IV

Night brought one of these men to each of our cabins, and put a party of

them drinking in the saloon. After my habit of thinking of people in

crowds, as an Anglican Church, or an ethical society, a labour movement,

a federation of proprietors, or suffragists, or Jews, or stockbrokers'

clerks, crowds moving with massed exactitude by the thousand at least,

when prompted, this man O'Brien standing on his two legs by himself, old

man Jim, and the rest, each of them defending and running his own

particular kingdom, and governing that, ill or well--for I saw them

fairly drunk now and then--and never waiting for a word from any master

or delegate, made me wonder whether till then I had met a living man, or

had heard merely of a population of bundles of newspapers. These men had

no leaders. They attended to all that. Each had to find his own way.

They were unrelated to anything I knew, and beyond the help of even a

candidate for Parliament. I suppose they had never heard of a Defence

League. They could have found no use for it, because a challenge to

defend themselves would never catch them unwilling or unable. Each man

soldiered himself, and perhaps was rather too ready to deal with a show

of insolence, or an assumption of power in another. Yet they were not

the violent and headstrong fellows of romantic tales. They were simple

and kind, submitting with a sick smile to the prickly ridicule of their

fellows round the board. They regarded meat, drink, and tobacco as

common; they were ready to leap into the dark for a friend.

There was one young bearded Englishman among them who was more than a

friendly figure to me. All were friendly; but the Americans bore

themselves with the easy assurance of the favoured heirs of Adam; though

their successful work in that tropical swamp perhaps justified them. The

Englishman had less of that assurance of a unique favour which was so

completely bestowed that irresolution never shook the aplomb of its

lucky inheritors. He came into my cabin one night, hoping he was not

disturbing me, and bringing as a present a sheaf of native arrows tipped

with red and blue macaw feathers, as he had promised.

"They come from Bolivia--forest Indians--three hundred miles from here."

He explained he had reached our point in the Brazilian forest from the

Pacific side. He had crossed the mountains, descended to the level

jungle at the base of the Andean wall, and followed the rivers eastward,

alone in a canoe till he chanced upon our steamer unloading Welsh fuel

into a forest clearing. To a new-comer in a mysterious land, this was a

clear invitation to listen, and I looked at the man expectantly. He was

lighting his pipe. The country through which he must have passed was

unknown, as our maps showed. But he simply indicated that manner of his

advent, as though it were the same as any other, and sat looking through

the door of my cabin, smoking, absently gazing at the night scene on the

afterdeck.

The hombres were working at the hold immediately below us, their labours

made obscurely bright by a roaring flame of volatalised oil. The light

pulsed on the face of the Englishman, and chequered my cabin in black

and luminous gold. Of all the region of forest about us nothing showed

but a cloud of leaves, which leaned towards us out of the night,

supported on two pale, tremulous columns. The hold of the ship was a

black rectangle, and the almost naked negroes and brown men moving about

it, or peering into the chasm, were like sinister figures on an

inscrutable business about the verge of the pit. They were not men, but

the debris of men, moving with awful volition, merely a bright

cadaverous mask hovering in a void, or two arms upheld, or a black

headless trunk. For the roaring illuminant on deck dismembered the ship

and its occupants, bursting into the weight of surrounding night as a

fixed explosion, beams rigid and glowing, and shadows in long solid bars

radiating from its incandescent heart.

"I'm glad you're here," said my companion. He never gave me his name,

and I do not know it now. "I hav'n't heard home talk for a year. Hav'n't

heard much of anything. A little Spanish coming along; and here some

American."

We continued looking at the puzzling, disrupted scene outside for some

time without speaking, secure in a chance and lucky sympathy. Then a

basket of coal tipped against a hatch coaming and whirled away,

scattering the men. We rose to see if any were hurt.

"Curious, this desperate haste, isn't it?" said the Englishman. "At

every point of the compass from here there's at least a thousand miles

of wilderness. Excepting at this place it wouldn't matter to anybody

whether a thing were done to-night, or next week, or not at all. But

look at those fellows--you'd think this was a London wharf, and a tide

had to be caught. Here they are on piece-work and overtime, where

there's nothing but trees, alligators, tigers, and savages. An unknown

Somebody in Wall Street or Park Lane has an idea, and this is what it

does. The potent impulse! It moves men who don't know the language of

New York and London down to this desolation. It begins to ferment the

place. The fructifying thought! Have you seen the graveyard here? We've

got a fine cemetery, and it grows well. Still, this railway will get

done. Yes, people who don't know what it's for, they'll make a little of

it, and die, and more who don't know what it's for, and won't use it

when it's made, they'll finish it. This line will get its freights of

precious rubber moving down to replenish the motor tyres of

civilisation, and the chap who had the bright idea, but never saw this

place, and couldn't live here a week, or shovel dirt, or lay a track,

and wouldn't know raw rubber if he saw it, he'll score again. Progress,

progress! The wilderness blossoms as the rose. It's wonderful, isn't

it?"

I was just a little annoyed. After all, I was part of the job. I'd made

my sacrifices, too. But I admitted what he said. Why not? It was

something, that fancy, that every rattle of the winch outside, bringing

up another load, moved abruptly under the impulse of another thought

from London Town--six thousand miles away; two months' travel. Great

London Town! It was true. If London shut off its good will that winch

would stop, and the locomotives would come to a stand to rot under the

trees, and the lianas would lock their wheels; and in a month the forest

would have foundered the track under a green flood. Where the American

accent was dominant, the jaguars would moan at night. That long wound in

the forest would be annealed and invisible in a year. While it

persisted, the idea could conquer and maintain.

"Yes, but it's all chance," said the Englishman.

"That uncertain and impersonal will controls us. Have you ever worked

desperately, the fever in your bones, at a link in a job the rest of

which was already abandoned, though you didn't know it? Yet perhaps even

so there is something gained, the knowledge that all you do is fugitive,

that there is nothing but an idea, which may be withdrawn without

warning at any moment, under the most complicated and inspiring

structure. Having that fore-knowledge you can work with a light heart,

secure against betrayal, ready with your own laugh when the mockery

comes. A community finds it must have a bridge; Wall Street hears of it,

and finances a contractor, who finds an architect to design it. An army

builds it. And then this blessed old planet moves in its sleep, and the

obstructing river flows another way. Well for us we can rarely see the

beginning and the end of the work we are doing. Most of the men on this

job have not been here three months. They come and shovel a little dirt,

and die. Or they get frightened, and go. But that idea, that remains

here, using up men and forests, using up all that comes within its

invisible influence, drawing in material and pressing it into its unseen

mould, so that out of the invisible sprouts a railway, projecting length

by length, transmuted men and timber. A courtier once gave his cloak to

Queen Elizabeth to save her feet; but what is that when these men give

their bodies to make an easier road for the commerce of their fellows?

They say every sleeper on a tropical line represents a man. The

conquering human, who lives by dying!

"The unseen idea remains--some stranger's idea--of gain; profit out of a

necessity not his, filled by other men unknown to him. You can't escape

it. First and last, it uses you. It uses you up. You may twist and

double, but 'when me you fly, I am the wings,' as Emerson says. Once,

once, I deliberately tried to escape from it, to get out of its range. I

thought it was local, that idea, a mean and local urge. I believed I had

escaped it too. I was young, though, then. But we all try when we're

young. There is but one way of escape--you may use up others; but that

isn't an easy way of escape, for some of us.

"No alternative but that, and a man cannot take it. There you are; use,

or be used. Once I thought I had escaped. Once upon a time, every

morning at eight o'clock, I went to an office in Leadenhall Street. Know

that place? My first job. I was one in a crowd of fifty clerks. We sat

on high stools, facing each other across double-desks. There were brass

rails above each desk, where we rested ledgers and letter baskets. Each

of us marked his stool somewhere with a personal symbol. My own, my sole

point of vantage there, my support in life, that high stool; and I would

have been prepared to maintain it upright--following our office code of

honour, I as firm as may be upon it--even if, treacherously blabbing, I

had had to deprive all my fellow-clerks of their supports in life. We

were not a community, working out a common ideal. An idea used us. And

that was a job I got as a favour, mark you. Some one had known my dead

father.

"I knew the name of my boss, but that was all. I never spoke to him. I

used to see him, a middle-aged man with sad eyes and a petulant mouth,

clean shaved, and bald headed. He came in a carriage every morning, and

went straight to a room kept from us by opaque glass. I used to wonder

what he did in there. He rarely came into the office. When he did come

into it, his was the only voice which ever spoke there above a whisper;

a sharp, startling, and minatory voice. But we rarely saw him there. A

bell would ring, a sinister summons on the ceiling over the desk of a

principal clerk, and that chap would drop anything he was doing,

anything, and go. I've seen my senior clerk, an elderly man in

spectacles, jump as if he'd been struck when his bell whirred. It was

such an awfully solemn place. Nobody ever thought of calling across that

room, but would go round to another desk, and whisper. You felt you were

part of a grave and secret plot, scribbling away to bring it to a

completion, and that all your fellow-conspirators were possible

traitors.

"But the plot was never complete. It went on and on, day after day, in

an everlasting, suffocating sanctity, with the opaque shining glass

front of the private room overlooking us, a luminous face entirely

blank, though you knew the brain behind it saw everything, and was aware

of all. It even knew old Beckwith, my senior, had got deeply into debt

through his wife's doctor's bills, and had been fool enough to go to the

moneylenders. His bell sprang a summons one morning; in Beckwith went;

came out again, looking grey, poor old perisher, went straight to the

hat rack, passed awkwardly through the swing doors, letting in a burst

of traffic noise from the street, while we watched him furtively, and

that was the last of Beckwith. I have heard our boss was a rigid

moralist. He said a man who drank, gambled, or got into debt, not being

able to control his own life, was no good for the business of another

man. A system should have no bowels. Out the incompetent had to go. It

was Spartan, but it paid twenty per cent., I've heard. Once we had a

rebellious interruption of our sacred quiet, but only once. I never knew

exactly why it was. We had a huge factory somewhere in the East

End--Cubitt Town way--and one afternoon a woman came to the counter, and

asked for the cashier. She was so obviously East End, in a shawl, that

the counter clerk was shocked at the bare idea of it. She kept demanding

the cashier. The clerk politely, but nervously, because of her rising,

emotional voice, resisted her. She began to shout. We all stopped to see

what would happen. Shouting there! She was still crying out--she wanted

justice for a daughter whose body had got into a machine, I think--and

the cashier was forced to appear. I was surprised that he was so quiet

with her. She was weeping hysterically at our polished mahogany counter,

with its immaculate blotters, and flat, crystal ink-pots, where there

were men in silk hats, looking at the unusual scene sideways and

smiling. She could not be pacified; and suddenly she picked up an

ink-pot, and hurled it through that frozen glass face of the private

room. A devastating crash. The shocking, raucous horror of blasphemy.

The silence following was unendurable. We looked to the private door for

outraged power to appear. Nothing happened. A policeman came and removed

the woman, the cashier smiling indulgently at the officer, and shaking

his head. The system, after a momentary halt, moved on again, broad,

serene, and irresistible.

"I never catch the smell of an open Bible now but it conjures a picture

of that arid office, angular, polished, and hard, where the ledgers

before the disciplined men exude a dusty, leathery smell. But there I

stayed for years, smelling it, and making out bills of lading and

invoices. It was my lot. There was a junior who assisted me, a chap with

flat, shiny hair parted in the middle. He had a habit of whispering

about girls, when he was not whispering about the music hall last night,

or the football next Saturday. When the cashier, a young man, and a

relative of the boss, came walking down the avenue of desks, his sharp

eyes narrowed to slits, and his mouth a little open, it was funny to see

my junior put on speed, and get an intent and earnest look in his face.

"When I was done for the day, I'd get my book out of my bag, and wonder,

going home, whether I'd ever see those places I read about, Java, India,

and the Congo, where you went about in a white helmet and a white

uniform, and did things in a large, directive way, helping Indians and

niggers to make something of their country. Not this niggling, selfish,

pretty chandlery written large in stone, mahogany, and glass, disguised

in magnitude and gravity. Cocoanut palms and forests with untold tales.

