Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






                                THE SEA
                             AND THE JUNGLE

                                   BY
                            H. M. TOMLINSON

                                NEW YORK
                         E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY
                            681 FIFTH AVENUE




                            Published, 1920,
                       BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY

                         _All Rights Reserved_

                    _First Printing, October, 1920_
                   _Second Printing, September, 1921_

                         THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE

  Being the narrative of the voyage of the tramp steamer _Capella_
  from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and thence 2000 miles along the
  forests of the Amazon and Madeira Rivers to the San Antonio Falls;
  afterwards returning to Barbados for orders, and going by way of
  Jamaica to Tampa in Florida, where she loaded for home. Done in the
  years 1909 and 1910.

                         DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO
                               DID NOT GO

  The author is indebted to the editors of the _English Review_, the
  _Pall Mall Magazine_, the _Morning Leader_, and the _Yorkshire
  Observer_, for permission to incorporate such parts of this
  narrative as appeared first in their publications.




                                CONTENTS

                        CHAPTER               PAGE
                             I.                  1
                            II.                 98
                           III.                185
                            IV.                246
                             V.                271
                            VI.                324




THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE




I


Though it is easier, and perhaps far better, not to begin at all, yet if
a beginning is made it is there that most care is needed. Everything is
inherent in the genesis. So I have to record the simple genesis of this
affair as a winter morning after rain. There was more rain to come. The
sky was waterlogged and the grey ceiling, overstrained, had sagged and
dropped to the level of the chimneys. If one of them had pierced it! The
danger was imminent.

That day was but a thin solution of night. You know those November
mornings with a low, corpse-white east where the sunrise should be, as
though the day were still-born. Looking to the dayspring, there is what
we have waited for, there the end of our hope, prone and shrouded. This
morning of mine was such a morning. The world was very quiet, as though
it were exhausted after tears. Beneath a broken gutter-spout the rain
(all the night had I listened to its monody) had discovered a nest of
pebbles in the path of my garden in a London suburb. It occurs to you at
once that a London garden, especially in winter, should have no place in
a narrative which tells of the sea and the jungle. But it has much to do
with it. It is part of the heredity of this book. It is the essence of
this adventure of mine that it began on the kind of day which so
commonly occurs for both of us in the year’s assortment of days. My
garden, on such a morning, is a necessary feature of the narrative, and
much as I should like to skip it and get to sea, yet things must be
taken in the proper order, and the garden comes first. There it was: the
blackened dahlias, the last to fall, prone in the field where death had
got all things under his feet. My pleasaunce was a dark area of soddened
relics; the battalions of June were slain, and their bodies in the mud.
That was the prospect in life I had. How was I to know the Skipper had
returned from the tropics? Standing in the central mud, which also was
black, surveying that forlorn end to devoted human effort, what was
there to tell me the Skipper had brought back his tramp steamer from the
lands under the sun? I knew of nothing to look forward to but December,
with January to follow. What should you and I expect after November, but
the next month of winter? Should the cultivators of London backs look
for adventures, even though they have read old Hakluyt? What are the
Americas to us, the Amazon and the Orinoco, Barbados and Panama, and
Port Royal, but tales that are told? We have never been nearer to them,
and now know we shall never be nearer to them, than that hill in our
neighbourhood which gives us a broad prospect of the sunset. There is as
near as we can approach. Thither we go and ascend of an evening, like
Moses, except for our pipe. It is all the escape vouchsafed us. Did we
ever know the chain to give? The chain has a certain length—we know it
to a link—to that ultimate link, the possibilities of which we never
strain. The mean range of our chain, the office and the polling booth.
What a radius! Yet it cannot prevent us ascending that hill which looks,
with uplifted and shining brow, to the far vague country whence comes
the last of the light, at dayfall.

It is necessary for you to learn that on my way to catch the 8.35 that
morning—it is always the 8.35—there came to me no premonition of
change. No portent was in the sky but the grey wrack. I saw the hale and
dominant gentleman, as usual, who arrives at the station in a brougham
drawn by two grey horses. He looked as proud and arrogant as ever, for
his face is as a bull’s. He had the usual bunch of scarlet geraniums in
his coat, and the stationmaster assisted him into an apartment, and his
footman handed him a rug; a routine as stable as the hills, this. If
only the solemn footman would, one morning, as solemnly as ever, hurl
that rug at his master, with the umbrella to crash after it! One could
begin to hope then. There was the pale girl in black who never, between
our suburb and the city, lifts her shy brown eyes, benedictory as they
are at such a time, from the soiled book of the local public library,
and whose umbrella has lost half its handle, a china nob. (I think I
will write this book for her.) And there were all the others who catch
that train, except the young fellow with the cough. Now and then he does
miss it, using for the purpose, I have no doubt, that only form of
rebellion against its accursed tyranny which we have yet learned,
physical inability to catch it. Where that morning train starts from is
a mystery; but it never fails to come for us, and it never takes us
beyond the city, I well know.

I have a clear memory of the newspapers as they were that morning. I had
a sheaf of them, for it is my melancholy business to know what each is
saying. I learned there were dark and portentous matters, not actually
with us, but looming, each already rather larger than a man’s hand. If
certain things happened, said one half the papers, ruin stared us in the
face. If those thing did not happen, said the other half, ruin stared us
in the face. No way appeared out of it. You paid your half-penny and
were damned either way. If you paid a penny you got more for your money.
Boding gloom, full-orbed, could be had for that. There was your extra
value for you. I looked round at my fellow passengers, all reading the
same papers, and all, it could be reasonably presumed, with
fore-knowledge of catastrophe. They were indifferent, every one of them.
I suppose we have learned, with some bitterness, that nothing ever
happens but private failure and tragedy, unregarded by our fellows
except with pity. The blare of the political megaphones, and the
sustained panic of the party tom-toms, have a message for us, we may
suppose. We may be sure the noise means something. So does the butcher’s
boy when the sheep want to go up a side turning. He makes a noise. He
means something, with his warning cries. The driving uproar has a
purpose. But we have found out (not they who would break up side
turnings, but the people in the second class carriages of the morning
train) that now, though our first instinct is to start in a panic, when
we hear another sudden warning shout, there is no need to do so. And
perhaps, having attained to that more callous mind which allows us to
stare dully from the carriage window though with that urgent din in our
ears, a reasonable explanation of the increasing excitement and flushed
anxiety of the great Statesmen and their fuglemen may occur to us, in a
generation or two. Give us time! But how they wish they were out of it,
they who need no more time, but understand.

I put down the papers with their calls to social righteousness pitched
in the upper register of the tea-tray, their bright and instructive
interviews with flat earthers, and with the veteran who is topically
interesting because, having served one master fifty years, and reared
thirteen children on fifteen shillings a week, he has just begun to draw
his old age pension. (There’s industry, thrift, and success, my little
dears!) One paper had a column account of the youngest child actress in
London, her toys and her philosophy, initialed by one of our younger
brilliant journalists. All had a society divorce case, with sanitary
elisions. Another contained an amusing account of a man working his way
round the world with a barrel on his head. Again, the young prince, we
were credibly informed in all the papers of that morning, did stop to
look in at a toy-shop window in Regent Street the previous afternoon. So
like a boy, you know, and yet he is a prince of course. The matter could
not be doubted. The report was carefully illustrated. The prince stood
on his feet outside the toy shop, and looked in.

To think of the future as a modestly long series of such prone mornings,
dawns unlit by heaven’s light, new days to which we should be awakened
always by these clamant cockcrows bringing to our notice what the
busy-ness of our fellows had accomplished in nests of intelligent and
fruitful china eggs, was enough to make one stand up in the carriage,
horrified, and pull the communication cord. So I put down the papers and
turned to the landscape. Had I known the Skipper was back from below the
horizon—but I did not know. So I must go on to explain that that
morning train did stop, with its unfailing regularity, and not the least
hint of reprieve, at the place appointed in the Schedule. Soon I was at
work, showing, I hope, the right eager and concentrated eye, dutifully
and busily climbing the revolving wheel like the squirrel; except,
unluckier than that wild thing so far as I know, I was clearly
conscious, whatever the speed, the wheel remained forever in the same
place. Looking up to sigh through the bars after a long spin there was
the Skipper smiling at me.

I saw an open door. I got out. It was as though the world had been
suddenly lighted, and I could see a great distance.

We stood in Fleet Street later, interrupting the tide. The noise of the
traffic came to me from afar, for the sailor was telling me he was
sailing soon, and that he was taking his vessel an experimental voyage
through the tropical forests of the Amazon. He was going to Para, and
thence up the main stream as far as Manaos, and would then attempt to
reach a point on the Madeira river near Bolivia, 800 miles above its
junction with the greater river. It would be a noble journey. They would
see Obydos and Santarem, and the foliage would brush their rigging at
times, so narrow would be the way, and where they anchored at night the
jaguars would come to drink. This to me, and I have read Humboldt, and
Bates, and Spruce, and Wallace. As I listened my pipe went out.

It was when we were parting that the sailor, who is used to far horizons
and habitually deals with affairs in a large way because his standards
in his own business are the skyline and the meridian, put to me the most
searching question I have had to answer since the city first caught and
caged me. He put it casually when he was striking a match for a cigar,
so little did he himself think of it.

“Then why,” said he, “don’t you chuck it?”

