We pushed out the boat, and four oars shattered the mirror and the
revelation. Above the quay the white houses appeared, mounting a quick
incline in chalk-like strata. They did not reach the ridge of the hill.
The ridge was a wood dark against a cloud. Downstream, at the end of
the ridge, our river is met by another. They merge and turn to go to
sea. They become a gulf of confused currents and shoals in an exposed
region of sandy desert, salting, and marsh, which ends seaward in the
usual form of a hooked pebble bank. Beyond the bank and the breakers is
a bay enclosed by two great horns of rock, thirty miles apart. The next
land westward, straight out between the headlands, is America. A white
stalk of a lighthouse stands amid the dunes, forlorn and fragile in
that bright wilderness, a lamp at our door for travellers.
But we went upstream. The tide here, however, penetrates into the very
hills. The exposed coils of roots and the lower overhanging branches of
oaks in precipitous valleys, which in aspect are remote from the coast,
are submerged daily, and shelter marine crustacea; the fox-gloves and
ferns are just above the crabs. Yet where we grounded our boat, six
miles from the lighthouse, the western ocean was as distant a thought
as Siberia. On this still midsummer afternoon our lonely creek was
the conventional picture of the tropics, silent, vivid, and far. The
creek--or pill, as the natives of the west country call it in their
Anglo-Saxon--is, like all the best corners of the Estuary, uninhabited
and unvisited. Perhaps the common notion of the tropics, a place of
superb colours, with gracious palms, tree-ferns, and vines haunted by
the birds of a milliner’s dream, originated in the stage scenery of
the _Girls from Ko-ko_ and other equatorial musical comedies, to which
sailors have always given their hearty assent. That picture has seldom
been denied. What traveller would have the heart to do it? The sons
of Adam continue to hope that one day they may return to the garden,
and it would be cruel to warn them that this garden cannot be entered
through the Malay Straits or by the Amazon or Congo. We ought to be
allowed, I think, to keep a few odd illusions in a world grown so
inimical to idle dreaming. For the jungle in reality is rather like
mid-ocean where there is no help. The sea is monstrously active, but
the jungle is no less fearful because it is quiet and still. It is not
variously coloured. It has few graces. Once within its green wall,
that metallic and monotonous wall, the traveller becomes daunted by a
foreboding gloom, and a silence older than the memories of Rheims and
Canterbury. The picture is not of Paradise, but of eld and ruin. You
see no flowers, and hear no nightingales. Sometimes there is a distant
cry, prompted, it might be guessed, by one of the miseries which Dante
witnessed in a similar place. Yet whatever beings use equatorial
forests for their purgatory, they remain discreetly hidden; Dante there
could but peer into the shadows and listen to the agony of creatures
unknown. The grotesque shapes about him would mock him with aloof
immobility, and Dante presently would go mad. He would never write a
poem about his experiences. I saw this when reading Bates’ _Naturalist_
again, while the crew of the _Brunhilda_ gathered driftwood in a Devon
creek to make a fire for tea. Bates does little to warn a reader that
the forest of the Amazon is not a simple exaggeration of Jefferies
_Pageant of Summer_. And what a book, I saw then, a man like Bates
could have made of such a varied world as our Estuary. The range of
life in this littoral, from the heather of the moors to the edge of
the pelagic shelf where the continental mass of Europe drops to the
abyss--a range, in places, of no more than ten miles--has not yet had
its explorer and its chronicler. Yet I never saw in days of travel in
the equatorial forest such hues and variety of form as were held in
the vase formed by the steep sides of our little west-country combe.
A cascade of rose, purple, yellow, white and green, was held narrowly
by those converging slopes of bracken and oak scrub. That descent of
colour was in movement, too, as a tumult would be, with the abrupt
and ceaseless leaping and soaring of numberless red admiral, clouded
yellow, peacock, fritillary and white butterflies. On the foreshore,
where a tiny stream emerged from this silent riot, a cormorant on a
pile was black and sentinel. Kingfishers passed occasionally, streaks
of blue light. It was the picture of the tropics, as popularly imaged,
but it was what travellers seldom see there.