But like the boys who found fun with the girls, with music halls and

football, but were afraid of the sack. I did nothing. I was even afraid

of the girls.

"One day as usual I went with some of the other fellows to lunch, at an

A.B.C. shop. We always went there. The girls knew us and would smile at

our jokes. Small coffee and a scone and butter. My life! I found a

_Telegraph_ some one had left on a chair, and I read it more because I

didn't want to listen to that virulent abuse of our mean cashier--he

certainly was mean--than because I wanted to read. In it, by chance, I

noticed an advertisement for a book-keeper who would go to the tropics.

That I noted. Of course, I stood no chance. But I could try.

"That night at home I wrote an application. I wrote it, I think, a dozen

times, till the letter was impeccable, a thing of beauty and precision.

I felt this was a most momentous affair. Whether it was the excitement

of doing something in the veritable direction of romance, or whether it

was through reading 'Waterman's Wanderings' I don't know, but I remember

a curious dream I had that night. I was alone in a forest which made me

afraid and expectant. It was still and secretive. You know the empty

stage in an unnatural, rosy light, with a glorified distance in which

you expect a devil or a fairy queen to appear. There was a hammock

hanging motionless from a branch. Something was in it, but I could not

see what. That hammock was as still as the leaves hanging over it. Then

the hammock shook, and a girl rose in it and smiled at me. She was tiny,

but adult, and her eyes were shining in the dusk of her hair, which fell

thickly over her little, coffee-coloured breasts.

"A telegram came for me, just as I was leaving for the office one

morning. It required me to call on Mr. Utah R. Brewster at the Hotel

Palace, that very day, but at a time when I should have been

industriously at work for another. The question was, should I catch that

morning 'bus I had never missed--or take all the possibilities beyond

this door which promised to open on romance? I made up my mind, which

went drunk with rebellion. I got into my seventh-day clothes. Utah R.

Brewster and freedom! The Blackwall 'bus--do you remember those old

hearses, with a straight companion-ladder to the upper deck where the

outside passengers sat, knees up, back to back along the middle?--well,

it had to go by the office, and I was actually in doubt whether, aware

of my unprecedented revolt, it would stop outside the familiar glum

office and lawfully refuse to budge till I alighted. It went on,

blundering past the place, all strangely unconscious of what it was

doing, bearing me with my courage screwed down to bursting-point. The

driver even said what a lovely May morning it was.

"The Hotel Palace! I had often seen that ornate building when Saturday

afternoon release took me west. Red carpeting on the steps, a glimpse of

ferns, women all as strange as exotics going in and out, and between me

and it a chasm which cut clear to the very centre of the earth. I

carried my attack beyond the portals. It was nothing, after all. A

flunkey put me in a chair too full of cushions to be easy, and I watched

men and women who, at that time of the day, when all the folk I knew

were making desperate and cunning efforts to keep their places here

safe--I watched those men and women behaving as though all eternity were

theirs, and it was the angels' business to bear them up. It was as great

a mystery to me whose every week-day morning was the inviolate

possession of another, as Joshua's solar miracle. I was called, led

along a silent corridor full of shut doors, and after a long walk found

myself beyond all the noise of London, far in solitude with a man in a

dressing-gown, who stood before a fire, working a cigar with strong,

mobile lips. He put up a monocle, and looked at me shyly. Then began to

walk up and down the hearth-rug, talking.

"'Well,' he said. 'All right. I guess you'll do. Say, you look pretty

fit. You don't drink, eh? Don't get nervous when you see the dead, huh?

All right.' He put his monocle back into his eye, and grinned at me. I

told him, in a rush, how much I wanted to see the tropics. He said

nothing. He got a large blue map, intricate with white lines, and told

me of The Company. The Job.

"I did not fully comprehend it then. I don't now. He left out too much.

There was no beginning and no ending. There was hardly a middle. He

merely indicated unrelated points; but at any rate the points were so

widely sundered and so different that the bare indication of them

conveyed a sense of an enormous undertaking, difficult, important, and

necessary. Work for an army. I should be but an insignificant sutler in

that army. But at least I should be one in it, one of those putting this

important affair through for future generations. The communal idea,

this. The very size of it gave me a sense of security. It was too

broad-based to collapse. Success was inherent in its impersonal nature.

A state affair. Brewster briefly mentioned some showy names, names of

great financiers. They were my generals, and I should never see them.

But their reputations were partly in my keeping.

"Hallelujah! I had escaped. I never went back to the office. I never

replied to its curt inquiry. In a week I sailed from Liverpool. Much I

heard, on the mail boat, of The Company, this new enterprise which was

going to make a tropical region one of the richest countries in the

world; develop it, fling its riches to all. In four weeks more I arrived

at a small tropical island, at which I had to wait for The Company's tug

to take me to the mainland and my business.

"There was a club-house ashore, where I stayed for a few days. There I

met some men who had been working for The Company, but for

incomprehensible reasons were leaving this work to which I had come so

eagerly; they were returning home. They were strangely pallid and limp

as though the dark of some hot damp underground had turned their blood

white. Their talk was drawled out, the weary utterance of the

disillusioned who yet showed fate no resentment. They might have been

the dead speaking, long untouched by any warm human vanity. I was really

glad to get away from them. A tug conveyed me to the mouth of the river,

up which I was to proceed to my station. I joined a shallow-draught

river steamer.

"The river, that gateway to my dream come true, was a narrow place, a

cleft in universal trees, every tree the same. Mangroves, I suppose.

Soon the forest changed, often rising on each bank to meet overhead.

Those were uncertain places of leaves and dead timber, and as quiet and

still as churchyard yews at midnight. The thumps of our paddle-wheels

did not sound pleasant. Deeper and deeper we went, making turns so often

that I wondered how we could ever be got out again. Sometimes in an open

space we saw a flock of birds. I saw no other sign of life. There were

no men. All my fellow-passengers--there were ten of us--were newcomers;

some from the States, some from Germany, and a Frenchman. I was the only

Englishman. Each of us knew what was expected of himself; none of us

knew what that was which all would be doing. There were clerks with us,

miners, civil engineers, timber men, and a metallurgist. We speculated

much, were perhaps a trifle anxious, but reposed generally on the great

idea.

"In two hundred miles we reached a clearing. Why it should have been at

that particular place did not show. But there it was, the tangible link

in an invisible, encompassing scheme. It was my place. I landed with my

box. There was a white man on the river bank, sitting on a sea-chest,

his head in his hands. He looked up. 'You the victim?' he said. 'Well,

there you are'--sweeping a lazy arm round the small enclosed

ground--'that's your job. There's your store. There's your house. That's

where the niggers live.'

"'Pedro!' he called. A copper-coloured native, in shorts and a wide

grass hat, loafed over to us. 'This is your servant,' he said. 'He's a

bit mad, but he's not a fool. He's all right. Keep your eye on the

niggers though. They are fools, and they're not mad. You'll find the

inventory and the accounts in the desk in your hut. The quinine's there

too. Take these keys. Oh, the mosquito curtain's got holes in it. See

you mend it. I couldn't. Had the shakes too bad. Cheer up!'

"He went aboard. The steamer saluted me with its whistle, turned a

corner, and the sound of its paddles diminished, died. I seemed to

concentrate, as though I had never known myself till that instant when

the sound of the steamer failed, when the last connection with busy

outer life was gone. I could smell something like stephanotis. In that

dead silence my hearing was so acute that I caught a faint rustling,

which I thought might be the sound of things growing. I turned and went

to my hut, sad Pedro following with my box. The cheap American clock in

the hut made a terrific noise, filling the afternoon with its rapid and

ridiculous beat, trying to recall to me that time still was moving

quickly, when it was quite evident that time had now come for me to an

absolute stand in a broad-glowing noon. I sat surveying things from a

chair. Then leisurely took my envelope and read my instructions--how I

was to receive and take charge of shovels, lanterns, machinery parts,

railway metals, soap, cooking utensils, axes, pumps, and so on, which

consignments I must divide and parcel according to directions to come,

marking each consignment for its own destination. The names of a hundred

destinations I should hear about in my future work were given. They were

names meaning nothing to me. Then followed some brief rules for a novice

in the governing of men. Through all the rules ran an incongruous note

for such a place as that, a reminiscence of Leadenhall Street and its

miserable whine. Yet it hardly disturbed me. I sat and thought over this

expansion of my life. A melancholy bird called in two notes at

intervals. The leaves which formed the thatch of my hut hung a long

coarse black fringe at the door. My walls were of leaves, and the floor

a raft of small logs, still with the bark on, just clear of the ground.

The sunlight came through one dark wall, studding it with sparks. No.

That dubious and familiar note in the instructions was nothing. I was

clear beyond all that now--all those occasions for carking anxiety which

deprave the worker, and make him hate the task to which whipping

necessity drives him. The domineering manner of my instructions, the

fretfulness of the old correspondence I found carelessly scattered

about, addressed to my predecessor, was the illusion. The forest behind

the hut, the black river, the quiet, the insects, the foreign smell, the

puzzling men, my men to command, who kept passing without in the violent

light, they were not from books any more, they made evidence direct to

my own senses now. I was authority and providence, moulding and

protecting as I thought right. This place should be kept reasonable,

four square, my plot of earth to be clean and unashamed, frankly open to

the eye of the sky. I would see what I could do; and I would start now.

I laughed at authority--all I could see of it--reflected in a fragment

of mirror kept to a door tree by nail heads; the funny hat and the shirt

which did not matter, bad as it was, for I was authority there by every

reason of that white shirt; and the beard which was coming. Latitude, my

boy, latitude! I strolled out to survey my little world.

"Of the weeks that followed, nothing comes back so strongly as some

quite irrelevant incidents. A tiger I saw one morning, swimming the

river. Pedro, insensible for two days with fever; and death, which came

to over-rule my viceroy authority. The first blow! There was a flock of

parrots which visited us one day, and it surprised me that the men

should regard them merely as food. But there was work to be done, and in

a definite way; but why we did it--and I know we did it well--and how it

joined up with the Job, I could not see. That was not my affair. There

was the inventory to be checked, for one thing, and before I was through

with it the work had fairly imprisoned me, and the new romantic

circumstances became blurred and over written. That inventory was so

extravagantly wrong that in a week I was going about heated and swearing

at the least provocation. It was fraudulent. There was a sporadic

disorder of goods irreconcilable with their neat records, though each

record bore the signs and counter-signs of Heaven knows how many

departments of the Company. All an inextricable welter of calm errors,

neatly initialled by unknown fools.

"Every few days a steamer of the Company would call, loaded with more

goods, or would come down river to me to take goods away. The confusion

grew and interpenetrated, till I felt that nothing but dumping all that

was there into the river, and beginning again with a virgin station,

would ever clear the muddle. The place grew maddening through ridiculous

blundering from outside. I had six men to attend to, all with

temperatures and all useless. The arrears of accounts, my work on

sweltering nights while the very niggers slept, the arrears grew. A

steam-shovel came, without its shovel, and not all my written protests

to headquarters could complete that irrational creature lying in

sections rotting in sun and rain, minus the very reason for its

existence, an impediment to us and an irritation. Constant urgent orders

came to me from up country to ship there this abortion. I declined, in

the name of sanity. There followed peremptory demands for a complete

steam-shovel, violent with animosity for me, the unknown idiot who

obstinately refused to let a steam-shovel go, just as though I was in

love with the damned thing, and could not part with it. But I understood

those letters. They were from chaps, irritated, like myself, by all this

awful tomfoolery. And from headquarters came other letters, shot with a

curt note of innocent insolence, asking whether I was asleep there, or

dead, and adding, once, that if I could not keep up communications

better I had better make way for one who could. There were plenty who

could do it. Pleasant, wasn't it? They complained querulously of my

accounts, almost insinuating that I debited more wages to the Company

than I credited to the men. I had too many sick men, they said. Did I

pamper them? And again, I had too many who died; I must take care; they

did not want the local government to get alarmed.

