Let something survive on earth, if it be only the record of
Maundeville’s island, which humanity cannot violate. I am glad
Amundsen returned safely, but I am glad also because the North Pole
compelled even our wonderful aeroplanes to treat it with respect.
Without guessing what our trouble is, we may be growing too clever.
Our very boldness may hide that fact from us. It would be a pity if
the earth became tired of us, as once it grew weary of the dinosaurs,
who appear to have overdone their part. They grew too big. A traveller
who recently returned from the upper Amazon asks, for instance, what
the future of that region is to be. “Unless oil,” says this gentleman,
“renews interest in this part of the world, large sections may revert
to savagery, as for instance in the Upper Napo, where already the
rubber gatherers have withdrawn, and the Indian tribes who once
occupied the territory have returned to their original haunts.” Clearly
then the Indian tribes must once have deserted their original haunts.
Was that because of the rubber gatherers? However, these savages
may be compelled again to leave their original haunts. The explorer
suggests that the forest trees could be readily converted into alcohol;
though he adds that not much can be done without better transport, and
his idea is that the use of flying boats, or hydroplanes, a use he
describes as “intelligent,” would in that wasted region “make things
possible which otherwise would be out of the question.” And then, to
show that this beneficent development is really in the air, and may
blossom soon, he reports that the Murato Indians of the Pastazo River
have a curious saying. They say, “When the white man comes with wings
we are going to die.”
We never doubt that what has been revealed only to the superior race
of whites--or as Mr. E. M. Forster describes us, the “pinko-greys”--is
better than any idea of an inferior colour. Alcohol and pulp, to our
mind, are the better forms for trees, their spiritual transmutation
as it were, and death in flying machines more desirable than what we
call savagery. The white man with his burden feels that he has not
reconciled himself to his god unless he has converted a mountain or
a wood into something like Widnes or Dowlais. When the mountain is a
mass of slag on which a community crowds into back-to-back hovels,
living there in the sure and certain hope of the Poor Law as the crown
to its labours, the man of western culture looks at the figures in
a Blue-Book, and knows that he has fulfilled the divine injunction.
He never suspects that he may be wrong in that. Impossible that the
Murato Indians in their forest may be as pleasing as his flying
machines and alcohol! Yet perhaps the firs and pines of Newfoundland
are not necessarily worse than the rolls of paper into which they are
converted. The conversion of a forest into a popular press may be
inevitable, like war, but we should not deride the trees which help us
to our enlightenment by calling them savage. That seems hardly fair.
Let the Murato and all other Indians perish, if there is no other
way of getting our alcohol, but to say they are uncivilized as we
extinguish them seems a little priggish.
And so our regret is not moved as easily as it ought to be when we
remember that the pioneer heroes who will venture to convert that
Amazon solitude into oil and other commodities may, nay will, die
in numbers of various fevers, along with the Indians who will die
because of other things. That is not unjust. For we feel that the
transformation of all the world into the likeness of the industrious
Black Country need not be hastened on our account. There is a tributary
of the Amazon I know, which once rewarded my admiration for it with
some fever, but I do not want it to be punished into the likeness of
the factories and slime of the Lea at Stratford-by-Bow. I shall never
again see that river and its forest, but it is a pleasure to remember
that, beyond Whitehall and Versailles, there still it flows between its
cliffs of foliage, for whoever would like a complete change from the
best that man has thought and done, and is willing to pay the price
for it. The explorer of the Amazon who wondered whether it could be
translated into a favourable balance sheet, says, “Alone in these dense
green solitudes, harmless as they may appear, it is the unknown, the
unseen, that terrifies. Man feels that he is battling with an invisible
monster more horrible than the river, because the latter attacks in
the open and its death stroke is relatively quick, whereas the forest
ensnares its victim in the dark, and slowly draws its coils tighter,
till death comes as a merciful relief.” But that, of course, is only
the impression of a human creature in such a land who is not a forest
Indian, and finds himself unable to call up a taxicab at the moment he
needs it. To alcohol with the place! The truth is the forest was not
meant for him. Whatever its design, it was not that. It does not wish
to do him any harm; and though its countenance has the appearance of
it, yet it was not composed as a look of doom. If he cannot survive,
however, then he must die, and while he is dying it will maintain its
aloofness and silence.
So I am glad when the North Pole turns back our aeroplanes. The day
will come when they will land there, no doubt. A quantity of black
grease, our mark of trade, will be left on the snow, as evidence that
man at last has come. But it is just as certain that he will not stay
there. Nothing can be done with that place, and it will be left to
stare in white emptiness at the stars. We find some comfort, which need
not be pure misanthropic lunacy, in the thought of unprofitable deserts
and waste lands. Some parts of earth, we are assured, will remain
exempt forever from the blight of our appalling activities. Let us pray
for more power to the mosquito’s elbow on the Amazon and such places.
It is pleasant to remember that he is guarding those regions against
saw mills and plant for distilling alcohol from the pulp of the forest.
Another sort of traveller, Mr. Norman Douglas, made this confession in
a review he wrote of that noble travel narrative, Doughty’s _Arabia
Deserta_--for I would prefer a little society in this misanthropy.
I do not want to be solitary in my desert. Says Mr. Douglas, with
feeling, “I recall my first view of the Chott country, that sterile
salt depression in Tunisia, and my feelings of relief at the idea that
this little speck of the globe, at least, was irreclaimable for all
time; never to be converted into arable land, or even pasture; safe
from the intrusion of potato planters and what not; the despair of the
politician, the delight of any dreamer who might care to people its
melancholy surface with phantoms, mere illusions, of his own.”
I sing with him, Hosanna! A great region of South Africa is sinking
into a like melancholy surface, for which we may thank whatever
desiccating Power there may be. It is returning to the dust. Its
water is leaving it. Its stones are now unturned. Its prospect is the
deceptive mirage. So kingdoms of Central Asia, once the arenas for the
battle glories of turbulent Huns and Tartars, have got tired of us, and
now turn to the moon her own aspect of parched and shining dunes. And
there is that part of Arabia known as the Empty Quarter--the Great Red
Desert. What a name that is, the Empty Quarter! It is as satisfying to
the mind as the Canadian Barren Grounds, a name so much more moving in
its implications than all the statistics of the Wheat Belt.