What, escape? I had never thought of that. It is the last solution which
would have occurred to me concerning the problem of captivity. It is a
credit to you and to me that we do not think of our chains so
disrespectfully as to regard them as anything but necessary and
indispensable, though sometimes, sore and irritated, we may bite at
them. As if servitude fell to our portion like squints, parents poor in
spirit, green fly, reverence for our social superiors, and the other
consignments from the stars. How should we live if not in bonds? I have
never tried. I do not remember, in all the even and respectable history
of my family, that it has ever been tried. The habit of obedience, like
our family habit of noses, is bred in the bone. The most we have ever
done is to shake our fists at destiny; and I have done most of that.

“Give it up,” said the Skipper, “and come with me.”

With a sad smile I lifted my foot heavily and showed him what had me
round the ankle. “Poo,” he said. “You could berth with the second mate.
There’s room there. I could sign you on as purser. You come.”

I stared at him. The fellow meant it. I laughed at him.

“What,” I asked conclusively, “shall I do about all this?” I waved my
arm round Fleet Street, source of all the light I know, giver of my gift
of income tax, limit of my perspective. How should I live when withdrawn
from the smell of its ink, the urge of its machinery?

“_That_,” he said. “Oh, damn that!”

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was his light tone which staggered me and not what he said. The
sailor’s manner was that of one who would be annoyed if I treated him
like a practical man, arranging miles of petty considerations and
exceptions before him, arguing for hours along rows of trifles, and
hoping the harvest of difficulties of no consequence at the end of the
argument would convince him. Indeed I know he is always impatient for
the next step in any business, and not, like most of us, for more
careful consideration. “Look there,” said the sailor, pointing to
Ludgate Circus, “see that Putney ’bus? If it takes up two more
passengers before it passes this spot then you’ve got to come.”

That made the difficulty much clearer. I agreed. The ’bus struggled off,
and a man with a bag ran at it and boarded it. One! Then it had a clear
run—it almost reached us—in another two seconds!—I began to breathe
more easily; the danger of liberty was almost gone. Then the sailor
jumped for the ’bus before it was quite level, and as he mounted the
steps, turned, and held up two fingers with a grin.

Thus was a voyage of great moment and adventure settled for me.

When I got home that night I referred to the authorities for the way to
begin an enterprise on the deep. What said Hakluyt? According to him it
is as easy as this: “Master John Hawkins, with the Jesus of Lubeck, a
ship of 700 tunnes, and the Solomon, a ship of seven score, the Tiger, a
barke of 50, and the Swalow of 30 Tunnes, being all well furnished with
men to the number of one hundred threescore and ten; as also with
ordnance and vituall requisite for such a voyage, departed out of
Plinmouth the 18 day of October in the yeere of our Lord 1564, with a
prosperous wind.”

But we all know such things were done far better in that century. Yet
Master John Hawkins, who seems to have handled a fleet with greater
facility than I do this pen now I am so anxious to scratch it across
preliminaries and get it to sea, did not come to a decision by the
number of passengers on a Putney ’bus. So I turned to a modern
authority. Yet Bates, I found, is worse than old John Hawkins, Bates
actually arrives at his destination in the first sentence. He steps
across in thirty-eight words from England to the Amazon. “I embarked at
Liverpool with Mr. Wallace, in a small trading vessel, on the 26th day
of April 1848; and, after a swift passage from the Irish Channel to the
equator arrived on the 26th of May off Salinas.”

Well, I did not. I say it is a gross deception. Voyaging does not get
accomplished in that off-hand fashion. It is a mockery to captives like
ourselves to pretend bondage is puffed away in that airy manner. It is
not so easily persuaded to disencumber us. Indeed, with this and that, I
found the initial step in the pursuit of the sunset red a heavy weight,
and hardly suited to the constitution of men who have worked into a deep
rut; but that high resolution and a faith equal to belief in the
liquefaction of St. Januarius’ blood are needed to drop the protective
routine of years, to sheer off the dear and warm entanglements of home
and friendships; to shut the front door one bleak winter evening when
the house smells comfortable and secure, and the light on the hearth,
under such circumstances, is ironic in its bright revelation of years of
ease and stability till then not fully appraised; and so depart in the
dusk for an unknown Welsh coaling port, there to board a tramp steamer
for a voyage that has some serious doubts about it, though its landfall
shall be near the line, and have palms in it. The door slammed, I
noticed, in a chill and penetrating minor, an incident of travel I have
never seen recorded.

Now do I come at last, O Liberty, my loved and secret divinity! Your
passionate pilgrim is here, late, though still young and eager eyed; yet
with his coat collar upturned for the present. Allons! the Open Road is
before him. But how the broad and empty prospects of his freedom shudder
with the dire sounds and cries of the milk churns on Paddington Station!

And next I remember black night—it was, I think, about three a.m.—and
a calamitous rain, and a Welsh railway station where I had alighted,
faint with a famine, a kit bag soon to increase in weight and drag, and
a pair of numbed feet. There was a porter who bore himself as though it
were the last day and he knew the worst, a dying station light, the wind
and rain, and me. Outside was the dark, and one of the greatest coaling
ports in the world. As I could not see the coal in great bulk I could
not admire it. The railway man turned out the light, conducted me
politely into a puddle, set my course for the docks in uncharted night
with a dexter having no convictions, and left me. I began to hate the
land of the wild bard in which I found myself for the first time, and
felt a savage satisfaction in being nearly a pure blooded London Saxon;
and as I surveyed my prospects in that country, not even the fact that I
had a grandparent named Hughes would have prevented me striking Wales
with my umbrella, for it is only a cheap one; but I had left it in the
train.

It had never occurred to me (any more than it did to you when you got
this book to learn about the tropic sea and the jungle) that the Open
Road, where the chains fall from us, would include Swansea High Street
four hours before sunrise in a steady winter downpour. But there I
discovered that trade wind seas by moonlight, flying fish, Indians, and
forests and palms, cannot be compelled. They come in their turn. They
are mixed with litter and dead stuff, like prizes in a bran tub. Going
down the drear and aqueous street it was clear that if there are exalted
moments in travel, as on the instant when we discover we really may
prepare to go, yet exaltation implies the undistinguished flats from
which, for a while, we are translated. This is a travel book for honest
men. I am still on the flat. It will be to-morrow presently.

My chief fear was that my waterproof, rattling in the wind, would alarm
silent and sleeping Swansea. I found a policeman standing at a street
corner, holding out his cape to help away the rain. He could give me no
hope. He knew where the dock was, but the way thither was difficult and
torturous. I had better follow the tram lines, and ask again, if I saw
anybody. Therefore the tram lines I followed till my portable estate, by
compound interest, had increased to untold tons; but the empty tram way
went on for ever down the rows of frozen and desolate lamps, so that I
surrendered all my chances of the seas of the tropics and the jungle of
the Brazils, and turned aside from the course which the policeman said
led to ships and the deep, entered the dark portico of a shop, where it
was only half wet, and lit my pipe, there to wait for the shy gods to
turn my luck. Hesitating footsteps fumbled to where I was hidden, and
stopped at the flash of my match. “Could yer ’blige with a light,
mister?”

He was a little elderly seaman in yellow oilskins and a so’wester. He
was rather drunk. His oilskins gathered the reflected street shine, so
that he looked phosphorescent, an old man risen wet and shining from the
ocean. He was looking for Buenos Aires, he explained, and hadn’t got any
matches. Now he, for the Plate, and I, for ultimate Amazonas, set off
down the Swansea tram lines. And the wind whined through overhead wires,
and a lost dog followed us along the empty thoroughfare where the only
sound was of waterspouts, and the elderly mariner sang bold and improper
songs, so that I wondered there was not an irruption of nightcaps at
upper Swansea windows to witness this disturbance of their usual peace.

We came at length to abandoned lagoons, where spectral ships were moored
down the marges, and round the wide waters was the loom of uncertain
monsters and buildings. Railway metals waylaid us and caught us by the
feet. There were many electric moons swaying in the gale, and they
spilled showers of broken light, which melted on the black water, and
betrayed to us our loneliness in outer night. The call of a vessel’s
syren across that inhospitable space was heard by us as the prolonged
moan of the lost.

The old man of the sea took me under a stack of timber to light his
pipe. He borrowed my box of matches, and malicious spurts of wind
extinguished each match, steadily, as mine ancient struck them. It was
now 4 a.m. He threw each bit of dead wood down, without irritation, as
though it were the fate of man to strike lights for the gods to douse,
but yet was he uplifted now beyond the hurt of cosmic mockery. The
matches were not wasted. At least they lighted up his sorrowful face as
he talked to me. I would not have had him any the less drunk, for it but
softened his facial integument, which I could see had been hardened and
set by bitter experience, masking the man; but now his jaded life,
warmed by emotion, though much of the emotion was artificial and of the
pewter born, was quick in his face again, and made him a human
responsive to his kind, instead of a sober and warped shellback with a
sour remembrance of his hardships, and of the futility of his endurance,
and of the distance away of his masters with their bowels of iron.

He had seven children, and the sea was a weary place. Had I any
children?—and God keep them if I had. He was a troublesome old man
(“that’s another light gone”) but he had just left his kids (“ah, to
hell wi’ the wind”) and he had to talk to someone about them, and that
was my rotten luck, said he. We got to the fifth child, and I heard
something about her, when the wind reached round the wood stack at us,
and snatched the last glim. So it was in the dark that I heard about the
other two and the wife, while one of my pockets filled with rain. Only
Milly, he said, was at work, and what was four pound a month for the
rest? And he was sick of the sea and chief mates, and did I think a chap
stood for a better time when he died, if he kept off drink and did his
bit without grousing, like some of the parson fellers said? Then he
indicated my ship, and disappeared in the dark. He is still waiting an
answer to his last question, which I have saved for you to give him.