"The time came when I got amusement out of those letters from

headquarters; for their faults were so plain that I conceived the

headquarters staff having much time to spend, and a sort of instruction

at large to administer ginger to men, like myself, on the spot, on

general principles, so to keep us not only alive, but brisk and anxious;

and doing it with the inconsequential abandon of little children playing

with sharp knives. I got comfort from that view; and when I looked round

my placid domain where my men, with whom I was on good terms, laboured

easily and rightly under the still woods, I told myself I was still

fretting because the business was new, that things would come easier

soon. But at night I felt I was anxious exactly because it was all so

old and familiar to me.

"One day, having given a group of men at work in a distant corner of the

clearing some advice, I noticed a little path enter the wood beside a

big tree. I had never been into the forest. To tell the truth, I had had

no time. The trees stood round us, keeping us from--what? I had always

felt a little doubt of what was there and could not be seen. I turned

inwards. I found myself at once in a cool gloom. I went on curiously,

peering each side into those shadows, where nothing moved, and in an

hour came to another clearing, smaller than my own, and with no river in

view. By the sun, which now I saw again, this place was north of our

station. The opening was being rapidly choked by a new growth. I was

turning for home again, for the afternoon was late, when I saw a hammock

slung between two saplings beside a dismantled hut. I could just see the

hammock and hut through the scrub. I went over there, and was so

carefully looking for snakes and beastly things in the bush that I had

arrived before I knew it. The hut had been long abandoned. The hammock

had something in it, and I was turning something in my mind as I went up

to it. There were some ragged clothes in the bottom of it, partly

covering bones, and among the rags was a globe of black hair.

"Next morning I woke late, feeling I had gone wrong. My hands were

yellow and my finger nails blue, and I was shaking with cold. But the

tootling of an up-coming steamer forced me to business. The steamer was

towing six lighters, filled with labourers. They were Poles, I think.

Afterwards, I learned, some hundreds of these men had been collected for

us somewhere by a clever, business-like recruiting agent, who promised

each poor wretch a profitable time in the Garden of Eden. My

responsibility, thirty of them, was landed. They stood by the river,

gaping about them, wondering, some alarmed, more of them angry, most

clad in stuffy woollens, poor souls. Having the fever, I was not very

interested. I told my negro foreman to find them shelter and to put them

to work. We were making our clearing larger, and were building more

store-houses.

"Something like the pale morning light which wakens you, weary from a

fitful sleep, to the clear apprehension again of an urgent trouble which

has filled the night with dreams, I came through each bout of fever to

know there was really trouble outside with the new men. Daily I had to

crawl about, shivering, my head dizzy with quinine, till the fever came

near its height, when I got into my hammock, and would lie there,

waiting, burning and dry, tremulous with an anxiety I could not shape.

Sometimes then I saw my big negro foreman come to the door, look at me,

as though wishing to say something, but leave, reluctantly, when I

motioned him away.

"One morning I was better, but hardly able to walk, when shouts and a

running fight, which I could see through the door, showed me the Poles

had mutinied. There was a hustling gang of them outside my door, filling

it with haggard, furious faces. I could not understand them, but one

presently began to shout in French. They refused to work. The food was

bad. They wanted meat. They wanted their contracts fulfilled. They

wanted bread, clothes, money, passages out of the country. They had been

fooled and swindled. They were dying. I argued plaintively with that

man, but it made him shout and gesticulate. At that the voices of all

rose in a passionate tumult, knives and axes flourishing in the

sunlight. In a sudden cold ferocity, not knowing what I was doing, I

picked up my empty gun--I had no ammunition--and moved down on them.

They held for a moment, then broke ground, and walked away quickly,

looking back with fear and malice. Next day they had gone. Yes,

actually. The poor devils. They had gone, with the exception of a few

with the fever. They had taken to that darkness around us, to find a way

to the coast. Talk of the babes in the wood! The men had no food, no

guide, and had they known the right direction they could not have

followed it. If the Company did not take you out of that land, you

stayed there; and if the Company did not feed you there, you died. No

creature could leave that clearing, and survive, unless I willed it. The

forest and the river kept my men together as effectively as though they

were marooned without a boat on a deep-sea island. Those men were never

heard of again. Nobody was to blame. Whom could you blame? The Company

did not desire their death. Simply, not knowing what they were doing,

those poor fellows walked into the invisibly moving machinery of the

Job, not knowing it was there, and were mutilated.

"We had news of the same trouble with the Poles up river. Some of the

mutineers tried to get to the sea on rafts. Such amazing courage was but

desperation and a complete ignorance of the place they were in. One such

raft did pass our place. Some of them were prone on it, others

squatting; one man got on his feet as the raft swung by our clearing,

and emptied his revolver into us. A few days later another raft floated

by, close in, with six men lying upon it. They were headless. Somewhere,

the savages had caught them asleep.

"No. I was not affected as much as you might think. I began to look upon

it all with insensitive serenity. I was getting like the men I met on

the islands, months before. I saw us all caught by something huge and

hungry, a viewless, impartial appetite which swallowed us all without

examination; which was slowly eating me. I began to feel I should never

leave that place, and did not care. Why should others want to leave it,

then? Often, through weakness, the trees around us seemed to me to sway,

to be veiled in a thin mist. The heat did not weigh on my skin, but on

my dry bones. I was parched body and mind, and when the men came with

their grievances I felt I could shoot any of them, for very weariness,

to escape argument. The insolence from headquarters I filed for

reference no longer, but lit my pipe with it. But the correspondence

ceased at length, and because now I was callous to it, I failed to

notice it had stopped.

"Some vessels passed down river, coming suddenly to view, a rush of

paddles, and were gone, tootling their whistles. The work went on,

mechanically. The clearing grew. The sheds spread one by one. The

inventory was kept, the accounts were dealt with. There came a time when

I was forced to remember that the steamer had not called for ten days.

We were running short of food. I had a number of sick, but no quinine.

The men, those quick, faithful fellows with the dog-like, patient eyes,

they looked to me, and I was going to fail them. I made pills of flour

to look like quinine, for the fever patients, trying to cure them by

faith. I wrote a report to headquarters, which I knew would get me my

discharge; I was not polite. There was no meat. We tried dough fried in

lard. When I think of the dumb patience of those black fellows in their

endurance for an idea of which they knew nothing, I am amazed at the

docility and kindness inherent in common men. They will give their lives

for nothing, if you don't tell them to do it, but only let them trust

you to take them to the sacrifice they know nothing about.

"That went on for a month. We were in rags. We were starved. We were

scarecrows. No steamer had been by the place, from either direction, for

a month. Then a vessel came. I did not know the chap in charge. He

seemed surprised to see us there. He opened his eyes at our gaunt crew

of survivors, shocked. Then he spoke.

"'Don't you know?' he asked.

"Even that ridiculous question had no effect on me. I merely eyed him. I

was reduced to an impotent, dumb query. I suppose I was like Jack the

foreman, a gaping, silent, pathetic interrogation. At last I spoke, and

my voice sounded miles away. 'Well, what do you want here?'

"'I've come for that steam shovel. I've bought it.'

"The man was mad. My sick men wanted physic. We all wanted food. But

this stranger had come to us just to take away our useless steam shovel.

'I thought you knew,' he said. 'The Company's bought out. Some

syndicate's bought 'em out. A month ago. Thought the Company would be

too successful. Spoil some other place. There's no Company now. They're

selling off. What about that steam shovel?'"

V

We had 5200 tons of cargo, and nearly all of it was patent fuel. This

was to be put into baskets, hauled up, and emptied into railway trucks

run out on the jetty alongside. We watched the men at work for a few

days and nights, and judged we should be at Porto Velho for a month. I

saw for myself long rambles in the forest during that time of golden

leisure, but saw them no more after the first attempt. The clearing on

its north side rose steeply to about a hundred feet on the hard red

conglomerate; to the south, on the San Antonio side, it ended in a creek

and a swamp. But at whatever point the Doctor and I attempted to leave

the clearing we soon found ourselves stopped by a dense undergrowth. At

a few places there were narrow footpaths, subterranean in the quality of

their light, made by timbermen when searching for suitable trees for the

saw-mill. These tracks never penetrated more than a few hundred yards,

and always ended in a well of sunshine in the forest where some big

trees would be prone in a tangle of splintered branches, and a deep

litter of leaves and broken fronds. And that was as far as man had got

inwards from the east bank of the Madeira river. Beyond it was the

undiscovered, and the Araras Indians. On the other side of the river the

difficulty was the same. The Rio Purus, the next tributary of the Amazon

westward from the Madeira, had its course, it was guessed, perhaps not

more than fifty miles across country from the river bank opposite Porto

Velho; but no one yet has made a traverse of the land between the two

streams. The dark secrecy of the region was even oppressive. Sometimes

when venturing alone a little beyond a footpath, out of hearing of the

settlement, surrounded by the dim tangle in which there was not a

movement or a sound, I have become suspicious that the shapes about me

in the half light were all that was real there, and Porto Velho and its

men an illusion, and there has been a touch of panic in my haste to find

the trail again, and to prove that it could take me to an open prospect

of sunny things with the solid "Capella" in their midst.

We carried our butterfly nets ashore and went of a morning across the

settlement, choosing one of the paths which ended in a small forest

opening, where there was sunlight as well as shadow. Few butterflies

came to such places. You could really think the forest was untenanted. A

tanager would dart a ray of metallic sheen in the wreckage of timber and

dead branches about us, or some creature would call briefly, melancholy

wise, in the woods. Very rarely an animal would go with an explosive

rush through the leaves. But movements and sounds, except the sound of

our own voices, were surprises; and a sight of one of the larger

inhabitants of the jungle is such a rarity that we knew we might be

there for years and never get it. Yet life about its various business in

the woods kept us interested till the declining sun said it was time to

get aboard again. Every foot of earth, the rotting wood, the bark of the

standing trees, every pool, and the litter of dead leaves and husks,

were populous when closely regarded. Most of the trees had smooth barks.

A corrugated trunk, like that of our elm, was exceptional. But when a

bole had a rough surface it would be masked by the grey tenacious

webbing of spiders; on one such tree we found a small mantis, which so

mimicked the spiders that we were long in discovering what it really

was. Many of the smooth tree trunks were striated laterally with lines

of dry mud. These lines were actually tunnels, covered ways for certain

ants. The corridors of this limitless mansion had many such surprises.

There were the sauba ants; they might engross all a man's hours, for in

watching them he could easily forget there were other things in the

world. They would move over the ground in an interminable procession.

Looked at quickly, that column of fluid life seemed a narrow brook, its

surface smothered with green leaves, which it carried, not round or

under obstructions, but upwards and over them. Nearly every tiny

creature in that stream of life held upright in its jaws a banner, much

larger than itself, cut from a fresh leaf. It bore its banner along

hurriedly and resolutely. All the ants carrying leaves moved in one

direction. The flickering and forward movement of so many leaves gave

the procession of ants the wavering appearance of shallow water running

unevenly. On both sides of the column other ants hurried in the reverse

direction, often stopping to communicate something, with their antennae,

to their burdened fellows. Two ants would stop momentarily, and there

would be a swift intimation, and then away they would go again on their

urgent affairs. We would see rapid conversations of that kind everywhere

in the host. Other ants, with larger heads, kept moving hither and

thither about the main body; having an eye on matters generally, I

suppose, policing or superintending them. There was no doubt all those

little fellows had a common purpose. There was no doubt they had made up

their minds about it long since, had come to a decision communally, and

that each of them knew his job and meant to get it done. There did not

appear to be any ant favoured by the god of the ants. You have to cut

your own leaf and get along with it, if you are a sauba.

There they were, flowing at our feet. I see it now, one of those

restricted forest openings to which we often went, the wall of the

jungle all round, and some small attalea palms left standing, the green

of their long plumes as hard and bright as though varnished. Nothing

else is there that is green, except the weeds which came when the

sunlight was let in by the axe. The spindly forest columns rise about,

pallid in a wall of gloom, draped with withered stuff and dead cordage.

Their far foliage is black and undistinguishable against the irregular

patch of overhead blue. It never ceased to be remarkable that so little

that was green was there. The few pothos plants, their shapely parasitic

foliage sitting like decorative nests in some boughs half-way to the

sky, would be strangely conspicuous and bright. The only leaves of the

forest near us were on the ground, brown parchments all of one simple

shape, that of the leaf of the laurel. I remember a stagnant pool there,

and over it suspended some enamelled dragonflies, their wings vibrating

so rapidly that the flies were like rubies shining in obscure nebulae.

