Though several years have elapsed since my journey across those wild
vast regions, the remembrance of them is most vivid and clear in my
mind. It seems to me that everything in that period of my life,
landscape and human beings, forest and plain, stream and cloud,
mountains and breezes, all, all are still alive; they form part of the
panorama or scene wherein my memory keeps them immortal, abiding for
ever as I saw them, though unattainable to me. What was, is; what was,
must be; so I imagine. Memory is in this respect like the artist. The
sculptor or the painter seizes one moment of life, fashions and records
it in marble or in bronze, in line or colour, and there it remains
defying time, unchanging and unchangeable. The gallery of the mind, the
vast storehouse of the past, is infinite. It keeps in its inmost
inexhaustible recesses the living record of our life, the tremulous
shadowy hues of early night deepening into the dark, the glory of the
rising sun casting its veil of light upon the waves, the sensation of
the breeze as it fans our heated brow after an anxious night, the
thunder of the ocean or the deafening tumult of frenzied crowds in hours
of national misfortune or universal anger, the last parting word or look
of those who are gone before, the blithe greeting of him who comes back
to us after years of absence and of sorrow: all these manifestations of
life, the ebb and flow of joy and happiness, of pain and grief, stand
individualized, so to speak, in the memory, and nothing, save the loss
of memory itself, can change them. Nothing so dear to the heart as those
treasures; against them time and the vicissitudes of life are
powerless—even as the lovers and the dancers and the singers and the
enchanted leafy forest in Keats’ ‘Grecian Urn.’ That love will know no
disappointment. Sweet as songs heard may be, far sweeter are those
unheard of human ear; beautiful as are the green boughs of the forest,
far lovelier are those whose verdure is imperishable, whose leaves will
know no autumn; and sweeter than all melody, the unheard melody of those
flutes, dumb and mute in the infinite harmony which man can imagine, but
not create. Our own mind keeps that record of the past; hallowed and
sacred should it be, for therein our sorrow may find relief, and our joy
purity and new strength.
Beautiful indeed were our days. Gliding softly over the waters, we would
read, and there, in forced and intimate communion with Nature, would
seek our old-time friends the historians, the poets, the humbler singers
that had charmed, or instructed, or taught us how to live. The lessons
of history seemed clearer and more intelligible, the puissant and
sonorous voice of poetry sounded fitly under that blue sky in the midst
of those forests, even as the notes of the organ seem to vibrate and
echo as in their very home, under the fretted vault of some Gothic
temple. The majesty of surrounding Nature lent an additional charm to
the voice of the great ones who had delivered a message of consolation
and of hope to mankind. We lived now in Rome, now in Greece, now in
modern Europe, and frequently the songs of our own poets filled our
minds with joy, as the twitter of native birds when the sun rose and the
morning sparkled, bedewed with jewels that night had left on leaves and
flowers.
One day, when we had grown expert in bargaining with the Indians,
shortly before sunset a solitary Indian paddled towards our camp. He had
been attracted by the novel sight. We had learnt that within the memory
of living man no such large convoy as ours had passed through those
waters; groups of eight or ten men in one canoe were the largest ever
seen—at least, the largest groups of strangers. Here was a small army,
with two large canoes and great abundance of strange and wonderful
equipment—boxes, trunks, weapons, cooking utensils, many men with white
faces and marvellous strange array; indeed, enough to attract the
attention and curiosity of any child of the forest. The canoe upon which
the Indian stood was barely six feet in length—so narrow and shallow
that at a distance he seemed to stand on the very mirror of the waters.
He carried a large paddle, shaped like a huge rose-leaf somewhat blunted
at the end, and with a very long stem. He plunged this gracefully in the
water on either side, seeming hardly to bend or to make any effort, and
in feathering there appeared a convex mirror of liquid glass, upon which
the sunlight fell in prismatic hues each time that his paddle left the
water. He drew near, and stood before us like a bronze statue. He was
stark naked, save for a clout round his loins. On his brow was a crown
of tiger-claws surmounted by two eagle feathers. Across his neck, hung
by a string, was a small bag of woven fibre containing a piece of salt,
some hooks made of bone and small harpoons which could be set on arrows,
and two hollow reeds about an eighth of an inch in diameter and four or
five inches long. By means of these reeds the Indians inhale through
their nostrils an intoxicating powder, in which they delight. The man
was young, powerfully built, about five feet ten in height, and well
proportioned; his teeth glistening and regular; his eyes black and
large, gleaming like live coals; he was a perfect incarnation of the
primitive race, and the hardships and exposure of his past life had left
no more trace on him than the flowing waters of the river on the
swan’s-down.
Guided by our civilized instinct, which in these utilitarian days
prompts man to seek in whatever meets his eye, first and foremost, not
its beauty or the symbol which it may represent, or the tendency towards
something higher which it may indicate, but its utility, following this
delightful system of our latest Christian civilization, I, in common
with my companions, at once decided to exploit that simple spirit and
press him into our service. Being unable to bargain ourselves—which was
lucky for him, for in our enlightened way we should have driven a harder
bargain than our men—we entrusted the task to Leal.
The Indian, also true to his instinct, immediately indicated—first by
signs, and then by word of mouth, when he saw he was understood—that he
craved a part of the innumerable riches before his eyes. He really did
not ask for much; he wanted some salt, a knife, a piece of glass like a
small mirror that he saw glittering in the hands of one of our men, and
whatever else we might be willing to give. He was told that he could
have all that he asked and more. He smiled broadly, and a light of joy
came over his face. These were signs truly human, not yet trained into
the hypocritical conventions of well-bred society. As he stretched forth
his hand, he was told that the gift was conditional—that he must earn
the articles he coveted, that we expected him to sit beside the other
paddlers and help to carry us for two or three days, whereupon he would
receive these rich gifts from our prodigal bounty.
This statement seemed to our Indian interlocutor absurd, just as
something utterly incongruous and ludicrous in business would strike the
mind of a London banker. In his primitive mental organism the idea that
one man should work for another was something that found no place. Those
forests, rivers, and plains were his home; he roved free and fearless
through them, alone or in the company of others, each one of whom
provided for himself. A bargain—that basis of civilization, of culture,
that great agent of progress and of human development—was something
which he could not understand. The essence of the fact, and the fact
itself, were beyond him. We could see the struggle between his greed and
his love of freedom. The riches that we offered him tempted him far more
than glittering diamonds on the counter of a jeweller tempt a vain woman
or a burglar at bay. Yet he overcame the temptation. The glad smile
vanished; his face darkened with a look that we could interpret as
reproach, and possibly contempt; he silently lifted his paddle, and with
two strokes sped his canoe into mid-stream. Without glancing backwards,
giving now and then a tremendous stroke, he disappeared in the distance.
The rays of the sinking sun reddened the waters of the river and the
surrounding horizon; the Indian, upright in his canoe, seemed as if clad
in a sheet of flame, and finally vanished as though consumed in the
crimson glow. The sun itself in the western horizon resembled a huge
ball of red-hot iron, as if the Cyclops and the Titans, after playing,
had left it behind on the bosom of the endless plain, flat and still as
the sea in a calm.