For me, I was in no mood to discuss whether balm is to be got in Gilead,
when we come to the place; but stumbling among the lumber on the
deserted deck of the S.S. “Capella,” I found a cabin, fell into it, and
remember nothing more but the smell of hot bread, eggs and bacon, and
coffee, which visited me in a beautiful dream. Then I woke to the
reveille of a tin whistle, which the chief engineer was playing in my
ear; and it was daylight. The jumble of recollections of the night
before were but dark insanities. But the smell of that aromatic food, I
give grace, did not pass with the awakening, for next door I heard
lively sizzling in the galley. Already Fleet Street was hull down.

                   *       *       *       *       *

If you are used only to the methods of passenger steamers and regular
routes, then you know little of travel. You are but carried about.
Insistent clocks and schedules keep that way, and the upholstered but
rigid routine is a soporific. You never see the hither side of the
hedge. The granite countenance of fortune, her eyes filmed like frozen
pools, which keeps alert and bright the voyager who is unprotected from
her unscheduled and unmoral acts except by his own ready buckler, is
watched for you by others. You are never surprised into fear by the
unlucky position of the planets, nor moved to sing Laus Deo, when now
and then, the stars are propitious. I had been brought hastily to the
“Capella,” for it was said she was sailing instantly. This morning I
learned at breakfast that nobody knew when she could sail. Our steamer
sat two feet higher than her capacity. There was some galvanised iron to
come from Glascow, some machinery from Sheffield; and owing to labour
difficulties we were short of several hundred tons of coal. A little mob
of us, all strangers, shuffled after the Skipper’s spry heels that
morning to the Board of Trade offices, where an official mumbled over
the ship’s articles, to our shut ears, and we signed where we were told.
A more glum and unromantic group of voyagers, each man twirling his
shabby hat in his hands as he waited his turn for the corroded pen, was
never seen this side of the Elizabethan era. I became the purser of the
“Capella,” with my wages lawfully recorded at a shilling per month.

I was committed. There was no withdrawal now but desertion. And
desertion, at times, I seriously considered, because for a week more the
cargo dribbled down to us, while I endured as a moucher about those
winter docks with their coal tips, and the muddy streets with their
sailors’ slop marts, marine stores, and pawnshops having a cankered
display of chronometers, telescopes, and other flotsam of marine failure
and wreckage. Daily the quays and the dismal waterside ways with their
cheap shops were still more depressed by additional snow mush and drives
of sleet; and it was no warmth for this idler that he saw the tradesmen,
because of the season, putting holly among their oranges and wreathing
beer bottles with chains of coloured paper. The iron decks and cabins of
my new home were as chill and unfriendly as the empty grate, the marble
tables, and the tin advertisements of chemical slops of a temperance
hotel. Am I plain? Such are the conditions which compass the wayward
traveller. This is what chills one’s rapid pulse when pursuing at last
the rosy visions of boyhood. The deplorable littoral of our island
kingdom is part of a life on the ocean wave, and should help you in
coming to a decision when next you see a friendless and bestial
sailorman. It becomes necessary to declare that we shall really get down
to the tropics presently; have the courage to wait, like the crew of the
“Capella.” Our ship did sail, when she was ready.

It was the afternoon before we sailed, and having listened long enough
to my messmates, who, after dinner, weighed the probabilities of
malaria, yellow fever and other alien disasters into our coming strange
voyage, that I went into the town to take my last look round a book
shop, and to get some marine soap, dungarees, and things. Here was I at
last with my heart’s desire. On the very next day I should sail, I
myself, and no other hero, veritably Me at last, for a place not on the
chart, because the place we should find, at the journey’s end, the map
described with those words of magic: “Forest” and “Unexplored.” I made
my way round crates and barrels on that untidy deck, which had a thick
mud of coal dust and snow, to the ladder overside. Coal dust and melting
snow! But where was the uplifted heart, the radiant anticipation, as of
one to whom the future was big with treasures to be born, which are the
privilege of a young pilgrim, released from his usual obligations to
pursue far horizons in the Spanish main, while his envious fellows in
the city still cast ledgers under gas lamps? Here was another swindle of
the romanticists. You may search their warm and golden pages in vain for
coal tips, melting ice, delays, and steam heaters that will not work for
cold cabins. Down they go here, though. These gallant affairs, I
thought, as I descended the wet and gritty ladder, are much better done
before the fire at home, in your slippers; for the large scale map, as
you traverse its alluring blank areas, leaves out the conditions which
now, when I am on the actual business, precipitate as frozen spicules,
as would north winds, my warm, aerial, and cloudy enthusiasms that were
wont to be dyed such wonderful hues by sunsets, poems, and tales of old
travel. Another of these congealing draughts was now to catch me
unbuttoned. Because of our unusual destination, and the wild stories
that were told of it, we were a point of interest in Swansea docks, and
had many interviewers and curious visitors. Some of them were on the
quay then, inspecting our steamer, and as I stepped off the ladder one
turned to me.

“Mister,” he whispered, “are you going in her?”

“I am,” I said.

“O gord,” said he.

That night I met a number of my grave fellow shipmates in the town. The
question was, Should we then go back to the ship?

“What,” burst out one of us in surprise—his gold-laced cap was already
resting on his right eyebrow—“Now? Not me. Boys, don’t freeze the
Carnival. Follow me!”

We followed him. The rest of the evening is more easily given in dumb
show. There was a mechanical piano in a saloon bar, and it steadily
devoured pennies, and returned to us automatic joy, fortissimo, over
which our conversation strenuously high-stepped and vaulted. Later,
there was a search for cabs, and an engineer carried with him everywhere
two geese by their necks and sometimes trod on their loose feet. When he
did this he snatched a goose from his own grasp, and then roundly abused
us for our post-dated frivolity. We learned our steamer was now moored
in mid-dock. We found a quay wall, and at the bottom of it, at a great
depth in the dark, the level of the water was seen only because shreds
of lamp-shine floated there. We understood a boat was below, and found
it was, and we loaded it till the water brimmed at the gunwale. As we
mounted the “Capella’s” rope-ladder only one goose fell back into the
dock.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The “Capella” started in her sleep, and she woke me. She was still
trembling. Resting my hand on her I felt her heart begin to throb,
though faintly. We were off.

It was a bright morning, early and keen. Those habitual quays now were
moving past us. The decks were cleared, the carpenter and some sailors
were fixing the hatches, and the pilot, muffled in a thick white shawl,
was on the bridge with the Skipper. We stopped in the outer lock, the
exhaust humming impatiently while a pier-head jumper—for we were a
sailor short—was examined by our doctor. The Skipper had some short
words for an official who had mounted the bridge, because the third mate
had deserted, and had taken his half pay; and the official, who had
volunteered to get us a substitute, had failed. There were now but two
mates for our big tramp steamer going a long and arduous voyage which
included the navigation for some months of narrow inland waterways in
the tropics. Our first mate, passing amidships where the Purser was
leaning overside, stopped to tell me what this meant for him and the
second mate. I was mighty glad it was not the purser’s fault. I have
never heard a short speech more passionate; and his eyes were feral. Yet
it became increasingly clear to me, as the voyage lengthened, that his
eyes no more than met the case.

Out we drove at last. It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon
morning which had got lost in the year’s procession. It was a Sunday
morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a
vestal light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this
trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous rays
had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still was regarding
us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and
eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your ambassador while you
still slept, and betrayed not, I hope, any greyness and bleared satiety
of ours to its pure, frail, and lucid regard. That was the last good
service I did before leaving you quite. I was glad to see how well our
old earth did meet such a light, as though it had no difficulty in
looking day in the face. The world was miraculously renewed. It rose,
and received the new-born of Aurora in its arms. There was clouds of
pearl above hills of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames. The
shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we rolled. The breakfast
bell rang not too soon. This was a right beginning.

The pilot was dropped, and a course was shaped to pass between Lundy and
Hartland. A strong northwester and its seas caught us beyond the
Mumbles, and the quality of the sunshine thinned to a flickering stuff
which cast only grey shadows. The “Capella” became quarrelsome, and
began to strike the seas heavily. You may know the “Capella” when you
see her. She is a modern three-thousand-ton freighter, with derrick
supports fore and aft, and a funnel; and the three of them are so
fearful of seeming rakish that they overdo the effect of stern utility,
and appear to lean ahead. She is a three-island ship, the amidships
section carrying the second mate’s cabin, and the cabins of the four
engineers, all of them, excepting the Chief’s cabin, looking outwards
overseas across a narrow sheltered alleyway; and on a narrower
athwartship’s alleyway there, and opening astern, are the Chief’s place,
and the cook’s galley, the entrance to the engine-room, and the
engineers’ messroom. Above this structure is the boat deck. You may
reach the poop, which contains the master’s and chief mate’s quarters,
the doctor’s and steward’s berths, and the saloon, by descending a
perpendicular iron ladder to the long main deck, or else, as all did at
sea, by a flying trestle bridge, which is dismantled when in port. Her
black funnel is relieved by a cryptic design in white, and her bows are
so bluff that, as the chief mate put it, “her belly begins there.” She
might not take your eye, but a shipowner would see her points. She
carries a large cargo on a comparatively low registered tonnage. The
money that built her went mostly in hull and engines, and the latter do
their work as sweetly as an eight-day clock, giving ten and a half
knots, weather permitting, on a low coal consumption. There was not much
money left, therefore, for balm in the cabins, and that is the reason we
do not find it there.