When we moved, the nymphs vanished, just as if a light flashed out. We

sat down again on our felled tree to watch, and magically they

reappeared in the same place, as though their apparition depended on the

angle and distance of the eye. When a bird called one started

involuntarily, for the air was so muffled and heavy that it was strange

to find it open instantly to let free the delicate sibilation.

In the low ground beyond Porto Velho up stream there was another place

in the forest where sometimes we would go, the approach to it being

through a deep cutting made by the railwaymen in the clay. This clay, a

stiff homogeneous mass mottled rose and white, was saturated with

moisture, and the helicon butterflies frequented it, probably because it

was damp; and a sight of their black and yellow, or black and crimson

wings, spread on the clean plane of the beautifully tinted rock, was far

better than putting them in the collecting box. The helicons are bold

insects, and did not seem to mind our close inspecting eyes. Beyond the

cutting was a long narrow clearing, with a giant silk cotton tree, a

province in itself, on the edge of the forest. Looking straight upward

we could see its foliage, but so far away was the spreading canopy of

leaves that it was only a black cloud, the outermost sprays mere wisps

of dark vapour melting in the intense brightness of the sky. The smooth

grey trunk was heavily buttressed, the "sapeomas" (literally, flat

roots) ascending the bole for more than fifty feet, and radiating in

walls about the base of the tree; the compartments were so large that

they could have been used as stabling for four or five horses. From its

upper limbs a wreckage of lianas hung to the ground. Beyond this giant

the path rose to a place where the clearing was already waist high with

scrub. Then it descended again to the woods. But the woods there were

flooded. That was my first near view of the igapo. We had approached the

trees, for they seemed free of the usual undergrowth, and passed into

the sombre colonnades. The way appeared clear enough, and we thought we

could move ahead freely at last, but found in a few steps the bare floor

was really black water. The base of the forest was submerged, the

columns which supported the unseen roof, through which came little

light, diminished down soundless distance into night. After the flaming

day from which we had just come this darkness was repellant. The forest,

that austere, stately and regarding Presence draped interminably in

verdant folds, while we gazed upon it suspecting no new thing of it, as

by a stealthy movement had withdrawn its green robe, and our sight had

fallen into the cavernous gloom of its dank and hollow heart.

It was about the little wooden town itself, where the scarified earth

was already sparsely mantled with shrubs, flowering vines, and weeds,

and where the burnt tree stumps, and even the door posts in some cases,

were freshly budding--life insurgent, beaten down by fire and sword, but

never to its source and copious springs--that most of the butterflies

were to be found. In a land where blossoms were few, these were the

winged flowers. About the squalid wooden barracks of the negro and

native labourers, which were built off the ground to allow of

ventilation, and had a trench round them foul with drainage and evil

with smells, a Col[oe]nis, a scarlet butterfly with narrow, swallow-like

wings, used to flash, and frequently would settle there. Over the

flowering weeds on the waste ground there would be, in the morning

hours, or when the sky was overcast, glittering clouds of the smaller

and duller species, though among them now and then would stoop a very

emperor of butterflies, a being quick and unbelievably beautiful to

temperate eyes. After midday, when the sun was intense, the butterflies

became scarce. When out of the shade of the woods, and stranded, at that

time, in the hopeless heat of the bare settlement, we could turn into

one of the houses of the officials of the company for shelter. These

also were of timber, cool, with a verandah that was a cage of fine

copper gauze to keep out the insects. All the doors were self-closing.

The fewest chances were offered to the mosquitoes. There was no glass,

for the window openings also were covered with copper mesh. Here we

could sit in shaded security, in lazy chairs, and look out over the

clearing to the river below, and to the level line of forest across the

river, while listening to stories which had come down to Porto Velho

from the interior, brought by the returning pioneers.

Porto Velho had a population of about three hundred. There were

Americans, Germans, English, Brazilians, a few Frenchmen, Portuguese,

some Spaniards, and a crowd of negroes and negresses. There was but one

white woman in the settlement. I was told the climate seemed to poison

them. The white girl, who persisted in staying in spite of warnings from

the doctors, was herself a Brazilian, the wife of one of the labourers.

She refused to leave, and sometimes I saw her about, petite, frail,

looking very sad. But her husband was earning good money. It was a busy

place, most of it being workshops, stores, and offices, with an engine

and trucks jangling inconsequentially on the track by the shore. The

line crossed a creek by a trestle bridge, and disappeared in the forest

in the direction of San Antonio. The hospital for the men was nearly two

miles up the track.

It was along the railway track towards the hospital, with the woods to

the left, and a short margin of scrub and forest, and then the river, on

the right hand, that I saw one morning in sauntering a few miles as many

butterflies as there are flowers in an English garden in June. They were

the blossoms of the place. The track was bright with them. They settled

on the hot metals and ties, clustered thickly round muddy pools, a

plantation there as vivid and alive, in the quick movements of their

wings, as though a wind shook the petals of a bed of flowers. They

flashed by like birds. One would soar slowly, wings outspread and

stable, a living plane of metallic green and black. There was a large

and insolent beauty--he did not move from his drink at a puddle though

my boot almost touched him--his wings a velvety black with crimson eyes

on the underwings, and I caught him; but I was so astonished by the

strength of his convulsive body in the net that I let him go. Near the

hospital some bushes were covered with minute flowers, and seen from a

distance the countless insects moving about those bushes were a

glistening and puzzling haze.

All that morning I had felt the power of the torrid sun, which clung to

the body like invisible bonds, and made one's movements slow, was a

luscious benefit, a golden bath, a softening and generative balm; a

mother heat and light whose ardent virtues stained pinions crimson and

cobalt, and made bodies strong and convulsive, and caused the earth to

burst with rushing sap, to send up green fountains; for so the palms,

which showed everywhere in the woods, looked to me. You could hear the

incessant low murmur of multitudinous wings. And I had been warned to

beware of all things. I felt instead that I could live and grow for ever

in such a land.

Presently, becoming a little weary of so much strong light, I found it

was midday, and looking back, there was the ship across a curve of the

river. It was two good miles away; two intense, shadeless, silent

afternoon miles. I began the return journey. An increasing rumbling

sound ahead made me look up, as I stepped from tie to tie, and there

came at me a trolley car, pumped along slowly, four brown bodies rising

and falling rhythmically over its handle. A man in a white suit was its

passenger. As it passed me I saw it bore also something under a white

cloth; the cloth moulded a childish figure, of which only the hem of a

skirt and the neat little booted feet showed beyond the cloth, and the

feet swayed limply with the jolts of the car in a way curiously

appealing and woful. The car stopped, and the white man, a cheerful

young doctor chewing an extinct cigar, came to me for a light. He stood

to gossip for a few minutes, giving his men a rest. "That's the

Brazilian girl," he said; "she wouldn't go home when told, poor thing."

* * * * *

This Madeira river had the look of very adventurous fishing, and the

Doctor had brought with him an assortment of tackle. The water was

opaque, and it was deep. Its prospects, though the forest closed round

us, were spacious. It flowed silently, with great power, and its surface

was often coiled by profound movements. The coils of the river, as we

were looking over the side one morning, began to move in our minds also,

and the Doctor mentioned his tackle. There was the forest enclosing us,

as mute as the water, its bare roots clenched in aqueous earth. Nobody

could tell us much about the fish in this river, but we heard stories of

creatures partly seen. There was one story of a thing taken from the

very place in the river where we were anchored, a fish in armour which

the natives declared was new to them; a fearful ganoid I guessed it,

reconstructing it in vision from fragments of various tales about it,

such as is pictured in a book on primeval rocks. There were alligators,

too, and there was the sucuruju, which I could call the great water

serpent, only the Indian name sounds so much more right and awful; and

that fellow is forty feet long in his legend, but spoils a good story

through reducing himself by half when he is actually killed. Still,

twenty feet of stout snake is enough for trouble. I saw one, just after

it was killed, which was twenty-two feet in length, and was three feet

round its middle. So to fish in the Madeira was as if one's hook and

line were cast into the deeps where forms that are without name stir in

the dark of dreams. We got out our tackle, and the cook had an

assortment of stuff he did not want, and that we put on the hooks, and

waited, our lines carried astern by the current, for signals from the

unknown. Yet excepting for a few catfish, nothing interrupted the placid

flow of stream and time. The Doctor put a bight of the lime round his

wrist, sat down, and slept. We had fine afternoons, broad with the

wealth of our own time.

Old man Jim came aboard and saw our patience with amusement. He

suggested dynamite, and no waiting. The river was full of good fish, and

he would come next day with a canoe and take us where we could get a

load. It was a suggestion which needed slurring, to look attractive to

sportsmen. Jim took it for granted that we simply wanted fish to eat,

and as many as we could get; and next morning there he was alongside

with his big boat and its crew. Jim himself was in the stern, the

navigator, and he was sitting on what I was told was a box of dynamite.

Now, there were two others of our company who, but the day before, were

even eager to see what dynamite would send up from the bottom of that

river; but when they saw the craft alongside with its wild-looking crew,

and Jim with his rifle sitting on a power which could lift St. Paul's,

they considered everything, and decided they could not go that day. I

went alone.

I suppose men do plucky things because they are largely thoughtless of

the danger of the things they do. As soon as I was sitting on the level

of the water in that crazy boat, with Jim and his explosive, and beside

him what whisky he had not already consumed, and saw under my nose the

eddies and upheavals of the current, I knew I was doing a very plucky

thing indeed, and wished I was high and safe on the "Capella." But we

had pushed off.

Jim, with his eyes dreamy through barley juice, was the pilot, and there

was a measure of confidence to be got from the way he navigated us past

the charging trees afloat. There was no drink in the steering paddle, at

least. But the shore was a long swim away; yet perhaps it would have

been as pleasant to be drowned or blown-up as to be lost in the jungle.

We turned into a still creek, where the trees met overhead. Jim

continued his course till the inundated forest was about us. The gloom

was hollow, the pillars rising from the black floor were spectral, and

our voices and paddles sounded like a noisy irruption among the aisles

of a temple. The echoes fled from us deeper into the dark. But Jim was

all unconscious of this; he but stopped our progress, and opened the box

of cartridges.

I had never seen dynamite, but only heard of it. I understood it had

unexpected qualities. Jim had a cartridge in his hand, and was digging a

knife into it. I repeat, the flooded wilderness was round us, and below

was the black deep. Jim fitted a detonator to a length of fuse, and

stuck it in the cartridge. He was in no hurry. He stopped now and then

for another drink. Having got the cartridge ready, with its potent

filament, he tied four more cartridges round it. I put these things down

simply, but my hand ached with the way I gripped the gunwale, and I

could hear myself breathing.

Then Jim struck a match on his breeches, with all the fumbling

deliberation of the fully ripe--brushing the vine leaves from his eyes

the better to see what he was doing--and he lit the fuse, after it had

twice dodged the match. It fizzed. The splutter worked downwards

energetically. Jim did not deign to look at it, though it fascinated me.

He slowly scratched his back with his disengaged hand, and gazed

absently into the forest.

The spark and its spurts of smoke were now near the bottom. Jim changed

the menace into his right hand, in order to reach another part of his

back with his leisurely left. His eyes were still on the forest. I kept

swallowing.

"Jim," I said eagerly--though I did not know I was going to

speak--"don't--don't you think you'd better throw it away now?"

He regarded me steadily, with eyes half shut. The spark spurted, and

dropped another inch. He looked at it. He looked round the waters

without haste. Then, and I could have cried aloud, he threw the shocking

handful away from us.

It sank. There were a few bubbles, and we sat regarding each other in

the quiet of a time which had been long dead, waiting for something to

happen in a time to come. At the end of two weeks the bottom of the

river fell out, with the noise of the collapse of an iron foundry on a

Sunday. Our boat tried to leap upwards, but failed. The water did not

burst asunder. It vibrated, and was then convulsed.

Dead fish appeared everywhere, patches of white all round; but we hardly

saw them. There was a great head which emerged from the floor, looking

upwards sleepily, and two hands moved slowly. These quietly sank again.

