FOLLOWING A LIANA
It was a Sunday, the 26th of May, and the young people had made up
their minds to take a holiday. The weather was splendid, the heat being
tempered by the refreshing breezes which blew from off the Cordilleras,
and everything invited them out for an excursion into the country.
Benito and Manoel had offered to accompany Minha through the thick woods
which bordered the right bank of the Amazon opposite the fazenda.
It was, in a manner, a farewell visit to the charming environs of
Iquitos. The young men went equipped for the chase, but as sportsmen who
had no intention of going far from their companions in pursuit of any
game. Manoel could be trusted for that, and the girls--for Lina could
not leave her mistress--went prepared for a walk, an excursion of two or
three leagues being not too long to frighten them.
Neither Joam Garral nor Yaquita had time to go with them. For one reason
the plan of the jangada was not yet complete, and it was necessary that
its construction should not be interrupted for a day, and another was
that Yaquita and Cybele, well seconded as they were by the domestics of
the fazenda, had not an hour to lose.
Minha had accepted the offer with much pleasure, and so, after breakfast
on the day we speak of, at about eleven o’clock, the two young men and
the two girls met on the bank at the angle where the two streams joined.
One of the blacks went with them. They all embarked in one of the ubas
used in the service of the farm, and after having passed between the
islands of Iquitos and Parianta, they reached the right bank of the
Amazon.
They landed at a clump of superb tree-ferns, which were crowned, at
a height of some thirty feet with a sort of halo made of the dainty
branches of green velvet and the delicate lacework of the drooping
fronds.
“Well, Manoel,” said Minha, “it is for me to do the honors of the
forest; you are only a stranger in these regions of the Upper Amazon.
We are at home here, and you must allow me to do my duty, as mistress of
the house.”
“Dearest Minha,” replied the young man, “you will be none the less
mistress of your house in our town of Belem than at the fazenda of
Iquitos, and there as here----”
“Now, then,” interrupted Benito, “you did not come here to exchange
loving speeches, I imagine. Just forget for a few hours that you are
engaged.”
“Not for an hour--not for an instant!” said Manoel.
“Perhaps you will if Minha orders you?”
“Minha will not order me.”
“Who knows?” said Lina, laughing.
“Lina is right,” answered Minha, who held out her hand to Manoel. “Try
to forget! Forget! my brother requires it. All is broken off! As long
as this walk lasts we are not engaged: I am no more than the sister of
Benito! You are only my friend!”
“To be sure,” said Benito.
“Bravo! bravo! there are only strangers here,” said the young mulatto,
clapping her hands.
“Strangers who see each other for the first time,” added the girl; “who
meet, bow to----”
“Mademoiselle!” said Manoel, turning to Minha.
“To whom have I the honor to speak, sir?” said she in the most serious
manner possible.
“To Manoel Valdez, who will be glad if your brother will introduce me.”
“Oh, away with your nonsense!” cried Benito. “Stupid idea that I had! Be
engaged, my friends--be it as much as you like! Be it always!”
“Always!” said Minha, from whom the word escaped so naturally that
Lina’s peals of laughter redoubled.
A grateful glance from Manoel repaid Minha for the imprudence of her
tongue.
“Come along,” said Benito, so as to get his sister out of her
embarrassment; “if we walk on we shall not talk so much.”
“One moment, brother,” she said. “You have seen how ready I am to obey
you. You wished to oblige Manoel and me to forget each other, so as not
to spoil your walk. Very well; and now I am going to ask a sacrifice
from you so that you shall not spoil mine. Whether it pleases you or
not, Benito, you must promise me to forget----”
“Forget what?”
“That you are a sportsman!”
“What! you forbid me to----”
“I forbid you to fire at any of these charming birds--any of the
parrots, caciques, or curucus which are flying about so happily among
the trees! And the same interdiction with regard to the smaller game
with which we shall have to do to-day. If any ounce, jaguar, or such
thing comes too near, well----”
“But----” said Benito.
“If not, I will take Manoel’s arm, and we shall save or lose ourselves,
and you will be obliged to run after us.”
“Would you not like me to refuse, eh?” asked Benito, looking at Manoel.
“I think I should!” replied the young man.
“Well then--no!” said Benito; “I do not refuse; I will obey and annoy
you. Come on!”