At sundown the sky cleared. The wind, increased in violence, had swept
it of the last feather. Lundy was over our starboard bow, a small dark
blot in a clear yellow light which poured, with the gale and the rising
seas, from the west. The glass was falling. Now, the Skipper has often
told me how his “Capella” had faced hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, when
laden with ore, and had kept her decks dry. There are other stories
about her surprising buoyancy, when deeply laden, and I have heard them
all at home, and they are fine stories. But what lies they are! For
there below me, with Lundy not even passed, and the Bay of Biscay to
come (Para not to be thought of yet) were tons and tons of salt wash
that could not get time to escape by the scuppers, but plunged wearily
amongst the hatches and winches.

“I’ve never seen her as dirty as this,” grumbled the chief engineer
apologetically, peeping from his cabin at cold green water lopping over
casually on to the after deck. “It’s that patent fuel—its stowed wrong.
Now she’ll roll—you can feel it—the cat she is, she’s never going to
stop. It’s that patent fuel and her new load line.”

Certainly she sat close to the sea. I had never seen so much lively
water so close. She wallowed, she plunged, she rolled, she sank heavily
to its level. I looked out from the round window of the Chief’s cabin,
and when she inclined those green mounds of the swell swinging under us
and away were superior, in apparition, to my outlook.

“Listen to it,” said the Chief. He stopped triturating some shavings of
hard tobacco between his huge palms, and sat quietly, hands clasped, as
though in prayer. The surge mourned over the deck. The day, too, was
growing towards the dusky hours of retrospection. That sombre monody
outside was like the tremor and boom of the drums funebre. “That chap
some of you talk about—Lloyd George!”—said the Chief, suddenly rubbing
his tobacco again with energy. (Good God, I thought, and here we are at
sea too. Now what has the misguided man done.) “If I had him here I’d
hold him down in that wash on deck till it cleared. Then he’d know. He
put it there, to break sailors’ legs. This steamer, she had dry decks
till her load line was altered. She carries more now than she was built
for, two hundred tons more. If I had him here—but there you are!
Popularity! There’s a fine popular noise for you, isn’t it? Sailors
growled for better food. ‘What about this improved food scale?’ says Mr.
Lloyd George to the shipowners. ‘Oh,’ said they, ‘we’ll give ’em better
food, the drunken insubordinate dogs, if you’ll make overloading legal.’
‘Why,’ says Lord George, ‘then it wouldn’t be illegal, would it?’ So it
was done. What does the public know about a ship’s buoyancy? Nothing.
But it understands food. So the clever man heightens the Plimsoll mark,
adds a million or so to shipowners’ capital by dipping his pen in the
ink, and gives Jack more jam. What you want ashore,” the Chief added
bitterly, “is not more voters, as some say, but more lunatic asylums.”

Though I had left politics at home, to be settled by others, like the
trouble with the drains, the dog licence, and the dispute about the
garden fence, I glanced with interest at the Chief. I know him well. Not
only is he a kindly man, but he himself is also a philosophic rebel. But
his eye was hard, and he still ground the tobacco with forgetful energy,
us though an objectionable thing were between his strong hands. Then
impatiently he threw the tobacco loose on his log book, which was open
on his deck, paused, and said, “Ah, maybe the man thought a little
freeboard the less didn’t matter. God give him grace,” and picked his
flute out of a bookshelf which was fastened above his bunk; sat down
over the steam heater, and broke out like a blackbird. Yet was it a
well-remembered air he fluted so well. I listened so long as respect for
the artist demanded, then rose, filled my pipe from the fragrant grains
on the log book, and left him. Presently I would listen to such airs;
but this was too soon.

I repeat I had confidence in the “Capella” to gain. I went forward to
get it, mounting the bridge, where my cabin mate, the youthful second
officer, was in charge, in his oilskins. A cheerful sight he looked. “I
think,” said he briskly, “we’re going to catch it.” He was puckering his
face over our course. Lundy was looming large—even Rat Island was
plain—but it looked so frail in that flood of seas, wind, and wild
yellow light streaming together from the evening west, that I looked for
the unsubstantial island to spring suddenly from its foundations, and to
come down on us a stretched wisp of thinned and ragged smoke. The sea
was adrift from its old confines. The flood was pouring past, and the
wind was the drainage of interstellar space. Lundy was the last delicate
fragment of land. It still fronted the upheaval and rush of the
ungoverned elements, but one looked for it to be swept away.

Yet that wild and scenic west, of such pallor and clarity that one
shrank from facing its inhospitable spaciousness, with each shape of a
wave there, black against the light as it reared ahead, a distinct
individual foe in the host moving to the attack, was but the prelude.
Night and the worst were to come. Just then, while the last of the light
was shining on the officer’s oilskins, I was only surprised that our
bulk was such a trifle after all. Our loaded vessel looked so bluff and
massive when in dock. She began to attempt, off Lundy, the spring and
jauntiness of a trawler. The bows sank to the rails in an acre of white,
and the spume flew past the bridge like rain. The black bows lifted and
swayed, buoyant on submarine upheavals, to cut out segments of the
sunset; then sank again into dark hollows where the foam was luminous.
The cold and wind were bitter dolours.

We rolled. I grasped the rail of the weather cloth, in the drive of wind
and spume, and rode down on our charger like a valiant man; like a
valiant man who is uncertain of his seat. Something like a valiant man.
We advanced to the attack, masts and funnel describing great arcs, and
steadily our bows shouldered away the foe. I think sailors deserve large
monies. Being the less valiant—for the longer I watched, the more grew
I wet and cold—it came to my mind that where we were, but a few weeks
before, another large freighter had her hatches opened by the seas, and
presently was but a trace of oil and cinders on the waters. You will
remember I am on my first long voyage. The officer was quite cheerful
and asked me if I knew Forest Gate. There were, he said, some fine girls
at Forest Gate.

We rounded Hartland. It was dusk, the weather was now directly on our
starboard beam, and the waves were coming solidly inboard. The main deck
was white with plunging water. We rolled still more.

“I can’t make out why you left London when you didn’t have to,” said the
grinning sailor. “I’d like to be on the Stratford tram, going down to
Forest Gate.”

This was nearly as bad as the Chief’s flute. I held up two fingers over
those hatches of ours, called silently on blessed Saint Anthony, who
loves sailors, and went down the ladder; for night had come, and the
prospect from the “Capella” was not the less apprehensive to the mind of
a landsman because the enemy could not be seen, except as flying ghosts.
The noises could be heard all right.

I shut my heavy teak door amidships, shut out the daunting uproar of
floods, and the sensation that the night was collapsing round our
heaving ship. There was a home light far away, on some unseen Cornish
headland, rising and falling like a soaring but tethered star. Nor did I
want the lights of home.

“I love the sea,” a beautiful woman once said to me. (We, then, stood
looking out over it from a height, and the sea was but the sediment of
the still air, the blue precipitation of the sky, for it was that
restful time, early October. I also loved it then.)

I was thinking of this, when the concrete floor of the cabin nearly
became a wall, and I fell absurd-wise, striking nearly every item in the
cabin. Was this the way to greet a lover? Sitting on a sea-chest, and
swaying to and fro because the ship compelled me to a figure of woe, I
began to consider whether it was only the books about the sea which I
had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself. Perhaps it is better not to
live with it, if you would love it. The sea is at its best at London,
near midnight, when you are within the arms of a capacious chair, before
a glowing fire, selecting phases of the voyages you will never make. It
is wiser not to try to realise your dreams. There are no real dreams.
For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will
never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was
married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of human
kind and understandable, and so the springs of its behaviour are hidden.
The sea does not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute and dark
desolation is not raised to overwhelm you; you disappear then because
you happen to be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune, and
drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. Yet, thought I, that
night off Cornwall, if I pray now as one of the privileged and lucky
foolish, this very occasion may prove to be set apart for the sole use
of the calculating wise. Because that is the way things happen at sea.
What else may we expect from It, the nameless thing, new-born with each
dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me had it degenerated into its
mood of old night, behaving as it did in the lightless days, before
poetry came to change it with flattery. It was again as inhuman as when
the poet was merely a wonderfully potential blob on a warm mudbank.

Here, you see, is the whole trouble in appealing to Omnipotence. Picture
me entering the wide western ocean at night, an inconspicuous but
self-important morsel sitting on a sea-chest, at a time when it was
perhaps ordained that hundreds of ships should have anxious passages.
(Afterwards I learned very many ships did have anxious passages.) How
could I expect to be spared, even though somewhere the hairs of my head
were all numbered? It is plain that to spare me would be to extend
beneficence to all. There only remained to me my liberty to hope that
our particular steamer might miss all seventh waves, by luck. I was free
to do that.