The tail of the saurean appeared, slowly described a half circle, and

went. The big alligator then lifted itself, and performed some grotesque

antics with deliberation and gravity. Then it gathered speed. It

rotated, thrashed, and drummed. It did all that a ten-horse-power maniac

might. I think the natives shrieked. I think Jim kept saying "hell"; for

I was conscious only with my eyes. When the dizzy reptile recovered, it

shot away among the trees like a torpedo.

We went home. That night I understand the second mate was kept awake

listening to me, as I slept, bursting into spasms of dreadful merriment.

* * * * *

When you are lost in the map of a country that is beyond the worn

routes, trying to discover therein the place name which is the most

secluded and inaccessible, if the map should happen to be that of South

America, then your thought would naturally wander to the neighbourhood

of San Antonio of the Rio Madeira. There you stay, to wonder what

strange people and rocks and trees are to be found at San Antonio. It

looks remote, even on the map. The sign which stands for the village is

caught in a central loop of the mesh which is the river system of the

Amazon forest. San Antonio must be beyond all, and a great journey. It

is far outside the radius. And that would be enough, to be beyond the

last ripple of the traffic and at peace, where that dark disquiet, that

sombre emanation which rises from the soured earth where myriads have

their chimneys, their troubles and their strife, staining even the

morning and the morning thought, is no more. A place where the light has

the clarity of the first dawn, and one might hear, while sure of

absolute solitude, the winding of a strange horn, and suspect, when

coming to an opening in the woods, the flight of a shining one; for

somewhere the ancient gods must have sanctuary. A land where the rocks

have the moss of unvisited fastnesses, and you can snuff the scents of

original day.

Where we were anchored, San Antonio was in view, about five miles up

stream. Where at the end of that reach of river a line of tremulous

light, which we thought was the cataracts, bridged the converging

palisades of the jungle, in the trees of the right bank it was sometimes

easy to believe there was a glint of white buildings. But looking again,

to reassure your sight, the apparition of dwellings vanished. At night,

in the quiet, sometimes the ears could detect the shudder of the weighty

rapids by San Antonio; but it was merely a tremor felt; there was no

sound. The village remained to us for some time just that uncertain

gleam by day, and the rapids but a minute reduction of a turmoil that

was far. For in that languorous heat we counted miles differently, and

it was pleasanter to suspect than to go and prove, and much easier.

One day I went. When in a small boat the jungle towered. The river, too,

had a different character. From the shore, or from the big "Capella,"

the river was an expanse of light, an impression of shining peace.

Whenever you got close to its surface it became alive and menacingly

intimate. Our little boat seemed to roll in the powerful folds of a

monster which wallowed ponderously and without ceasing. The trees

afloat, charging down swiftly and in what one felt was an ominous quiet,

stood well above our tiny craft.

We steered close in-shore to avoid the drifting wood and the set of the

current. The jungle's sheer height, confusion, and intensity were more

awesome than when seen from the steamer. Not many of the trees were of

great beam, but their consistent height, with the lianas in a wreck from

the far overhanging cornice, dwarfed our boat to an unimportant straw.

At times the forest had a selvage of cane, and growths of arrow grass,

bearing long white plumes twelve feet above us, and a pair of fan-shaped

leaves resembling palm leaves.

The sound of the cataracts increased, and a barrier grew in height

athwart the Madeira. Mounting high right ahead of us at last was a mass

of granite boulders, with broad smooth surfaces, having the structure of

gigantic masonry in ruin which weathered plutonic rock so often assumes.

Beyond the barrier the river was plainly above our level. It was seen,

resplendent as quicksilver, through the crenellations of the black

rocks. One central mass of rock, higher than the rest, had a crown of

dark and individual palms, standing paramount in the upper light. Yet,

with that gleam of wide river behind, no great rush of water broke

there. A few fountains spurted, apparently without source, and

collapsed, and pulsed again. The white runnels of foam which laced the

contours of the piled boulders gave the barrier the appearance of being

miraculously uplifted, as though one saw thin daylight through its

interstices. Not till the village was in view did we see where the main

river avoided the barrier. The course here was looped. Above the barrier

the river turned from the right bank, and heaped itself in a smooth

steep glide through a narrow pass against the opposite shore, the

roaring welter then running obliquely across the foot of the rocks to

the front of San Antonio on the right bank again. The forest beside the

falls seemed to be tremulous with continuous and profound underground

thunder.

The little huddle of San Antonio's white houses is on slightly rising

ground, and the lambent green of the jungle is beside them and over

them. The foliage presses the village down to the river. Like every

Amazonian town and village, it appears, set in that forest, as rare a

human foothold as a ship in mid-ocean; a few lights and a few voices in

the dark and interminable wastes. So I landed from our little craft

elated with a sense of luckily acquired security.

The white embowered village, the leaping fountains and the rocks, the

air in a flutter with the shock of ponderous water collapsing, the

surmounting island in mid-stream with its coronet of palms, the

half-naked Indians idling among the Bolivian rubber boats hauled up to

the foreshore below, the unexplored jungle which closed in and framed

the scene, the fierce sun set in the rounded amplitude of the clouds of

the rains, made the tropical picture which was the right reward for a

great journey. I had come down long weeks of empty leisure, in which the

mind got farther and farther away from the cities where time is so

carefully measured and highly valued. The centre of the ultimate

wilderness was more than a matter of fact. It was now a personal

conviction which needed no verification.

The village had but one street. There were two rows of houses of a

single storey, built of clay and plaster, dilapidated, the whitewash

stained and peeling, every house open and cavernous below, without

doors, in the way of Brazilian dwellings, to give coolness. The street

was almost deserted when we entered it. A few children played in the

shadows, and outside one house a merchant in a white cotton suit stood

overlooking the scales while the half-breeds weighed balls of rubber;

for this town is in the midst of the richest rubber country of the

world, and all the wealth of the rivers Mamore, Beni, and Madre de Dios

comes this way. And that was why, as we idled through its single

thoroughfare, some dark girls came to stand at the house openings,

dressed in odorous muslin, red flowers in their shiny black hair, and

their smiling eyes full of interest in us. The rough road between the

dwellings was overgrown with grass, and in the centre of it, partly

hidden by the grass, was the line laid long ago by the railway

enterprise which ended so tragically. To-day the rubber men use it as a

portage for their boats. There were several inns, half-obliterated names

painted on their outer walls. They had crude interior walls of mud, and

floors of bare earth. In such an inn would be a few iron tables and

chairs, and there a visitor might drink from bottles which at least bore

European labels, though the contents and cost were past all European

understanding. I forgot to say that by the foreshore of this little

village is the head depot of a great rubber house, a building apparently

out of all proportion to the size of San Antonio. But I looked on that

place with the less interest, though from what my native companion told

me the head of the house is a monarch more absolute and undisputed in

this wild country than most eastern kings are to-day.

I was more interested in the huge boulders of smooth granite which rose

strangely from the street in places, and broke its regularity. These

rounded and noble rocks often topped the houses. What man had built

looked mean and transitory beside the poise and fine contours of the

rocks. The colony of giant rocks had a look of settled and tranquil

solidity, a friendly and hospitable aspect. They might have been old

friends which time had proved; the houses beside them were alien by

contrast. I felt that San Antonio had merely imposed itself on them,

that they tolerated the village because it was but an incident; that

they could afford to wait. When I saw them there I recognised the

village of my map. I climbed to the summit of one, over its weather-worn

shelves. It had a skin of lichen, warm in the sun and harshly familiar.

The curious hieroglyphics of the lichen were intelligible enough, and

more easily read than the signs on the walls of the inns. I learned

where I was; and knew that when the day of the great rubber house had

long passed, my village would still be there, and prospering.

Below my rock, on the land side--to which I had turned my back--was a

monstrous cesspool. It was in the centre of the village. It was the

capital of all flies, and the source and origin of all smells, varying

smells which reposed, as I had found when below in the hot and stagnant

street, in strata, each layer of smell invisible but well-defined. Among

the weeds in the roads were many derelict cans. Over the empty tins, and

the garbage, pulsed and darted hundreds of Brazil's wonderful insects.

But I was above all that, on my high rock. Its height released me to a

wide and splendid liberty. I cannot tell you all that my vantage

surveyed. But chiefly I was assured by what I saw that I was more

central even than my eyes showed; they merely found for me the

intimation. Here was all the proof I wanted; for faith is not blind, but

critical, yet instantly transcends to knowledge at the faintest glimmer

of authentic light, as when an exile who is beset by inexplicable and

puissant circumstance among strangers whose tongue is barbarous, is

surprised at a secret sign passed there of fellowship, and is at once

content. Yet I can report but a broad river flowing smooth and bright

out of indefinite distance between dark forests to the wooded islands

below; and by the islands suddenly accelerated and divided, in a slight

descent, pouring to a lower level in taut floods as smooth, noiseless,

and polished as mercury. Lower still was the gleaming turmoil of the

falls, pulsing, and ever on the point of vanishing, but constant, its

shouting riot baffled by the green cliffs everywhere. But I could

escape, for once, over the parapets of the jungle to the upper rolling

ocean of leaves; to the distance, dim and blue, the region where man has

never been.

* * * * *

There was a man who looked like a sensational ruffian who boarded us one

morning at Porto Velho, and said he had come to find me. He was going up

into the forest, beyond the track, and would I go with him? That made me

look at him again, and with some anxiety; for I had tried before to get

away, but the crowd on the "Capella" disliked the idea. The Doctor

talked dysentery and things. He said it was safer to keep to the ship

during the month we had still to spend at Porto Velho. I felt, overborne

by their arguments, a rather thin sort of adventurer. That mysterious

railway would have drawn the mind of any man who had not lost his

curiosity, and who valued being alive more than his chance of old age.

The track went from Porto Velho into outer darkness. It left the

clearing and the village of mushroom buildings, the place where the

inhuman had been moderately subdued, where a modicum of industry was

established in a continent of primitive wild, crossed a creek by a

trestle bridge in view of our steamer, and vanished; that was the end of

it, so far as we knew. Men came back to the settlement through that hole

of the forest, and boarded the "Capella" to tell us, in long hot nights,

something of what the forest of the Madeira was hiding; and they were

bearded like Crusoe, pallid as anaemic women, and speckled with insect

bites. These men said that where they had been working the sun never

shone, for his light was stopped on the unbroken green which, except

where the big rivers flowed, roofed the whole land. I liked the look of

the stranger who had come to persuade me to this rare holiday. He said

his name was Marion Hill, of Texas. He wore muddy riding breeches, and a

black shirt open at the throat, and boots of intricately embossed

leather which came well up his thighs, spurs that would have ravelled a

pachyderm, and the insolent hat of a bandit. He had a waistbelt heavy

with guns and ammunition. I saw his face, and divined instantly that

this was a man, and that the memory of a time with him would serve me as

a refuge in the grey and barren years, and as a solace. I told him I

would get my things together. The Skipper called after me that if I

returned too late I should have to walk home.

There was a commissary train next morning, taking men and supplies to

the camps. It had a number of open waggons, loaded with material, about

which the labourers going up to replenish the gangs made themselves as

comfortable as they could. I had an indiarubber bag for all my

belongings, being told that it was best for strapping to a mule, and a

valuable lifebuoy when a canoe overturned. I accepted it with perfect

faith, for I knew nothing of mules or canoes. The train moved off, a

bell on the engine ringing sepulchrally. Hill and I were packed into a

box car, which had a door open on either side for light and air. Two

American engineers were in charge, there was an Austrian to superintend

the distribution at each camp of the provisions, the Austrian had an

Italian assistant, and a few Barbadian blacks were there to move about

the packages. I sat on a case of tinned fruit. Hill reposed on one of

the shelves where we should stow fever victims, when we collected them.

There was no more room in the car, and another degree of heat would have

meant complete ruin.