And so the four, followed by the black, struck under the splendid trees,
whose thick foliage prevented the sun’s rays from every reaching the
soil.
There is nothing more magnificent than this part of the right bank of
the Amazon. There, in such picturesque confusion, so many different
trees shoot up that it is possible to count more than a hundred
different species in a square mile. A forester could easily see that
no woodman had been there with his hatchet or ax, for the effects of a
clearing are visible for many centuries afterward. If the new trees are
even a hundred years old, the general aspect still differs from what
it was originally, for the lianas and other parasitic plants alter, and
signs remain which no native can misunderstand.
The happy group moved then into the tall herbage, across the thickets
and under the bushes, chatting and laughing. In front, when the brambles
were too thick, the negro, felling-sword in hand, cleared the way, and
put thousands of birds to flight.
Minha was right to intercede for the little winged world which flew
about in the higher foliage, for the finest representations of
tropical ornithology were there to be seen--green parrots and clamorous
parakeets, which seemed to be the natural fruit of these gigantic
trees; humming-birds in all their varieties, light-blue and ruby red;
_“tisauras”_ with long scissors-like tails, looking like detached
flowers which the wind blew from branch to branch; blackbirds,
with orange plumage bound with brown; golden-edged beccaficos; and
_“sabias,”_ black as crows; all united in a deafening concert of shrieks
and whistles. The long beak of the toucan stood out against the golden
clusters of the _“quiriris,”_ and the treepeckers or woodpeckers of
Brazil wagged their little heads, speckled all over with their purple
spots. It was truly a scene of enchantment.
But all were silent and went into hiding when above the tops of the
trees there grated like a rusty weathercock the _“alma de gato”_ or
“soul of the cat,” a kind of light fawn-colored sparrow-hawk. If he
proudly hooted, displaying in the air the long white plumes of his tail,
he in his turn meekly took to flight when in the loftier heights there
appeared the _“gaviao,”_ the large white-headed eagle, the terror of the
whole winged population of these woods.
Minha made Manoel admire the natural wonders which could not be found
in their simplicity in the more civilized provinces of the east. He
listened to her more with his eyes than his ears, for the cries and the
songs of these thousands of birds were every now and then so penetrating
that he was not able to hear what she said. The noisy laughter of Lina
was alone sufficiently shrill to ring out with its joyous note above
every kind of clucking, chirping, hooting, whistling, and cooing.
At the end of an hour they had scarcely gone a mile. As they left the
river the trees assumed another aspect, and the animal life was no
longer met with near the ground, but at from sixty to eighty feet above,
where troops of monkeys chased each other along the higher branches.
Here and there a few cones of the solar rays shot down into the
underwood. In fact, in these tropical forests light does not seem to
be necessary for their existence. The air is enough for the vegetable
growth, whether it be large or small, tree or plant, and all the heat
required for the development of their sap is derived not from the
surrounding atmosphere, but from the bosom of the soil itself, where it
is stored up as in an enormous stove.
And on the bromelias, grass plantains, orchids, cacti, and in short all
the parasites which formed a little forest beneath the large one, many
marvelous insects were they tempted to pluck as though they had been
genuine blossoms--nestors with blue wings like shimmering watered silk,
leilu butterflies reflexed with gold and striped with fringes of green,
agrippina moths, ten inches long, with leaves for wings, maribunda bees,
like living emeralds set in sockets of gold, and legions of lampyrons or
pyrophorus coleopters, valagumas with breastplates of bronze, and green
elytræ, with yellow light pouring from their eyes, who, when the night
comes, illuminate the forest with their many-colored scintillations.
“What wonders!” repeated the enthusiastic girl.
“You are at home, Minha, or at least you say so,” said Benito, “and that
is the way you talk of your riches!”
“Sneer away, little brother!” replied Minha; “such beautiful things are
only lent to us; is it not so, Manoel? They come from the hand of the
Almighty and belong to the world!”
“Let Benito laugh on, Minha,” said Manoel. “He hides it very well, but
he is a poet himself when his time comes, and he admires as much as
we do all these beauties of nature. Only when his gun is on his arm,
good-by to poetry!”
“Then be a poet now,” replied the girl.
“I am a poet,” said Benito. “O! Nature-enchanting, etc.”
