," shouted Jud,
stamping into the house as Pinto came grunting up the path carrying a
brimming bucket of water.
As they sat down for supper, a long streak of black and white flashed
across the ceiling just over Jud, who sat staring at it with a spoonful
of soup half-way to his mouth.
"Professor Ditson," he inquired softly, "is that thing on the ceiling
another one of your tame snakes?"
"No, sir," responded the professor, impatiently; "that is only a
harmless house-lizard."
"I just wanted to know," remarked Jud, rising and taking his plate to a
bench outside of the door, where he finished his supper, in spite of all
attempts on the part of the boys to bring him back.
In front of Will stood a pitcher of rich yellow cream. "You have a good
cow, Professor Ditson," he remarked politely as he poured some into a
cup of the delicious coffee which is served with every meal in Brazil.
"Yes," agreed the scientist, "I have a grove of them." Then he explained
to the bewildered Will that the cream was the sap of the cow tree.
Will was not so fortunate with his next investigation. Taking a second
helping of a good-tasting stew which Pinto had brought in from the
kitchen, he asked the Indian what it was made of.
"Tinnala," replied the Mundurucu.
"What is it in North American?" persisted Will.
The Indian shook his head. "I not know any other name," he said. "Wait,
I show you," he went on, disappearing into the kitchen to return a
moment later with a long, hairy arm ending in a clenched fist. Will
started up and clasped his stomach frantically, remembering all that he
had read about cannibalism among the South American Indians. Even when
Professor Ditson explained that the stew was made from a variety of
monkey which was considered a great delicacy, he was not entirely
reassured and finished his meal on oranges.
Jud was much amused. "You always were a fussy eater, Bill," he remarked
from the porch. "I remember you wouldn't eat mountain-lion meat up in
the North when we were after the pearl. You ought to pattern after Joe.
He don't find fault with his food."
"All I want about food," grunted Joe, "is enough."
That night the whole party slept side by side in hammocks swung in a
screened veranda in the second story.
During the night, Jud, who was always a light sleeper, was awakened by a
curious, rustling, crackling sound which seemed to come from the
storeroom, which opened into the sleeping-porch. After listening awhile
he reached over and aroused Professor Ditson, who was sleeping soundly
next to him.
"Some one's stealin' your grub," he whispered.
The professor stepped lightly out of his hammock, followed by Jud and
the boys, who had been waked up by the whispering. Opening the door
noiselessly, the scientist peered in. After a long look, Professor
Ditson turned around to find Jud gripping his revolver and ready for the
worst.
"You can put up your gun," the scientist growled. "Bullets don't mean
anything to thieves like these, and he flashed a light on a strange
sight. On a long table stood native baskets full of cassava, that
curious grainlike substance obtained from the root of the poisonous
manihot and which takes the place of wheat in South America. The floor
was covered with moving columns of ants, large and small, which had
streamed up the legs of the table and into the baskets. Some of them
were over an inch long, while others were smaller than the grains they
were carrying. The noise which had aroused Jud had been made by their
cutting off the dry leaves with which the baskets were lined, to use in
lining their underground nest. Professor Ditson told them that nothing
could stop an ant-army. Once on the march, they would not turn back for
fire or water and would furiously attack anything that tried to check
them. "A remarkably efficient insect," concluded the professor, "for it
bites with one end and stings with the other."
"This is what I call a nice quiet night!" murmured Jud, as he went back
to his hammock. "Sea-devils, snakes, lizards--and now it's ants. I
wonder what next?"
"Next," however, was daylight, blazing with the startling suddenness of
the tropics, where there is no dawn-light. With the light, the tumult of
the night ceased, and in place of the insect din came a medley of
bird-notes. When Jud opened his eyes Professor Ditson's hammock was
empty, for the scientist usually got up long before daylight, and
through the open door strutted a long-legged, wide-winged bird, nearly
three feet tall, with a shimmering blue breast and throat. Without
hesitating, she walked over to Jud's hammock and, spread her wings with
a deep murmuring note, made a low bow.
"Good morning to you," responded Jud, much pleased with his visitor.
The bird bowed and murmured again and allowed him to pat her beautiful
head as she bent forward. Then she went to the next hammock and the next
and the next, until she had awakened all of the sleepers, whereupon,
with deep bows and courtesies and murmurings, she sidled out of the
room.
"Now, that," said Jud, as he rolled out of the hammock and began to look
for his shoes, "is an alarm-clock worth having!"
Pinto, the Mundurucu, who appeared at this moment with a pail of spring
water, told them that the bird was a tame female trumpeter which he had
picked up as a queer, frightened little creature, all legs and neck, but
which had become one of the best-loved of all of his many pets. Each
morning the tame, beautiful bird would wander through the house, waking
up every sleeper at sunrise. When Pinto took trips through the forest
the bird always went with him, traveling on his back in a large-meshed
fiber bag; and when he made camp it would parade around for a while,
bowing and talking, and then fly up into the nearest tree, where it
would spend the night. Tente, as it was named, was always gentle except
when it met a dog. No matter how large or fierce the latter might be,
Tente would fly at it, making a loud, rumbling noise, which always made
the dog turn tail and run for its life.
As Pinto started to fill the pitchers, Will, the bird expert of the
party, began to ask him about some of the songs which were sounding all
around the house. One bird which squalled and mewed interested him.
"That bird chestnut cuckoo," said Pinto. "It have the soul of a cat."
And as Will listened he could well believe it. A little farther off,
another bird called constantly, "Crispen, Crispen, Crispen."
"One time," narrated the Indian, "a girl and her little brother Crispen
go walking in the woods. He very little boy and he wander away and get
lost, and all day and all night and all next day she go through the
woods calling, 'Crispen! Crispen! Crispen!' until at last she changed
into a little bird. And still she flies through the woods and calls
'Crispen!'"
At this point, Jud finally found his missing shoes and started to put
one on, but stopped at a shout from the Mundurucu.
"Shake it out!" warned Pinto. "No one ever puts on shoes in this country
without shaking out."
Jud did as he was told. With the first shoe he drew a blank. Out of the
second one, however, rattled down on the floor a centipede fully six
inches long, which Pinto skillfully crushed with the heavy
water-pitcher. Jud gasped and sank back into his hammock.
"Boys," he said solemnly, "I doubt if I last out this trip!"