When Porto Velho is left for the place where the line is to end, when

completed, though it is but 250 miles away, two months at least is

required for the return journey. That way goes the paymaster, with his

armed escort, and every bundle of shovels and tin of provisions. When I

went, too, the train helped for sixty miles. Then most of the material

was transported at the Rio Caracoles, a tributary of the Madeira, and

taken by boats in stages up the main stream, cargoes and boats being

hauled round each cataract. Travellers could shorten the journey by

going overland part of the way, mules being kept on the hither side of

the Caracoles river for that purpose.

We delivered some patients at the hospital, went through a cutting of

red granite to the back of San Antonio, and then entered the forest.

That absorbed us. Thenceforward, and until I reached the ship again, I

was dominated by the lofty, silent, confused, and brooding growth.

Everywhere it was dramatically passionate in its intensity, an arrested

riot of green life, and its muteness kept expectant attention fixed upon

it. The right of way through the forest was a hundred feet wide. On each

side of us the trees rose like virid cliffs. The trees usually were of

slender girth, almost as straight as fir poles, rising perhaps for sixty

feet without a branch. Occasionally there was a giant, a silk cotton

tree, or the strange tree with its grey trunk and pale birch-like habit

of foliage which I had noticed on the riverside; but they were not

common. Palms were numerous. From ground to high parapet the spaces

between the columns were filled with lianas, unrelated big leaves, and

the characteristic fronds of the endogens. In this older part of the

track, though it had been made but little more than a year, the scrub

was dense. The undergrowth was often so strong and aggressive as to

brush the train as we slowly bumped along. Sometimes we went through

deep cuttings in the red clay, close enough for me to notice it was

interstratified with waterworn but angular quartz peebles. But the track

usually was over flat country, only rarely crossing a gulley.

At every maintenance camp we stopped to deliver supplies. From out of a

small huddle of shanties made of leaves and poles, insignificant beneath

the forest wall, a number of languid half-breeds, merely in pants and

hats, would loiter through the hot sun to us for their sustenance. The

men of those secluded huts must have been glad of our temporary uproar,

and our new faces. The bell rang, and we left them to burial in their

deep silence again. There were intervening camps, which had been

deserted as the work progressed. These were even more interesting to me.

The work of the human, when he leaves it to the wild from which he has

won it with so much pain, has an appeal of its own, with its abandoned

ruin returning to the ground again. There would be a sandy swamp, and

standing back from the line some weather-worn shanties with roofs awry.

I am sure there were ghosts in those camps. One we passed, and it was

called Camp 10-1/2, and resting against its open front where the posts

were giving was a butterfly net. I pointed this out. "Oh, that," said

Hill. "Old man Biddell. I knew him. He was all right. He was great on

bugs and butterflies. Used to wear spectacles. He was a good engineer

though. Died of blackwater fever before the line got past this camp.

That was his shack." And that was his butterfly net, all of Biddell now,

his sole monument and reminder. As we bumped by the huts the helicons

and swallow tails rose precipitously from the mangled cans and cast

rubbish. I never knew Biddell, the man with spectacles and a butterfly

net, but a first rate railway man, who left that net outside his hut one

morning, and at evening was buried, but now I am doomed to think of him

while I live.

It was near midnight when we reached the last active camp but one on the

line, where we alighted. It was wiser, I was told, to run the remaining

length of the track by daylight. Here a doctor and a few engineers,

bearing handlamps against which moths were blundering, met us in a place

which seemed to be the bottom of a well, for the black shadows which

rose round us shut out all but a few stars. The men raised joyous cries

at the sight of Hill; and they took this stranger on trust. We fed in a

hut which was four poles and a roof. One pole had a hurricane lamp tied

to it. There was an enormous quiet, which the men seemed to delight in

breaking with their voices. Four planks nailed unevenly to uprights was

our table, and we sat crooked on a similar but lower construction. We

ate out of enamelled plates with iron instruments, and it was very good

indeed. There were four of us who were white, and we were babes in the

wood. One of us pretended he was playing on a Jew's-harp, sang songs

riotously, and then began to talk long and earnestly of New York. These

men lived in four railway waggons which had doors made of copper gauze,

berths with mosquito bars, and portraits of the folk at home; and in the

case of the doctor the waggon smelt of iodoform, had one wall full of

bottles, and a table with a board and chessmen. In one of those waggons

I lay down to sleep under a net; but the blanket felt damp and had a

foreign smell. My thoughts crowded me. For long I listened to so much

jungle pressing close to my bed, waiting for it to make known its near

but unseen presence with a voice; but it did not.

Next morning at sunrise the train moved forward to the construction camp

at the Rio Caracoles. I rode on a truck pushed in front of the

locomotive, perched there with some engineers who kept a careful eye on

the track. I saw at once why the train did not proceed at night. It was

too speculative altogether. Behind us the locomotive's smoke stack

rolled like a steamer's funnel when a beam sea is running. This part of

the line crossed many ravines, where we looked down upon the tree tops;

and when on a frail wooden bridge which crossed a vacancy like that such

movements of the drunken engine behind us became dazzling. Then, too,

there were some high "fills," or embankments. After heavy rains these

have a habit of retiring from the metals, which are left looped and

twisted in mid-air. An engineer told me that one cannot always tell when

an embankment is on the point of retiring. He was carefully watching,

however. But we reached the construction camp.

At the construction camp by the side of the Rio Caracoles we stayed two

days. There was the end of the line, and the men who were growing the

track were so busy that I was left to my own devices. Till the

railwaymen came none but the Caripuna Indians knew what was there; so

into the woods, of course, I would go, trying every track which led from

the camp. A botanist might have seen some difference from the forest at

Porto Velho, but I could not discover any. In appearance it was exactly

the same. The trees mostly were arborescent laurels I believe, with

smooth brown boles which were blotched through their outer cuticle

peeling away, much in the manner of that of the plane tree. The brown

parchments of their laurel-like leaves covered the floor of the woods.

The trees were rarely of great diameter, but their crowns were so

distant that nothing could be made of their living foliage. I saw no

flowers at all. There were few orchids, but the large shapely emerald

coloured leaves of pothos plants were very frequent, sitting in the

angles of branches and trunk. Aloft was always the wreckage of vines

suspended, as vaguely seen and as motionless as cobwebs and

dilapidations in the overhead darkness of high vaults. I rarely heard a

sound in that forest, though there was a bird which called. I often

heard it in the woods of the upper Madeira. It called thrice, as a boy

who whistles shrilly through his fingers; a long call, and then another

whistle in the same key followed instantly by a falling note. One

delightful walk was along a path which had not been made by the

railwaymen, for it was evidently old, as it ran, a cleft in the trees,

not through broken timber, but in partial sunshine, with a mesh of vines

and freely growing plants on either side. It led downwards to a small

stream, which was cumbered with fallen and rotting timber, a cool hollow

where ferns were abundant. It was in the woods at the Caracoles that I

first saw the great morpho butterfly at home. This species, peculiar to

South America, is rarely seen except in the shades of the virgin forest.

One day in the twilight aisles near the Caracoles camp, where nothing

moved, and all was a grey monotone, it so surprised me with its happy

undulating flight--as though it danced along, and were in no hurry--its

great size, and its bright blue wings, that I rose mesmerised, stumbling

after it through the dank litter, thoughtless of direction, not thinking

of the danger of losing my way, thinking of nothing but that joyous

resplendent creature dancing aloft ahead of me in the gloom and just

beyond my reach. Its polished blue wings flashed like speculae. It might

have been a drifting fragment of sunny sky. I had never seen anything

alive so beautiful. A fall over a log brought me to sobriety, and when I

looked up it was gone. Afterwards I saw many of them; sometimes when

walking the forest there would be morphos always in sight.

The construction camp was not more than a month old. Perched on an

escarpment by the line was a row of tents, and at the back of the tents

some flimsy huts built of forest stuff. They stood about a ruin of

felled trees, with a midden and its butterflies in the midst. Probably

thirty white men were stationed there. They were then throwing a wooden

bridge across the Caracoles. Most of them were young American civil

engineers, though some were English; and when I found one of them--and

he happened to be a countryman of mine--balancing himself on a narrow

beam high over a swift current, and, regardless of the air heavy with

vapour and the torrid sun, directing the disposal of awkward weights

with a concentration and keenness which made me recall with regret the

way I do things at times, I saw his profession with a new regard. I

noticed the men of that transient little settlement in the wilds were in

constant high spirits. They betrayed nothing of the gravity of their

undertaking. They might have been boys employed at some elaborate jest.

But it seemed to me to be a pose of heartiness. They repelled reality

with a laugh and a hand clapped to your shoulder. At our mess table,

over the dishes of toucan and parrot supplied by the camp hunters, they

rallied each other boisterously. There was a touch of defiance in the

way they referred to the sickness and the shadow; for it was notorious

that changes were frequent in their little garrison. They were forced to

talk of these changes, and this was the way they chose to do it. As if

laughter was their only prophylactic! But such laughter, to a visitor

who did not have to wait till fever took him, but could go when he

liked, could be answered only with a friendly smile. Some of my cheery

friends of the Caracoles were but the ghosts of men.

* * * * *

Hill warned me late one afternoon to be ready to start at sunrise, and

then went to play poker. On my way to my hut, at sunset, I stopped to

gossip with the young doctor, where he was busy dressing wounds at his

surgery. The labourers, half-breeds, Brazilians, and Bolivian Spaniards,

work being over, were giving the doctor a full evening with their

ailments. Mostly these were skin troubles. The least abrasion in the

tropics may spread to a horrid and persistent wound. The legs of the

majority of these natives were unpleasant with livid scars. In one case

a vampire bat had punctured a man's arm near the elbow while he slept,

and that little wound had grown disastrously. We were in a region where

the pium flies swarmed, tiny black insects which alight on the hands and

face, perhaps a dozen at a time, and gorge themselves, though you may be

unconscious of it. Where the pium fly feeds it leaves a dot of

extravasated blood which remains for weeks, so that most of us were

speckled. Even these minute wounds were liable to become deep and bad.

There were larger flies which put their eggs in the human body, where

they hatch with dire results. (Do not think the splendid tropics have

nothing but verdure, orchids, butterflies, and coral snakes banded

orange and black and crimson and black.) So the doctor was a busy man

that evening. The floor of his surgery was made of unequal boughs; the

walls and roof were of dried fronds. A lamp was slung on a doorpost. He

was a young American, and he did not grumble at his bumpy floor, the bad

light, the appliances and remedies which were all one should expect in

the jungle, nor the number of his patients, except comically. He told me

he was rather keen on the diseases of the tropics. He liked them. (I

should think he must have liked them.) He was merrily insolent with

those swarthy and melancholy men, and they smiled back sadly at the

clever, handsome, and lively youngster. He was quick in his decisions,

deft, insistent, kind, and thorough, working down that file of pitiable

humanity, as careful with the last of the long row as with the first;

telling me, as he went along, much that I had never heard before, with

demonstrations. "Don't go," he cried, when I would have left him; for I

thought it might be he was as kind with this stranger as he was with the

others. "Ah! don't go. Let me hear a true word or two." He said he would

give me a treat if I stayed. He finished, put his materials away

deliberately, accurately, his back to me, while I saluted him as a fine

representative of ours. He turned, free of his task and jolly, and

produced that treat of his, two bottles of treasured and precious ginger

ale. It was a miracle performed. We talked till the light went out.