We may confess, however, that in forbidding him to use his gun Minha
had imposed on him a genuine privation. There was no lack of game in
the woods, and several magnificent opportunities he had declined with
regret.
In some of the less wooded parts, in places where the breaks were
tolerably spacious, they saw several pairs of ostriches, of the species
known as _“naudus,”_ from four to five feet high, accompanied by their
inseparable _“seriemas,”_ a sort of turkey, infinitely better from an
edible point of view than the huge birds they escort.
“See what that wretched promise costs me,” sighed Benito, as, at a
gesture from his sister, he replaced under his arm the gun which had
instinctively gone up to his shoulder.
“We ought to respect the seriemas,” said Manoel, “for they are great
destroyers of the snakes.”
“Just as we ought to respect the snakes,” replied Benito, “because they
eat the noxious insects, and just as we ought the insects because they
live on smaller insects more offensive still. At that rate we ought to
respect everything.”
But the instinct of the young sportsman was about to be put to a still
more rigorous trial. The woods became of a sudden full of game. Swift
stags and graceful roebucks scampered off beneath the bushes, and a
well-aimed bullet would assuredly have stopped them. Here and there
turkeys showed themselves with their milk and coffee-colored plumage;
and peccaries, a sort of wild pig highly appreciated by lovers of
venison, and agouties, which are the hares and rabbits of Central
America; and tatous belonging to the order of edentates, with their
scaly shells of patterns of mosaic.
And truly Benito showed more than virtue, and even genuine heroism, when
he came across some tapirs, called “antas” in Brazil, diminutives of the
elephant, already nearly undiscoverable on the banks of the Upper Amazon
and its tributaries, pachyderms so dear to the hunters for their rarity,
so appreciated by the gourmands for their meat, superior far to beef,
and above all for the protuberance on the nape of the neck, which is a
morsel fit for a king.
His gun almost burned his fingers, but faithful to his promise he kept
it quiet.
But yet--and he cautioned his sister about this--the gun would go off in
spite of him, and probably register a master-stroke in sporting annals,
if within range there should come a _“tamandoa assa,”_ a kind of large
and very curious ant-eater.
Happily the big ant-eater did not show himself, neither did any
panthers, leopards, jaguars, guepars, or cougars, called indifferently
ounces in South America, and to whom it is not advisable to get too
near.
“After all,” said Benito, who stopped for an instant, “to walk is very
well, but to walk without an object----”
“Without an object!” replied his sister; “but our object is to see, to
admire, to visit for the last time these forests of Central America,
which we shall not find again in Para, and to bid them a fast farewell.”
“Ah! an idea!”
It was Lina who spoke.
“An idea of Lina’s can be no other than a silly one,” said Benito,
shaking his head.
“It is unkind, brother,” said Minha, “to make fun of Lina when she
has been thinking how to give our walk the object which you have just
regretted it lacks.”
“Besides, Mr. Benito, I am sure my idea will please you,” replied the
mulatto.
“Well, what is it?” asked Minha.
“You see that liana?”
And Lina pointed to a liana of the _“cipos”_ kind, twisted round a
gigantic sensitive mimosa, whose leaves, light as feathers, shut up at
the least disturbance.
“Well?” said Benito.
“I proposed,” replied Minha, “that we try to follow that liana to its
very end.”
“It is an idea, and it is an object!” observed Benito, “to follow this
liana, no matter what may be the obstacles, thickets, underwood, rocks,
brooks, torrents, to let nothing stop us, not even----”
“Certainly, you are right, brother!” said Minha; “Lina is a trifle
absurd.”
“Come on, then!” replied her brother; “you say that Lina is absurd so as
to say that Benito is absurd to approve of it!”
“Well, both of you are absurd, if that will amuse you,” returned Minha.
“Let us follow the liana!”
“You are not afraid?” said Manoel.
“Still objections!” shouted Benito.
“Ah, Manoel! you would not speak like that if you were already on your
way and Minha was waiting for you at the end.”
“I am silent,” replied Manoel; “I have no more to say. I obey. Let us
follow the liana!”
And off they went as happy as children home for their holidays.
This vegetable might take them far if they determined to follow it to
its extremity, like the thread of Ariadne, as far almost as that which
the heiress of Minos used to lead her from the labyrinth, and perhaps
entangle them more deeply.