I turned up the dull and stinking oil lamp, and tried to read; but that
fuliginous glim haunted the pages. That black-edged light too much
resembled my own thoughts made manifest. There were some bunches of my
cabin mate’s clothes hanging from hooks, and I watched their erratic
behaviour instead. The water in the carafe was also interesting, because
quite mad, standing diagonally in the bottle, and then reversing. A lump
of soap made a flying leap from the washstand, and then slithered about
the floor like something hunted and panic-stricken. I listened to
numerous little voices. There was no telling their origins. There was a
chorus in the cabin, rustlings, whispers, plaints, creaks, wails, and
grunts; but they were foundered in the din when the spittoon, which was
an empty meat tin, got its lashings loose, and began a rioting fandango
on the concrete. Over the clothes chest, which was also our table and a
cabin fixture, was a portrait of the mate’s sweetheart, and on its frame
was one of my busy little friends the cockroaches; for the mate and I do
not sleep alone in this cabin, not by hundreds. The cockroach stood in
thought, waving his hands interrogatively, as one who talks to himself
nervously. The ship at that moment received a seventh wave, lurched, and
trembled. The cockroach fell. I rose, listening. I felt sure a new
clamour would begin at once, showing we had reached another and critical
stage of the fight. But no; the brave heart of her was beating as
before. I could feel its steady pulse throbbing in our table. We were
alive and strong, though labouring direfully.

It was when I was thinking whether bed would be, as I have so often
found it, the best answer to doubt, that I heard a boatswain’s pipe.

I fought one side of the door, and the wind fought the other. My hurry
to open the door was great, but the obstinate wind jammed it firmly.
Without warning the wind released its hold, the ship fell over to
windward, the door flew open, and forth I went, clutching at the driving
dark. Then up sailed my side of the ship, and the door shut with the
sound of gunfire. I had never experienced such insensate violence. These
were the unlawful noises and movements of chaos. Hanging to a rail, I
was puzzling out which was the fore and which the rear of the ship, when
a flying lump of salt water struck me in the face just as a figure (I
thought it was the chief officer) hurried past me bawling “All hands.”

The figure came back. “That you, purser? Number three hatch has gone,”
it said, and disappeared instantly.

So. Then this very thing had come to me, and at night! Our hatches were
adrift. It was impossible. Why, we had only just left Swansea. It could
not be true; it was absurdly unfair. This was my first long voyage, and
it had only just begun. I stood like the cricketer who is out for a
duck.

If I could tell you how I felt, I would. Somebody was shouting
somewhere, but his words were cut off at once by the wind and blown
away. I felt my way along a wet and dark iron alleyway which was giddily
unstable, pressing hard against my feet, and then falling from under me.
I got round by the engine-room entrance. Small gleams, shavings of
light, were escaping from seams in the unseen structure, but they showed
nothing, except a length of wet rail or a scrap of wet deck. The ship
itself was a shade, manned by voices.

I could not see that anything was being done. Were they allowing her to
fill up like an open barge? I became aware my surcharged feelings were
escaping by my knees, which kept knocking in their tremors against a
lower rail. I tried to stop this trembling by hardening my muscles, but
my fearful legs had their own way. Yet it is plain there was nothing to
fear. I told my legs so. Had we not but that day left Swansea? Besides,
I had already commenced a letter which was to be posted at Para. The
letter would have to be posted. They were waiting for it at home.

Somewhere below me a heavy mass of water plunged monstrously, and became
a faintly luminous cloud over all the main deck aft, actually framing
the rectangular form of the deck in the night. It was unreasonable. I
was not really one of the crew either, though on the articles. I was
there by chance. No advantage should be taken of that. A torrent poured
down the athwartships alleyway, and nearly swept me from my feet.

One could not watch what was happening. That was another cruel
injustice. The wind and sea could be heard, and the ship could be felt.
But how could I be expected to know what to do in the dark in such
circumstances? There ought to be a light. This should have happened in
the daytime. My garrulous knees struck the lower rail violently in their
excitement. I leaned over the rail, shading my eyes. I grew savagely
indignant with something having no name and no shape. I cannot even now
give a name to the thing that angered me, but can just discern, in the
twilight which shrouds the undiscovered, a vast calm face the rock of
which no human emotion can move, with eyes that stare but see nothing,
and a mouth that never speaks, and ears from which assailing cries and
questions fall as mournful echoes, ironic repetitions. This flung stone
falls from it, as unavailing as your prayers; but we shall never cease
to pray and fling stones, alternately, up there into the twilight.

Nevertheless, when the chief, with his hurricane lamp, found me, he says
I was smiling. The youth who was our second mate ran up and stood by us,
the better to shout to the deck below. He shouted, bending over the
rail, till he was screaming through hoarseness. He turned to us
abruptly. “They don’t understand a word I say,” he cried in despair.
“There isn’t a sailor or an Englishman in the crowd, the —— German
farmers.” This, I found afterwards, was nearly true. These men had been
signed on at a Continental port. It was really our Dutch cook who saved
us that night. It was the cook who first saw the hatch covers going.

The ship’s head had been put to the seas to keep the decks as clear as
possible, and being now more accustomed to the gloom I could make out
the men below busy at the hatch. Most conspicuous among them was the
cook, who had taken charge there, and he, with three languages,
bludgeoned into surprising activity the inexperienced youngsters who
were learning for the first time what happens to a ship when the
carpenter’s chief job on leaving port has its defects discovered by
exceptional weather. They were wading through swirling waters as they
worked, and once a greater wave sprang bodily over them, and when the
hatch showed through the foam again some of the men had gone as though
dissolved. But it was found they had kept the right side of the
bulwarks, and the elderly carpenter, whose leg had got wedged in a
winch, was the only one damaged.

If you ask me when I shall be pleased to allow the necessary sun to rise
upon this narrative to give it a little warmth, then I must tell you it
cannot be done till we have fastened down the “Capella’s” number two
hatch, at least. That hatch has gone now, and if hatches one and four
give way while number two is getting attention from the weary, soaked,
and frozen crowd which has just had an hour’s desperate work at number
three, then I fear the sun will never rise on this narrative. (How Bates
got over to his wonderful blue butterflies in those forest paths under a
tropical sun in thirty-eight words I do not know. He must have been
thinking of nothing but his butterflies. I cannot do it, with the seas
and the ship keeping my mind so busy.)

Luckily, the other hatches kept staunch. We were watertight again. When
the Old Man, the Chief, the Doctor, and the Purser, gathered late that
night in the Chief’s cabin to see what it was he had secreted in his
cupboard, and boasted of, we sat where we could, being comfortably
crowded, and I never knew tobacco could taste like that. I felt as if
never before had I found such large leisure for extracting its full
flavour. From being suddenly confined within a space which gave me a
short outlook of a few hours, I was presently released into the open
again and of what might remain to me of the usual gift of ample years. I
had all that time to smoke in. Never did a pipe taste so sweet. It is
idle for good and serious souls to think me graceless here with this
talk of tobacco immediately after such a release. Let me tell them my
sacrificial smoke rose up straight and accepted. Looking through the
smoke I saw clearly how worthy, kind, and lovable were the faces of my
comrades. I warmed to this voyage for the first time; as though, after a
test, I had been initiated. This was the place for me, with men like
these about me, and such great affairs to be met. I revelled in the
thought of our valorous bluff, insignificant as we were in that malign
desolation, sundered from our kind.

“Chief,” said the Old Man, “it was my department that time. None of your
old engines did it.”

“You’ve got a good cook,” said the Chief, “I saw that.” Then the Chief,
remembering something, turned in his seat to the picture hanging above
his desk of a smiling and handsome matron. “Here’s luck, old girl,” he
said, holding up his glass; “you can still send me some letters.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

The Chief, in case of an emergency, slept in his clothes that night on
the settee, and I climbed into his bunk. What a comfortable outline the
man had, as he lay on his broad back, mildly snoring. There was a tangle
of tense hair over a square copper coloured forehead. A long experience
of such nights was written in many lines on that brow, and was shown in
that indifferent snoring while chaos was without. The nose sprang out of
the big face like an ejaculation, and beneath it was a moustache clipped
short to show the red of the upper lip. The jaw was powerful, but its
curves made it friendly. His body and limbs hid the settee and had a
margin over. I quite believed what I had been told of his successful way
with refractory stokers. There was confidence to be got from a mere look
at that slumbering Jovian form. The storm assailed its hairy and fleshy
ears in vain. I braced my knees against the bulkhead to keep myself
still, the rolling was so violent, and went to sleep ... waking to find
us on a level keel; and was deceived into thinking the parallel lines of
grey and gold in the upper air, seen as a picture framed by the port,
were the heights about; a harbour into which we had run for shelter; but
it was only cloudland over the western ocean. The stillness, too, was
but a short reprieve. The wind was merely making a detour, to spring at
us from another quarter.

The sun died at birth. The wind we had lost we found again as a gale
from the south-east. The waters quickly increased again, and by noon the
saloon was light and giddy with the racing of the propeller. I moved
about like an infant learning to walk. We were 201 miles from the
Mumbles, course S.W. 1/2W.; it was cold, and I was still looking for the
pleasures of travel. The Doctor came to introduce himself, like a good
man, and tried me with such things as fevers, Shaw, Brazilian
entomology, the evolution of sex, the medical profession under
socialism, the sea and the poets. But my thoughts were in retreat, with
the black dog in full cry. It was too cold and damp to talk even of sex.
When my oil lamp began to throw its rays of brown smell, the Doctor,
tired of the effort to exalt the sour dough which was my mind, left me.
It was night. O, the sea and the poets!