Much later a cry in the woods woke me. It was yet dark, but I could see

Hill up, and fumbling with his accoutrements. Out I jumped, though still

unreasonably tired; and sleepily dressed. When I turned to Hill, to see

if he were ready, he was then under his net, watching me. He explained

he had just returned from poker, and was wondering why I was dressing,

but did not like to ask, knowing that Englishmen have ways that are not

American. So the sun was up long before we were, though presently, in a

small canoe, we embarked on the Caracoles. This tributary of the Madeira

comes from nobody knows where. It is a river of the kind which explorers

in these forests have sometimes mentioned, to our fearful joy. The

sunlight hardly reached the water. The river was merely a drain

burrowing under the jungle. The forest on its banks met overhead. There

was little foliage below; we saw but the base of the forest, grey

columns that might have been of stone upholding a darkness from which

dead stuff suspended. The canoe had to dodge the lianas, which dropped

to the water. The noise of our paddles convoyed us down stream, a rout

of panic echoes trying to escape. We came to an opening and full

daylight presently, and landed by a mule corral; and I began a lonely

ride with Hill through the forest. The mule was such a docile little

brown creature that I was left in the silence to my thoughts, which were

interrupted now and then by the wandering blue flame of a morpho. My

mule followed Hill's mule along a winding trail, and our leader was

nearly always out of sight. I do not remember much of my first ride in

the forest. I had an impression of being at a viewless distance from the

sun. We were on the abysmal floor of a growth which was not trees, but

the hoary pediments of a structure which was too high and vast for human

sight. We rode in the basal gloom of it, no more than lost ants there,

at an immeasurable depth in the atmosphere. The roof of the world was

far away. Somewhere was the sun, for occasionally there was a well which

its light had filled, and a grove of green palms, complete and personal,

standing at the bottom of the well, living and reasonable shapes. Or one

of the morphos would flicker among those spectral bastions, aerial and

bright as a fairy in Hades. The sombre mind caught it at once, an

unexpected gleam of hope, a bright blue thought to set among one's

shapeless fears. We descended into hollows, going down into darker

fathoms of the shades; mounted again through brighter suffusions of day,

and in a while came out upon the open lane in the woods, the long cut in

the jungle made for the railway, when it should get so far.

Now I could see my companion. He was from Texas, and it was easy to

guess that. In the long rides which followed in the land where we looked

upon what was there for the first time since genesis, where we might

have been in the hush of the seventh day, so new, strange, and quiet was

all, the figure ahead of me, with its long boots, negligent black shirt,

the guns about the waist, and the hat with its extravagant size nobly

raked, made me stop at times to assure myself that I was not pursuing a

day-dream of boyhood, too much Mayne Reid in my head, especially when my

wild and improbable companion paused under a group of statuesque palms

and looked back at me--I suppose to make sure that I was still there,

and that the silence had not absorbed me utterly, a faint rustle of

intruding sound in a virgin and absorbent world. And again I remember

the sparkle and lift of early morning there. The air was new, it was

stimulative, it recharged me with buoyant youth. To breathe that air in

the fresh of the morning was exaltation, and to see the young sunlight

on the ardent foliage was to know the springs of life were full. That

was at the breakfast hour, when the camp fires crackled and were

aromatic, the smoke going straight to the tree tops. Then quickly the

narrow track through the forest filled with day, increased in heat till

I felt I could bear no more of it, and so gazed vacantly at the mule's

ears, merely enduring and numbed. The vitality of the morning went, and

in the fierce pour of light I looked no more to the strange leaves and

vines, the curious fronds, the anthills by the way, the butterflies and

birds, but had only a dull dread that the avenue through which we were

riding was straight and interminable. There was no escape from this

heat. There were no openings through which we could retreat under the

trees. The air was immobile; the air itself was the incumbent heat. The

only shadows were under the mules' bellies. Cruel and relentless noons!

How the surveyors endured it, standing for long eyeing their exacting

instruments in such a defeating glare, I do not know. At the end of each

day my pigskin leggings were like wet brown paper with sweat, and my

hands crinkled and bleached as though they had been in a soda bath.

We reached another and greater tributary of the Madeira, the Rio

Jaci-Parana. Here there was a very extensive clearing as great as the

one at Porto Velho. The bridging of the Jaci would be a considerable

undertaking, consequently there were numerous huts dotted about the

rough open ground; but I think the original intention in cutting back

the jungle to such an extent was that in the days to come a town would

grow there. I imagine it will not, and that the project is abandoned. In

one of my early walks in the woods I came by chance upon the new

cemetery; it was already large. The Jaci country has proved to be more

than usually unhealthy. The ground was cleared down to a coarse herbage,

round which stood shadowing trees. Little crucifixes, made by splitting

a stick and putting another stick crosswise in the slit, were planted at

all sorts of drunken angles in the ground. One large cross in the centre

stood for all the dead. There were no names given. A Brazil nut-tree

grew alongside this graveyard in the jungle, so tall that the flock of

screaming parrots about its foliage were but drifting black specks.

Because Hill had a touch of the fever we stayed for some days by the

Jaci. I had a hut given to me, typical of the rest; but I was so much

alone in it that that hut on the Jaci, where our remoteness from human

things tested and known, the aloofness and quiet of the forest, the

deadly nature of the romantic and beautiful river bank where we were

marooned, and the sickness of my friend Hill, threw me upon my centre,

until I began even to talk to myself, and received such an impress of

the minute details of my little habitation that, ephemeral as it was and

now long since gone, it endures, of coloured and indestructible stuff,

with a sunny portal I still can enter whenever my mind turns that way.

It was of four palm trunks, lapped round and over with mats of leaves.

The floor was of untrimmed branches, two feet from the earth, and their

unexpected inequalities, never remembered, were always jolting my

thoughts as I walked across. They were crooked, and I could see the

dusty earth two feet beneath where brown and green lizards ran. At one

end was a verandah with a narrow floor made of the lids of soap and

dynamite boxes, and laid without any idea that some curious tenant might

wish to read the manufacturers' full names and see their complete

trademarks. It was a puzzle. There was nothing to do, and I searched

long on my verandah floor for the clue to one embarrassing fragment of a

stencilled word. Hill sometimes huddled in a hammock on one side of the

verandah, a leg hanging limply over, his thin sallow face drawn and

resting on his breast, and his eyes shut; and I sat near him on the

rail, silent, alone with any thought I met, and gazing blankly down the

steep slope, past two tall Brazil nut-trees, to the half-hidden Rio Jaci

below, and the roof of the forest opposite, over which the sun set each

day in uplifted splendour. I remembered but one conversation during that

wait. An elderly white man came up to the verandah one evening, and

murmured something to Hill, who opened his eyes, and looked at his

visitor under weary lids. This man was one of Hill's subordinates. He

had something to say of the work; but one would hardly call it speech.

The flow of his life was so weak that he could do no more than lift a

few small words from his gaping mouth between his breaths. He held on to

the verandah. His loose clothes hung straight down from his bones. The

veins were in blue knots on his forehead. "Say," said Hill, rousing

himself, "I want you to ride to the Caracoles, go down to Porto Velho,

and take this note to the hospital." The man said nothing, but nodded.

Hill scrawled his note, and the man left. "He'll be dead in a month,"

said Hill, five minutes after the man had gone. "But he would not go to

the hospital for his health. I have to pretend that he must go for mine.

He may as well die in a comfortable bed.... I wish those damned parrots

would cease!" They were somewhere down by the river, unseen, but all the

sound there was, their voices long, keen and distracting flaws in the

pellucid and coloured dayfall.

One morning we crossed the Jaci, and on the opposite shore some mules

were already geared with Texan saddles, the hombres at their heads,

waiting for us. I considered my mule. He was a big, grey, upstanding

fellow, with the legs and feet of a racehorse, the head of a hammer, and

alert and inquisitive ears. He was very much alive. I had no doubt he

could leave anywhere like light, when he had a mind for it. So that I

turned to Hill, and said, "Is mine a quiet animal? Is he vicious?" "O

say," said my guide, glancing carelessly at my dubious mount, "I guess

he's just a mule." When a hombre shouted at my mule he stepped briskly,

with more than a hint of the malicious rebel in his gait.

I knew it would happen, and it did. One foot was no sooner buried in a

wooden shoe called a stirrup than he was off, like an explosion. A

desperate leap got my other leg over my travelling sack, lashed on his

rump, and I came down in the saddle, much surprised. Texan saddles are

not leather pads for riding domestic creatures, but thrones for ruling

devils, and the bit would have broken the mouth of a hippopotamus. The

brute stopped, turned back one ear, and his thought was in his swivel

eye. "You wait," I saw him say. In the few engrossing moments when his

body was expanding and contracting under me I got some idea of the force

I was supposed to guide, and it did not make my mind easy, for an office

chair had been my most unstable seat till then. Yet off we went quietly,

along the track, and Hill was in front, and my mule was as meek as a

sheep. There came a swamp, into which he went to the knees, and I

dismounted, jumping from hummock to hummock, encouraging him, and

showing him the best places. His brown eyes were then like those of a

good woman. So leaning forward, when we were through, I patted his sleek

neck, and gave him pleasant words. Afterwards, when he showed a certain

precious care in difficult places, for the country was very broken,

stepping like a tight-rope walker, I was fool enough to think it was

because of our understanding. Though I believe he would have deceived

anybody.

At noon we left the track and entered the forest by a path so narrow

that the trees touched our legs, and sometimes we had just time to duck

beneath a noose which a liana dangled in our faces. It was a low and

narrow tunnel, and it descended to a bottom where a shallow stream

brawled among granite boulders; thence up the trail went through the

trees and vines again, and at last we came to a little clearing, where

there was a hut, and men who would give us meat and drink. We

dismounted. I rubbed my mule's soft nose, and spoke him playfully, as a

familiar; but when entering the hut was rebuked by a man there for

making a short cut round the heels of my mule. "Never do it. Don't give

him a chance. A mule will be peaches for ten years waiting for the sure

chance of getting his heels right on your stomach. They're not horses,

them mules. They don't bite, and they don't muzzle you and show

friendly. They've got no feelings. That chap of yours, his mother was an

ass, and his father was old Solfernio himself. But they've all got one

good point--they're barren."

The mule stood deep in thought till I was mounted again; then instantly

bolted back along the path which led to the ravine. The idle hombre had

mishandled the reins, and I could get no pull. I went across that

clearing like (so Hill said afterwards) Tod Sloan up. The beast, his

ears back, was in a frenzy, and the convulsions of his powerful body

made my thoughts pallid and ghastly. Nothing but disaster could stop

him, and the black mouth of that steep tunnel in the forest yawned

before us, and grew larger, though not large enough. He took the opening

as clean as a lucky shot; but I was laid carefully along his back. Why

we missed the tangle of woods and the rocks in that precipitate descent

is known only to my lucky stars. I had my feet from the stirrups, my

toes hooked on his rump, one arm round the horn of the saddle, and the

other stretched along his sawing neck. I saw the roots and stones leap

up and by us, close to my face. Several things occurred to me, and one

was that some methods of dire fate were fatuous and undignified. I

wondered also whether I should be taken back to the ship, or buried

there. The impetus of the brute, which I expected would send us

somersaulting among the rocks of the bottom, took him partly up the

hither slope, and soon he had to gather his haunches for the upward

leaps. I slipped off. He swung round at the length of the reins, and

eyed me, cocking his ears derisively. A horse's nerves are human-like,

and a horse would have been in a muck, but this murderous mule was calm

and mocking. I watched him, and listened for an obscene and confident

guffaw.

I found afterwards that punishment has no more effect on them than

kindness. There is no guidance in this matter, take the mule all round.

It is dealing with the uncanny. It is better to cross yourself when you

go near a mule. Every morning about a camp we would watch the hombres

gear up those pensive and placid creatures. They were sleek, lissom, and

beautiful, and it was a pleasure to watch them. But as soon as the

business of the day began one of the mules (and there was no prophecy as

to which one it would be) became a homicidal maniac. At one camp it was

necessary to keep a hundred or more mules in reserve, and there, for

their health, a sane old horse was kept also. The horse was a knacker's

body, a sorry spectacle, and in that climate he but pottered about

waiting for disease to take him. He was smaller than the fine and

healthy mules, but the respect the hammer-heads had for him was comical,

and a great help to the men. Without the horse, it would have been

opening the door of an asylum to have let the mules out of the corral to

water at the river. But he led the way, and they bunched round him

bashfully, and followed him to the stream. He took no notice of them

whatever. He did not flatter them by pretending to be aware of their

existence. When he had had his fill, he turned, and ambled through them,

scorning to see them, and returned to the corral. Round went all the

mules nearest to him, and any of them on the outskirts of the mob that

stayed on because they did not see him go lost their heads, when they

looked up, and risked their necks in short cuts through the timber. "Ho,

mule!" would shout the hombres in alarm; for even mules cost money.