It was in fact a creeper of the salses family, one of the cipos known
under the name of the red _“japicanga,”_ whose length sometimes measures
several miles. But, after all, they could leave it when they liked.
The cipo passed from one tree to another without breaking its
continuity, sometimes twisting round the trunks, sometimes garlanding
the branches, here jumping form a dragon-tree to a rosewood, then from
a gigantic chestnut, the _“Bertholletia excelsa,”_ to some of the wine
palms, _“baccabas,”_ whose branches have been appropriately compared
by Agassiz to long sticks of coral flecked with green. Here round
_“tucumas,”_ or ficuses, capriciously twisted like centenarian
olive-trees, and of which Brazil had fifty-four varieties; here round
the kinds of euphorbias, which produce caoutchouc, _“gualtes,”_ noble
palm-trees, with slender, graceful, and glossy stems; and cacao-trees,
which shoot up of their own accord on the banks of the Amazon and its
tributaries, having different melastomas, some with red flowers and
others ornamented with panicles of whitish berries.
But the halts! the shouts of cheating! when the happy company thought
they had lost their guiding thread! For it was necessary to go back and
disentangle it from the knot of parasitic plants.
“There it is!” said Lina, “I see it!”
“You are wrong,” replied Minha; “that is not it, that is a liana of
another kind.”
“No, Lina is right!” said Benito.
“No, Lina is wrong!” Manoel would naturally return.
Hence highly serious, long-continued discussions, in which no one would
give in.
Then the black on one side and Benito on the other would rush at the
trees and clamber up to the branches encircled by the cipo so as to
arrive at the true direction.
Now nothing was assuredly less easy in that jumble of knots, among which
twisted the liana in the middle of bromelias, _“karatas,”_ armed with
their sharp prickles, orchids with rosy flowers and violet lips the size
of gloves, and oncidiums more tangled than a skein of worsted between a
kitten’s paws.
And then when the liana ran down again to the ground the difficulty
of picking it out under the mass of lycopods, large-leaved heliconias,
rosy-tasseled calliandras, rhipsalas encircling it like the thread on
an electric reel, between the knots of the large white ipomas, under
the fleshy stems of the vanilla, and in the midst of the shoots and
branchlets of the grenadilla and the vine.
And when the cipo was found again what shouts of joy, and how they
resumed the walk for an instant interrupted!
For an hour the young people had already been advancing, and nothing had
happened to warn them that they were approaching the end.
They shook the liana with vigor, but it would not give, and the birds
flew away in hundreds, and the monkeys fled from tree to tree, so as to
point out the way.
If a thicket barred the road the felling-sword cut a deep gap, and the
group passed in. If it was a high rock, carpeted with verdure, over
which the liana twisted like a serpent, they climbed it and passed on.
A large break now appeared. There, in the more open air, which is as
necessary to it as the light of the sun, the tree of the tropics, _par
excellence,_ which, according to Humboldt, “accompanies man in the
infancy of his civilization,” the great provider of the inhabitant of
the torrid zones, a banana-tree, was standing alone. The long festoon
of the liana curled round its higher branches, moving away to the other
side of the clearing, and disappeared again into the forest.
“Shall we stop soon?” asked Manoel.
“No; a thousand times no!” cried Benito, “not without having reached the
end of it!”
“Perhaps,” observed Minha, “it will soon be time to think of returning.”
“Oh, dearest mistress, let us go on again!” replied Lina.
“On forever!” added Benito.
And they plunged more deeply into the forest, which, becoming clearer,
allowed them to advance more easily.
Besides, the cipo bore away to the north, and toward the river. It
became less inconvenient to follow, seeing that they approached the
right bank, and it would be easy to get back afterward.
A quarter of an hour later they all stopped at the foot of a ravine in
front of a small tributary of the Amazon. But a bridge of lianas, made
of _“bejucos,”_ twined together by their interlacing branches, crossed
the stream. The cipo, dividing into two strings, served for a handrail,
and passed from one bank to the other.
Benito, all the time in front, had already stepped on the swinging floor
of this vegetable bridge.
Manoel wished to keep his sister back.
“Stay--stay, Minha!” he said, “Benito may go further if he likes, but
let us remain here.”