By next morning the gale, now from the south-west, like the seas, was
constantly reinforced with squalls of hurricane violence. The Chief put
a man at the throttle. In the early afternoon the waves had assumed
serious proportions. They soared by us in broad sombre ranges, with
hissing white ridges, an inhospitable and subduing sight. They were a
quite different tribe of waves from the volatile and malicious natives
of the Bristol Channel. Those channel waves had no serried ranks in the
attack; they were but a horde of undisciplined savages, appearing to
assault without design or plan, but getting at us as they could,
depending on their numbers. The waves in the channel were smaller folk,
but more athletic, and very noisy; they appeared to detach themselves
from the sea, and to leap at us, shouting.

These western ocean waves had a different character. They were the sea.
We did not have a multitude of waves in sight, but the sea floor itself
might have been undulating. The ocean was profoundly convulsed. Our
outlook was confined to a few heights and hollows, and the moving
heights were swift, but unhurried and stately. Your alarm, as you saw a
greater hill appear ahead, tower, and bear down, had no time to get more
than just out of the stage of surprise and wonder when the “Capella’s”
bows were pointing skyward on a long up-slope of water, the broken
summit of which was too quick for the “Capella”—the bows disappeared in
a white explosion, a volley of spray, as hard as shot, raked the bridge,
the foredeck filled with raging water, and the wave swept along our run,
dark, severe, and immense; with so little noise too; with but a faint
hissing of foam, as in a deliberate silence. The “Capella” then began to
run down a valley.

The engines were reduced to half speed; it would have been dangerous to
drive her at such seas. Our wet and slippery decks were bleak,
windswept, and deserted. The mirror of water on the iron surfaces,
constantly renewed, reflected and flashed the wild lights in the sky as
she rolled and pitched, and somehow those reflections from her polish
made the steamer seem more desolate and forlorn. Not a man showed
anywhere on the vessel’s length, except merely to hurry from one vantage
to another—darting out of the ship’s interior, and scurrying to another
hole and vanishing abruptly, like a rabbit.

The gale was dumb till it met and was torn in our harsh opposition,
shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed
our iron into its ponderable body. You could imagine the flawless flood
of air pouring silently express till it met our pillars and pinnacles,
and then flying past rift, the thousand punctures instantly spreading
into long shrieking lacerations. The wounds and mouths were so many,
loud, and poignant, that you wondered you could not see them. Our
structure was full of voices, but the weighty body which drove against
our shrouds and funnel guys, and kept them strongly vibrating, was
curiously invisible. The hard jets of air spurted hissing through the
winches. The sound in the shrouds and stays began like that of something
tearing, and rose to a high keening. The deeper notes were amidships, in
the alleyways and round the engine-room casing; but there the ship
itself contributed a note, a metallic murmur so profound that it was
felt as a tremor rather than heard. It was almost below human hearing.
It was the hollow ship resonant, the steel walls, decks, and bulkheads
quivering under the drumming of the seas, and the regular throws of the
crank-shaft far below.

It was on this day the “Capella” ceased to be a marine engine to me. She
was not the “Capella” of the Swansea docks, the sea waggon squatting low
in the water, with bows like a box, and a width of beam which made her
seem a wharf fixture. To-day in the Atlantic her bluff bows rose to meet
the approaching bulk of each wave with such steady honesty, getting up
heavily to meet its quick wiles, it is true, but often with such success
that we found ourselves perched at a height above the gloom of the
hollow seas, getting more light and seeing more world; though sometimes
the hill-top was missed; she was not quick enough, and broke the
inflowing ridge with her face. She behaved so like a brave patient thing
that now her portrait, which I treasure, is to me that of one who has
befriended me, a staunch and homely body who never tired in faithful
well-doing. She became our little sanctuary, especially near dayfall,
with those sombre mounts close round us bringing twilight before its
time.

Your glance caught a wave passing amidships as a heaped mass of polished
obsidian, having minor hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal
fractures in its glass. It rose directly and acutely from your feet to a
summit that was awesome because the eye travelled to it over a long and
broken up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to obscure thirty
degrees of light; and the imagination shrank from contemplating water
which over-shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk toppling in
collapse. The steamer leaning that side, your face was quite close to
the beginning of the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a
vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried far but plain in its
translucent deeps. It passed; and the light released from the sky
streamed over the “Capella” again as your side of her lifted in the
roll, the sea falling down her iron wall as far as the bilge. The
steamer spouted violently from her choked valve, as it cleared the sea,
like a swimmer who battles, and then gets his mouth free from a smother.

Her task against those head seas and the squalls was so hard and
continuous that the murmur of her heart, which I fancied grew louder
almost to a moaning when her body sank to the rails, the panic of her
cries when the screw raced, when she lost her hold, her noble and
rhythmic labourings, the sense of her concentrated and unremitting power
given by the smoke driving in violence from her swaying funnel, the
cordage quivering in tense curves, the seas that burst in her face as
clouds, falling roaring inboard then to founder half her length, she
presently to raise her heavy body slowly out of an acre of foam, the
cascades streaming from her in veils,—all this was like great music. I
learned why a ship has a name. It is for the same reason that you and I
have names. She has happenings according to her own weird. She shows
perversities and virtues her parents never dreamed into the plans they
laid for her. Her heredity cannot be explained by the general chemics of
iron and steel and the principles of the steam engine; but something
counts in her of the moods of her creators, both of the happy men and
the sullen men whose bright or dark energies poured into her rivets and
plates as they hammered, and now suffuse her body. Something of the
“Capella” was revealed to me, “our” ship. She was one for pride and
trust. She was slow, but that slowness was of her dignity and size; she
had valour in her. She was not a light yacht. She was strong and hard,
taking heavy punishment, and then lifting her broad face over the seas
to look for the next enemy. But was she slow? She seemed but slow. The
eye judged by those assailing hills, so vast and whelmingly quick. The
hills were so dark, swift, and great, moving barely inferior to the
clouds which travelled with them, the collapsing roof which fell over
the seas, flying with the same impulse as the waters. There was the
uplifted ocean, and pressing down to it, sundered from it only by the
gale—the gale forced them apart—the foundered heavens, a low ceiling
which would have been night itself but that it was thinned in patches by
some solvent day. And our “Capella,” heavy as was her body, and great
and swift as were the hills, never failed to carry us up the long
slopes, and over the white summits which moved down on us like the
marked approach of catastrophe. If one of the greater hills but hit us,
I thought——

One did. Late that afternoon the second mate, who was on watch, saw such
a wave bearing down on us. It was so dominantly above us that
instinctively he put his hand in his pocket for his whistle. It was his
first voyage in an ocean steamer; he was not long out of his
apprenticeship in “sails,” and so he did not telegraph to stop the
engines. The Skipper looked up through the chart-room window, saw the
high gloom of this wave over us, and jumped out for the bridge ladder to
get at the telegraph himself. He was too late.

We went under. The wave stopped us with the shock of a grounding, came
solid over our fore-length, and broke on our structure amidships. The
concussion itself scattered things about my cabin. When the “Capella”
showed herself again the ventilators had gone, the windlass was damaged,
and the iron ends of the drum on the forecastle head, on which a steel
hawser was wound, had been doubled on themselves, like tinfoil.

By day these movements of water on a grand scale, the harsh and deep
noises of gale and breaking seas, and the labouring of the steamer, no
more than awed me. At least, my sight could escape. But courage went
with the light. At dusk, the eye, which had the liberty during the hours
of light to range up the inclines of the sea to distant summits, and
note that these dangers always passed, was imprisoned by a dreadful
apparition. When there was more night than day in the dusk you saw no
waves. You saw, and close at hand, only vertical shadows, and they
swayed noiselessly without progressing on the fading sky high over you.
I could but think the ocean level had risen greatly, and was see-sawing
much superior to us all round. The “Capella” remained then in a
precarious nadir of the waters. Looking aft from the Chief’s cabin I
could see of our ship only the top of our mainmast, because that
projected out of the shadow of the hollow into the last of the day
overhead; and often the sheer apparitions oscillating around us swung
above the truck of it, and the whole length vanished. The sense of
onward movement ceased because nothing could be seen passing us. At dusk
the steamer appeared to be rocking helplessly in a narrow sunken place
which never had an outlet for us; the shadows of the seas erect over us
did not move away, but their ridges pitched at changing angles.

You know the Sussex chalk hills at evening, just at that time when, from
the foot of them, they lose all detail but what is on the skyline,
become an abrupt plane before you of unequal height. That was the view
from the “Capella,” except that the skyline moved. And when we passed a
barque that evening it looked as looks a solitary bush far on the summit
of the downs. The barque did not pass us; we saw it fade, and the height
it surmounted fade, as shadows do when all light has gone. But where we
saw it last a green star was adrift and was ranging up and down in the
night.

This was the dark time when, struggling from amidships to the poop, you
knew there was something organised and coherent under you, still a
standing place in chaos, only because you could feel it there. And this
was the time to seek your fellows in the saloon, where there was light,
warmth, sane and familiar things, and dinner. The “Capella’s” saloon was
fairly large, and the Skipper’s pride. It was panelled in maple and oak,
with a long settee at the foreward end upholstered in red velvet, the
velvet protected by a calico cover. A brass oil lamp with an opaline
shade hung over the table from a beam beneath the skylight. There was a
closed American stove, with a rigorously polished brass flue running up
through the deck. On two oak sideboards in corners of the saloon some
artificial plants blossomed; from single stems each plant blossomed into
flowers of aniline dyes and of different species. One of these plants,
an imitation palm, and a better imitation of life than the others, was
carefully watered throughout the voyage by the steward till it wilted
into corruption and an offence, and became a count against the steward
which the skipper never forgave, for he thought his floral ornaments
lovely. When a pretty Brazilian lady visitor at Itacoatiara admired the
magenta rays of one blossom, he culled it for her (five earnest minutes
with a sharp knife, for there was wire behind the green bark) more as a
sacrifice and a hard duty than a joy, and often spoke of it afterwards,
shaking his head regretfully.