* * * * *

The land through which we were riding shall have a little railway there

some day, if the men who are building it keep their hearts of brass, and

refuse in working hours to remember London and New York. When it is

there, that short line, it will begin and end in places having names

which will convey little meaning to people outside Brazil; but to know

what endurance of valour, but chiefly what raillery and light-hearted

disregard of the gods who put baleful forests guarded by dragons--the

dragons of mythology were lambs to what mosquitoes are--in the path of

weak men pursuing their purpose, to know what has gone to the building

of that track, though it nowhere plainly shows, for the graveyards are

casual and obscure, brings you to a stand, surprised into awe of your

fellows, as though through a coarse disguise you caught a gleam of

divinity. Something shows, a light shows, which is beyond human. Would

men be so prodigal of life and time if they were not aware of their

great wealth? I don't know. My travels never brought me to that ultimate

assurance. But I did see that my fellow-men are indifferent, spendthrift

with their known and scanty store as though they were immortals, the

remittance men of Great Jove. I have no doubt now the line will be

finished some day; but there were times, riding along the roughly

cleared trail where it is to be, and we came upon places where men, in a

spasm of pointless and soon expiring energy had scratched and mauled the

pristine earth, when I did not think so. Always the same dumb mystery

was about us at noon as at nightfall. I felt we were lost at the back of

the world, that we had crossed the boundary beyond which the voice of

traffic never goes, and were idly wandering on the confines of oblivion.

Sometimes I had that consciousness of futility which comes to us when,

in sleep, we are earnest in the absurd activities of a dream, one point

of the reason remaining awake to wonder at the antics of the busy but

blind mind. Why was I there at all? Was I there? Those forlorn spots in

the forest where our fellows had been before us, which we two riders

overlooked alone, seemed to show that those men, while in the midst of

their feverish labour, had recovered their minds, and had seen the

wilderness was too vast, was unconquerable; and they had fled. There

before us was what they had done. A deep trench would be in the track,

the sand thrown up on either side. Some dead trees would be prone in our

path, and we had to ride round them. There would be a few empty huts of

leaves, with old ashes at the entrances, and a midden with its usual

gorgeous butterflies. There would not be a sign of life, except the

butterflies over the refuse, and not a sound or a movement but a clink

from our own harness, and the heads of our mules impatient with the

flies. Over the evidence of man's far-fetched enterprise and industry,

his short and ferocious attack on the wild, brooded the forest. That

bent over us, and it might have been solicitous and compassionate, or it

might have been merely curious about the behaviour of the surprising

creatures who had come there for the first time, and had been so active

for a while. Sitting in the pour of the sun, looking upon the scanty

work of my fellows, and then upon the near watchful ranks of that

continent of trees pressing close to regard the grave-like trench into

which man's hope might have been thrown, I had a dread of the easy and

enduring dominion of those powers which were before man.

We would ride on then, sometimes up to our saddles in swamps, and every

day I lost faith that there was any company of our fellows in that

desolation, who would take our mules at nightfall, and show hammocks for

our rest. But always before night caught us we would spy a few huts

diminutive under the cliffs of forest--land ho!--and the little outpost

of two or three engineers and a doctor would meet us as we came up. Such

a camp was like finding security and fellowship again after the

uncertainty and emptiness of the sea. The voices of new friends disarmed

the forest. It was not curious that we found it so easy to talk and

laugh.

One such camp I remember well. We came upon it late, and my bones,

through a longer ride than usual in the wooden saddle, had grown into an

unjointed frame. This was the real meaning of fatigue. My body was a

comprehensive ache. Yet my mind was alert and buoyant; and I remembered

that perhaps it was so because I had been well bitten by the mosqitoes

of the Jaci-Parana, a first effect of the inoculation; so I swallowed

twenty grains of my store of quinine.

You in settled lands, unless you have been very poor indeed and know

what trouble is and what friends are, have never seen the face of your

brother, nor the serenity of evening when you have found, without

expecting it, shelter for the night; you don't know what the taste of

bread and meat is, nor the savour of tobacco, nor what comfortable

security is the whispering of a comrade unseen in the shadows of a

resting place, nor what it is to sleep. I found those gifts are not

means to life only, but reasons for living too; something to live for.

With these at nightfall, our frail little hut, beleaguered in the

limitless woods, the shack in which the ants and spiders swarmed and

gross insects rang on the metal lamp, where we loafed in hammocks,

smoking, and listened to the cries of we knew not what in the unknown

about us, was impregnable to the hosts of darkness.

Perhaps I remember that camp so well because it was a night of full

moon. There were three huts. We were deep in the trees. The dark walls

of that well in the jungle rose sheer all round us. Nobody knew what was

beyond the huts. The moon appeared just clear of the lofty parapet of

the well, and poured down to us an imponderable rarity of bluish fire.

Wherever this fire lodged it stayed. Half-way up projected palm fronds,

and they were heavy patterns in burnished silver. Nameless shapes grew

luminous in the dark about us. The ragged thatch of a hut fell from its

apex in a cascade of lustrous fluid metal suddenly congealed. The gloom

beneath that shining roof was hollowed by the pale yellow light of a

lamp; so I could see, under the eaves, the three hammocks slung from the

posts. The quiet talk of my companions was the only sound. I limped with

weariness towards the voices, and sat in a shadow listening; and looked

beyond to sprays of motionless shining foliage leaning out from

inscrutable darkness. I seemed to have escaped from my tired body; my

disembodied mind was free and at large. A camp hunter had killed a

jaguar there, during the afternoon, they were saying. There were many

about, for we were beyond the railway men, the track being but a lane of

felled trees. They were saying the country there abounded with wild

life. Just as we arrived that evening one of the men brought in a

wounded animal, its nature so disguised that I thought it was a kind of

sloth. It was about two feet long, and covered with long grizzled hair

from its snout to the end of its considerable tail; but when I lifted

it, and the poor injured creature shook its hair from its eyes, I saw it

was a monkey; that anguished and fearful gaze which met mine was of my

own tiny brother. It was a rare and little-known creature, the Hairy

Saki, the first of its kind I had seen. The native took it away to eat

it. I may say that at every camp we ate what we could get; and being by

nature squeamish I never asked what it was that was put before me.

Whatever it was, there it was, and it was all they could give me. I only

emphatically directed that monkey flesh would be worse to me than

hunger.

"There are plenty of tigers about here," called one of our hosts to me;

"I'll fix you with a gun to-morrow, and we'll have some fun." But thank

you, no. I did not carry arms throughout my journey. The jaguars did me

no hurt when I went exploring o' mornings; and as for me, I was not

looking for trouble. Quite politely the jaguars retired while I wandered

about alone; though I should have been delighted to have sighted one.

The whiffs of feral odour I got, especially in the neighbourhood of the

mules, about which the jaguars prowled at night, were my only big game

trophies. Sometimes an indistinguishable object would step across ahead

of me, or stir in a bush close by, drawing ear and eye at once in a

place where trees and leaves were always as fixtures, like the air. I

never met one of the larger natives of the place. I knew the parrots by

their voices. I heard and smelt the cats. The monkeys called from a

great distance; or a body would slip round a tree so like a shadow

moving that when I examined the place, and saw nothing, it was easy to

believe the eye was only suspicious.

The men began to talk of the Indians. They said we were in the land of

the Caripunas. "You won't see them," said Hill. "I expect they are

watching us now though," he added, after a pause. I glanced up with some

interest at the spectral foliage, where right before me the pale

moonfire on leaves and trunks framed portals in the night. I could see

nothing.

"It's odds that some of them have been following us all day," continued

Hill. "They watch us. They can't make us out. The rubber men told us the

Caripunas would kill and eat us. They kill the rubber men all right, and

a good job too. But they only slip through the forest watching us. I saw

some once. On the Jaci. I jollied them into putting their canoe ashore.

It was only a bark contraption, the roughest thing of its kind I've

seen, sharpened fore and aft by lacing the ends together with sinews.

They were fine light brown fellows, well made, and stark naked. The

black hair of some of them was frizzy. Curious, isn't it? But I've heard

that in the slave days runaway niggers got down here, and the forest

Indians collared them to improve their own miserable stock. The

Brazilians have always had a tradition of a frizzy-haired race on the

Madeira; and here they are. They had bows and arrows, those chaps, made

entirely of cane and wood. The arrows were tipped with macaw feathers,

and were over six feet long. I couldn't bend the bloomin' bow. These

fellows keep to the side rivers, and their villages are always hidden in

the woods. It's a funny thing, but whenever the surveyors come on a

village they find it has been vacated about a week."

We were silent for a time, and then a half-breed crept up to a hammock

and spoke in Spanish to the doctor. The doctor laughed, and the fellow

went away. "He's asking for a piece of that onca to eat. He says it will

make him strong." They began to talk of that, and the talk went on to

what the Indians say of the mai d'aqua, the mother of the waters, who

frequents islands in the rivers and is the ruin of young men, and of

such dreads as the jurupari, and the curupira, and the maty tapere.

They admitted it was easy to imagine such things into the forest. It

wasn't what was seen there. Only the trees and the shadows were seen.

But sometimes there were sounds. One of us, when alone making a traverse

in the forest, had heard a scream, as if a woman had been frightened,

and then there was no more sound. The camp doctor began to talk. He was

an Englishman. He sat upright in the middle of his hammock, swinging it

with one foot. "There was a curious yarn I heard about a tiger in

Hampshire. Ah! Hampshire! I had a practice there once, you know. It made

me so busy and popular that at last I began to wonder whether I wasn't

altogether too successful. It was the practice or me. As I wanted to

live on and do some useful work I slew the practice. I've got one or two

ideas about that beri-beri you chaps die of here. A doctor cannot serve

God and a lot of old women with colds.... Oh yes, about that tiger.

Well, one of those travelling shows came to our village. I could see the

steam of its roundabout engines from my surgery windows, and I told the

farmer who rented the field to the showmen that if he let a mechanical

organ come anywhere near my place again he could take his gallstone

somewhere else in future.

"Late one night I got an urgent message to go over to the show. There

had been an accident. I was taken into a caravan. There was a fat woman

dressed as a pink fairy kneeling over a man stretched on a bunk, shaking

him, and crying. The man was dead all right. But I couldn't find a mark

on him. Diseased heart, I supposed, but he looked a good 'un. Some of

the well-made, powerful chaps have most unreliable hearts. The woman

kept crying out something about 'that beast of a tiger.' Curious sort of

remark, and I asked the boss afterwards what she meant. He shuffled

about a bit, pretending that she was talking silly. 'Nothing to do with

the tigress,' he said, 'although the man was found unconscious in her

cage.' 'It's such a tame thing,' said the showman. 'Anybody could handle

it. Never shows vice. Old Jackson'--that was the dead chap--'he'd been

inside tinkering with a partition. When we found him she was lying in a

corner as if asleep, and only sat up and yawned when we got him out of

her cage. Come and see for yourself.'

"I went. There was nothing to see, except a slit-eyed tigress sitting up

in a corner of her cage, blinking at the lantern, and looking rather

spooky. A rather small creature, and prettily marked--one of the

melantic variety.

"Well, the chap was buried after an inquest, and that inquest made me

ask a lot of questions afterwards. It was a simple affair, the inquest.

Death from natural causes. But there was something behind the evidence

of the man's wife, and I wanted to find out about that.

"She told me she had a little girl, who got one night into the tent

where the big cats were kept. Nobody was there at the time. Next morning

she said to her mother, 'Mummie, who was the funny lady in Lucy's cage?'

"Lucy was the name of the tigress. The child said that there was only

the lady in the cage, and the lady watched her. And that was all they

could get out of the kiddie. The funny thing about it is that once

before the child had come back with a yarn like that, after straying

into the menagerie tent late at night. The wife's idea was her husband

had died of fright.

"Don't ask me what I want to make out, boys. I'm only just telling you

the yarn. There you are.

"Well, before the show left our village, I heard they'd got a nigger to

look after the big cats. He was with the show two days. On the third day

he was missing. He went without drawing his money, and he had left open

the door of Lucy's cage. She hadn't attempted to get out. The nigger was

found some days after, wandering about the country, and a little

cracked, by all accounts. And that's all." The doctor struck a match,

and then hoisted his legs into the hammock. Somewhere far in the forest

the monkeys were howling.

"That doctor is a good body mender," said Hill to me. "He is the most

entertaining liar on this job."