“No! Come on, come on, dear mistress!” said Lina. “Don’t be afraid, the
liana is getting thinner; we shall get the better of it, and find out
its end!”
And, without hesitation, the young mulatto boldly ventured toward
Benito.
“What children they are!” replied Minha. “Come along, Manoel, we must
follow.”
And they all cleared the bridge, which swayed above the ravine like a
swing, and plunged again beneath the mighty trees.
But they had not proceeded for ten minutes along the interminable cipo,
in the direction of the river, when they stopped, and this time not
without cause.
“Have we got to the end of the liana?” asked Minha.
“No,” replied Benito; “but we had better advance with care. Look!” and
Benito pointed to the cipo which, lost in the branches of a high ficus,
was agitated by violent shakings.
“What causes that?” asked Manoel.
“Perhaps some animal that we had better approach with a little
circumspection!”
And Benito, cocking his gun, motioned them to let him go on a bit, and
stepped about ten paces to the front.
Manoel, the two girls, and the black remained motionless where they
were.
Suddenly Benito raised a shout, and they saw him rush toward a tree;
they all ran as well.
Sight the most unforeseen, and little adapted to gratify the eyes!
A man, hanging by the neck, struggled at the end of the liana, which,
supple as a cord, had formed into a slipknot, and the shakings came from
the jerks into which he still agitated it in the last convulsions of his
agony!
Benito threw himself on the unfortunate fellow, and with a cut of his
hunting-knife severed the cipo.
The man slipped on to the ground. Manoel leaned over him, to try and
recall him to life, if it was not too late.
“Poor man!” murmured Minha.
“Mr. Manoel! Mr. Manoel!” cried Lina. “He breathes again! His heart
beats; you must save him.”
“True,” said Manoel, “but I think it was about time that we came up.”
He was about thirty years old, a white, clothed badly enough, much
emaciated, and he seemed to have suffered a good deal.
At his feet were an empty flask, thrown on the ground, and a cup and
ball in palm wood, of which the ball, made of the head of a tortoise,
was tied on with a fiber.
“To hang himself! to hang himself!” repeated Lina, “and young still!
What could have driven him to do such a thing?”
But the attempts of Manoel had not been long in bringing the luckless
wight to life again, and he opened his eyes and gave an “ahem!” so
vigorous and unexpected that Lina, frightened, replied to his cry with
another.
“Who are you, my friend?” Benito asked him.
“An ex-hanger-on, as far as I see.”
“But your name?”
“Wait a minute and I will recall myself,” said he, passing his hand over
his forehead. “I am known as Fragoso, at your service; and I am
still able to curl and cut your hair, to shave you, and to make you
comfortable according to all the rules of my art. I am a barber, so to
speak more truly, the most desperate of Figaros.”
“And what made you think of----”
“What would you have, my gallant sir?” replied Fragoso, with a smile;
“a moment of despair, which I would have duly regretted had the regrets
been in another world! But eight hundred leagues of country to traverse,
and not a coin in my pouch, was not very comforting! I had lost courage
obviously.”
To conclude, Fragoso had a good and pleasing figure, and as he recovered
it was evident that he was of a lively disposition. He was one of those
wandering barbers who travel on the banks of the Upper Amazon, going
from village to village, and putting the resources of their art at the
service of negroes, negresses, Indians and Indian women, who appreciate
them very much.
But poor Fragoso, abandoned and miserable, having eaten nothing for
forty hours, astray in the forest, had for an instant lost his head, and
we know the rest.
“My friend,” said Benito to him, “you will go back with us to the
fazenda of Iquitos?”
“With pleasure,” replied Fragoso; “you cut me down and I belong to you.
I must somehow be dependent.”
“Well, dear mistress, don’t you think we did well to continue our walk?”
asked Lina.
“That I do,” returned the girl.
“Never mind,” said Benito; “I never thought that we should finish by
finding a man at the end of the cipo.”
“And, above all, a barber in difficulties, and on the road to hang
himself!” replied Fragoso.
The poor fellow, who was now wide awake, was told about what had passed.
He warmly thanked Lina for the good idea she had had of following the
liana, and they all started on the road to the fazenda, where Fragoso
was received in a way that gave him neither wish nor want to try his
wretched task again.