Ah! that saloon. I remember it first, shiny, cold, and repellent, with a
handful of fire to its wide capacity for draughts, in the northern seas.
It had curious marine odours then, with which I was not friendly till
long after, odours that lamps, burnished brass, newly polished wood,
food, and the steward’s storeroom behind it, never fully accounted for;
and I remember it as I found it in the still heat of the Amazon, when it
had the air of an oven; when, writing in it, the sweat ran off the
fingers to soil the paper, strange insects crawling everywhere on its
green baize table cover, and banging against its lamp. I remember it
assiduously now, every trivial feature of it, and the men, now scattered
over all the world, thrown together in it then for a spell to make the
most of each other. It has the indelible impress of a room of that house
where first the interest in existence awakened in us.

The Skipper, with stove behind him, took his seat before the soup tureen
at the head of the table. You would as soon think of altering the
chart-room clock, even were it wrong, as of touching the soup tureen
without the Skipper’s orders. It is his duty and his right to serve the
soup, and to call the steward to inform him the density of the
vegetables in it is too heavy. We have no market garden on board, you
know.

The Doctor was on the Skipper’s right hand, and the Purser next to the
Doctor, and on the opposite side, the chief mate. There was the plump
and bald-headed German steward, in white apron, the lid of one eye
heavier than the other, serving us in his shirt sleeves, sometimes
sucking his teeth with a noticeable click when he knew a dish deserved
our approval. You kept the soup in the plate by holding it off the table
and watching its tides. When her stern sailed up, and the screw raced,
the glass shade of the lamp, being a misfit, took our eyes to watch the
coming smash; the soup then poured over you, and trying to push your
chair back from the mess, you found the chair was a fixture on the
floor. This last fact was never remembered. I should try to push my
“Capella” chair back now, if I were sitting in it.

The Doctor, who had been long enough tinkering careless bodies to have
grown a little worn and grizzled, was often removed from us by a faint
but impervious hauteur, though maybe he was only a little better and
differently dressed. He was a patient listener, but his eyes could be
droll. The Doctor’s chuckle, escaping from his thoughts while he was
unguarded, would sometimes make the captain look up from a narrative
with question and a trace of resentment in his glance. The captain was a
great traveller, but he was puzzled to find the memory of our surgeon
following him to the most remote and unfamiliar strands. “Now how did
that fellow come to be at a place like that?” the captain would whisper
to me afterwards. “Can’t make him out. Who is he?” The surgeon had a
bottomless fund of short stories, to which he would sometimes go about
the time when we were pushing away the banana skins and nutshells. He
had an elusive and stimulating method with them. He knew his work. At
the end of one the captain would explain the fun to the seriously
interested mate (who had leaned forward to learn), placing spoons and
crumbs to demonstrate the main points. Then the mate, too, would join us
with his happy laugh. The late and giddy laughter of the mate, when he
also arrived, became a welcome feature of a yarn by the surgeon. We
expected it. The mate’s own stories were usually bawdy; he always
prefaced them with some unmanageable hilarity, which impeded his start.

Mate (_pushing over his plate for soup_). That big wave washed out the
men’s berths, sir.

Captain. Then it did some good. The dirty brutes.

Mate. Heard the men grumbling to-night. Said we’ll never get the hawsers
to run out with them bugs in the hawse pipes. Say the bugs don’t belong
to them, sir—ship’s property.

Doctor. Any this end of the ship, captain? Good Lord!

Captain. Not a bug. And if there’s any for’ard the men brought ’em. No
bugs in my ship. Never saw one in my cabin.

Mate (_making a confused effort to master his emotion, not to spill his
soup, and to be respectful_). Te-he! you will, sir, Te-he! (_Realises he
may not laugh, but suffers internally._)

Captain (_indicates an interrogation with frightful eyes and guttural
noises_).

Mate (_controls himself by concentrating on a fork_). Well, sir—I’m
just telling you—I heard it said the men annoyed with bugs—some of ’em
said seein’s believin’—said they had enough for everybody. (_His voice
breaks into a stifled falsetto_) So they emptied a match—match—they
emptied a match box full down your ventilator this morning.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The captain would frequently keep his seat in the saloon after dinner
till he had finished his cigar, and in the vein, would put a leg over
the arm of his chair, which he had pushed back (his chair was cushioned,
and was not a fixture), and frowning at his cigar, as if for defects,
would voyage again his early seas. I suppose a sailor would call our
skipper a hard case. He was an elderly man, tall, spare, and meagrely
bearded. His eyes were set close into a knife-like nose, and they were
opaque and bright, like two blue stones under a forehead which narrowed
and tightened into a small shiny cranium. There were tufts of grey wool
above his temples. No light came through his eyes to make them limpid,
except when he was fondling Tinker, the dog. They shone from the
surface, giving him a look of peering and intent suspicion. The skin of
his face, neck and hands, now worked a little loose, was so steeped in
the tincture of sunshine that it had preserved an unctious child-like
quality. His dress and habits betrayed an appreciation of his own
person. He kept his own medicines.

I guessed he would have a ruthless process in an emergency; he would
identify the success and safety of the ship with his own. He laughed
from his mouth only, throwing his head back, showing surprisingly
perfect teeth, and laughter did not change the crystalline glitter of
his eyes. There was something alien and startling in his merriment. As
though his own mind were too cold for him at times he would seek out me,
or the chief, to find warmth in an argument. He would irritate us into a
disputation; and though he was a choleric man, quick at opposition, yet
his vocabulary then was flinty and sparse. It stuck, and was delivered
with pain. You could think of him labouring at his views of men and
affairs with a creaking slate pencil. He set one’s teeth. But he was a
sailor, cautious and bold, with a knowledge of ships and the sea that
was a mine to me. Let me say that, during the voyage, I found him busy
making a canvas cot. He sat on the poop and worked there, bent and
patient as a seamstress, for days. With a judgment made too readily I
believed he was, naturally, making it for his own comfort, against the
heat of the river. When it was finished he was rolling up his ball of
yarn, surveying his job, and he said, mumbling and shy, that the cot was
for me.

The Skipper, on this day that our decks were swept, swore about the men
and the bugs during dinner, muttered with foreboding about the glass,
which was still falling, and the coals, which were being burnt to no
purpose. We were hardly doing more than holding our place on our course.
The saloon was delirious, and when she flung up her heels, the varied
noises rose with the racing propeller to a crescendo of furious
castenets. The mate let us. The Skipper sat glooming, eyeing his cigar
resentfully, his leg over the arm of his chair. The Doctor was swaying
with the ship, weary and forlorn. Tinker had an appeal in his eyes, and
made timorous noises. The Purser wondered why he was there at all, and
blamed his silly dreams. The night boomed without. What a night!

Skipper. If this southerly wind goes round to the west and north, look
out. I saw porpoises to-day too.

Doctor. When are we due at Para?

Skipper. Huh! What’s this talk of Para? You wait. All this talk about
when we shall get there’s no good.... Now in those Newfoundland
schooners where I served my time—I wouldn’t have no talk in them about
getting anywhere. Seems as if somebody heard. You always run into it.
There was the “Lizzie Polwith.” She was about 80 tons. Those west
country schooners in the fish trade are never more than 100 tons, else
they’d have to carry more than a master and one mate. I was her master,
and a kid of eighteen. We left Falmouth for Cadiz. Now look what
happened. My mate was old Tregenna. He was a regular misery. I never
knew such a dead homer, not so much as he was, always wanting to talk
about his wife. I say, when you’ve cast off, it’s best not to have a
home. The ship wants all you can give her. Tregenna, he looked back a
lot. You know what I mean. Couldn’t keep his mind on his job, but wished
he was through with it. There he’d be cutting bread at dinner, and it
’ud remind him, and he’d be wishing he was cutting it at home. When
things began to go stiff, he’d say, “who wouldn’t sell his little farm
to go to sea?” Used to figure out on paper how long we’d be before we’d
be back. Why, you never know when you’ll get back.

See what happened. We left Cadiz that year on the first of January, and
got things just right. The winds chased us over. There were big
following seas, but you know those schooners ride like ducks. Up and
over they go. Never a drop did we ship. Though they’re lively enough to
bruise and sicken all but good sailors. And old Tregenna was rubbing his
hands and making out his figures better and better.

We arrived off St. Johns in a bit more than three weeks. I reckon I’d
done it all right, being such a young chap too. Well, I was turning in
that night, and just as I got into the companion a man said, “There goes
a lump of ice.” I jumped out again. Why, there was ice all round us. The
sea was full of it as far as I could see into the night. “This is all
along of your figuring,” I sang out to Tregenna. “But you’ll have a lot
of time to reckon it up afresh,” I said.

So he had. Do you know when we got in? We got in on April 15. We were
two months and a half getting in. And we came over in three weeks.
There’s something in that Jonah story. Always some fool who can’t keep
his mouth shut and his mind on his job.

We did have a time. Two and a half months, and our provisions ran out.
We were living on a little meal and dried peas. The ice chafed the
“Lizzie” till the rudder was worn down to the stock. It roughed up her
wooden sides till they looked as if they were covered with long coarse
hair. We were a sight when we got in. You wouldn’t have known us,
hardly. We looked as if we’d come up from the bottom.... Don’t ask me
when we shall get to Para. Wait till we’re out of this. Listen to that
dog. Shut up, you Tinker. Making that noise, sir! Go and lie down.

The Skipper clapped on his cap aggressively and went out. The Doctor had
a long and eloquent silence. Then he turned to me. “This beats all,” he
said. “Come and have a drop of gin, old dear.” He led the way to his
berth, which smelt of varnish and of lamp, and we swayed in chorus as
the ship rolled, and had a heartening mourn together. But for its
accidental compensations travel would not be worth the trouble. In proof
of that there is the entry in my diary some days after:

“December 22. Awoke at four a.m. with the ship rolling as brutally as
ever. A great noise of waters and things banging. The seas huge at
sunrise, when the light came over their tops. Depressing sight. The sky
was blue at first, but was soon overcast with squalls. The horizon ahead
gets slate coloured, and low clouds underneath, like ragged bales of
dirty wool, come towards us heavy and fast. Then the squall and waves
rush down on us express, and the ship buries herself. Constantly hearing
engine-room bell sounded from bridge to slacken speed as a big sea
appears. The captain popped in his head as I was deciding whether to get
up or stay where I was. He gazed sternly at me and said he was looking
for Jonah. I half believe he means it too. Everybody is weary of this.
The men have been in oilskins since the start.

“Noon to-day, Lat. 42.6 N. Long. 11.10 W. Miles by engines since noon
yesterday 222. Knots by revolutions 9.2. But the slip is 49.2 per cent.
So actual distance 112 miles only, and knots 4.6. Bad going. Wind
southly. Engines racing and engineer still at throttle.

“Night, and a full moon tearing past cloud openings. The ship
occasionally shows like a pale ghost, the black shadows of the funnel
guys and stanchions oscillating on the white paint-work as she rolls. I
went into Chief’s cabin, and from its open door—for it was sensibly
milder—looked out astern over the way we had come. Up and down, this
side and that, went the steamer, and the Great Bear, in a wind clear
patch of sky, was dancing on our wake. Polaris was making eccentric
orbits round the main masthead light. Then the Skipper came in. He sat
gazing astern. The look of his face was enough. It was quite plain he
would like to be offended to-night, and attack anybody about anything.
Presently he started intently as he looked astern, and jumped from his
seat crying the ultimate anathema on the chap at the wheel; and ran out.
The Chief glanced astern and laughed. ‘The old man comes in here because
it’s uncommon handy for watching the wake. Look at it. Somebody on the
bridge writing letters on the ocean. Thinking of his sweetheart, and her
name is Sue.’ We gave the Skipper’s voice time to reach the wheelhouse,
and then saw the wake visibly tauten out.

“I went aft, balancing like a man learning the tight rope, along the
trestle bridge. The moon was still falling precipitously through the
broken sky, and areas of the great seas, where the sweeping searchlight
of the moon showed monsters shaping and slowly vanishing, were
frightful. There were sudden expansions of vivid green lightnings in the
north and east. I found the Doctor in the chief mate’s cabin. I sang
some songs in a riving minor, accompanied by the mate on an accordion,
for the doctor’s amusement, and discovered why sailors always use the
accordion, previously a mystery to me. It has a sad and reflective note,
suited to men with memories when alone on the ocean. It ought to fit
Celtic bards better than the harp. It has a fine expiring moan. The mate
gave an imitation of a dying man with it.

“To bed at 11. Tried to read Henry James. My cockroach came out to wave
his derisive hands at me. No wonder. The light was very bad, and I was
pitched from side to side of the bunk. Nearly thrown out once. I might
just as well have attempted to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original.
So I read the last letters from home instead and then fell asleep as a
little child.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

There was something of leisure in her movements next morning. I felt
sure the glass must be rising at last. The air felt lighter and more
expansive. A peep through the port showed me the ceiling had gone up
considerably in the night. There was little wind, for the waves, though
as great as ever, had lost their white ridges. Their summits were
rounded and smooth. We were running south out of it, though the residue
of the dreary northern seas was still washing about the decks. It was
December yesterday, but April to-day. The engineers’ messroom boy, with
bare fat arms, went by the cabin, singing.

At breakfast we heard that Chips, who had retired to his bunk for some
days past to mend a leg damaged when the hatches were in danger, had met
with a still more serious misfortune. We fell into a mood of silent and
respectful compassion. There was nothing to be said. Chips had lost his
Victoria Cross. He was an old hero in trouble. The few of us who were
British there—true, most of us were Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians,
and Portuguese—felt we represented The Country. Chips limped about the
forecastle with reproach in his face, and we felt we were petty in
noticing his face was also dirty, though it certainly was difficult to
avoid seeing that too, perhaps because, and this can be said for us, the
dirt was of longer standing than the reproach. Then again it is common
knowledge that Chips sleeps in straw, having no mattress.

Chips’ story we knew. It had been whispered about the ship. He was at
the Siege of Alexandria, and a shell fell near a group of men on his
ship. Chips picked it up and dropped it overboard before the fuse was
finished. The Doctor and I felt especially responsible, for a reason I
cannot easily explain, it is so vague, and we told Chips we would help
him in his search for his lost treasure. This took us to Chips’
sea-chest, and amid a group of mask-like faces—for how could foreigners
guess what this mattered to us?—we hunted carefully for Chips his
aureole. We found—but I suppose even Victoria Cross heroes must dirty
their socks. There were other things also. Yet it was out of one of
these very other things, which were, I think, shirts, that there
dropped, when the Doctor picked up the garment, a little package wrapped
in newspaper. Chips, from his berth, gave a cry of joy. The Doctor and
I, smiling too, looked upon the old man feeling that we had acted for
you all. Chips, secretive with his sacrosanct emblem, was putting the
little packet under his coverlet, when a low foreign sailor snatched it
from him. The Cross fell to the deck. I recovered it from the feet
instantly in a white passion, and chanced to look at it. It confirmed
that one, who is named Chips here, was something in the Royal and
Ancient Order of Buffaloes.

Coming back from the fo’castle, suddenly I felt as the man of the
suburbs does when, bowed with months of black winter and work in a city
alley, he is, without any warning, transfigured on his own doorstep one
morning. There as before is his familiar shrub, dripping with rain. Yet
is it as before? It points a black finger at him. But the finger has a
polished green nail.

He is translated. His ears are opened, and there comes for the first
time that year the silver whistle of the starlings. A touch of South is
in the air. His burden falls.

The cloudy sky was not grey now, but pearly, for it was translucent to
the sun. More than day had come; life was born. There was ichor in the
day. They were not dark northern waves that baffled us, but we were
shoved and rocked by the send of a long nacreous ocean swell, firm but
kind, from the south-west. The iron ship which had been repulsive to the
touch, for its face had been glassy and cold, was now drying a warm rust
red, like earth of Devon in spring, and was responsive. You could rest
against its iron body and feel yourself grow. I saw the Chief outside
his cabin in his shirt sleeves, gazing overseas between the stanchions
of the boat deck, smoking in the evident luxury of full comfort and
release. Involuntarily, he danced the two-step as she rolled. “Got
anything to read?” he asked.

Now that reminded me. We have no library, of course, but we have a
circulation of books on board. There are no common shelves; but the book
you left thoughtlessly on the skylight five minutes ago, while you went
to find some matches, is gone when you return. And you, if you see a
book lying open and unprotected in a cabin, glance round warily, dash
in, and take it; very often only to discover to your bitter
disappointment that it is one of your own, and not an adventurous and
unread stranger. The Chief’s question reminded me that the day we left
Swansea a lady (and a friend of poor Jack, the public is well aware)
sent us a bale of literature. We blessed her when we saw its bulk,
looking at it as oxen might look at a truss of hay, for that was its
size and shape. Though it proved to be shavings and a cruel blow to the
animals, as you shall hear.

Here was the very day to get at that bale, and impatiently I rolled it
into the open. It was trussed with great care, so I tore away a corner
of the wrappings, dived in a hand, and hauled out a copy of “Joy Bells
for Young Christians,” the November number of 1899.

Well. Anyhow, it was a clean copy, and I put it by as the portion of our
bald-headed German steward.

This disappointment made me pause, though. Here was going to be a long
job for the Purser, sorting out this. Supposing there was anything
nutritious in the bale I did not mind the labour of the unpacking and
the distribution; but if the bulk of the consignment was hailed, so to
speak, by “Joy Bells,” then it would be better to call a deck hand and
get the package overside before the ship was littered with too much of
this joy. A Brazilian stoker, as he passed, saw me standing in thought,
and I suppose imagined—for he could not ask—that I wanted to cut the
string, but had no knife. Before I could stop him, he, smiling a knowing
and friendly smile, whipped out a blade from his rear; and at once we
stood ankle-deep in literature. There was a landslide near me of Infant
Methodists (dates unknown) and I gave the Brazilian an armful for his
kindness.

Our dear unknown friend at Swansea, with her eye on our sailor-like but
yet immortal souls, had heard, no doubt, at the annual meeting of the
Society for the Succor of Seamen, at Caxton Hall, Westminster (held on
the 29th of every February), what simple and barbarous and yet, in the
main, considering our origins and circumstances, what worthy fellows we
were. But she was not told at the meeting that the wealthy shipowners,
subscribers to the society, and whose presence there made Caxton Hall
seem nautical, have a way of signing on crews at continental ports
because wages rule lower there; and that consequently not one of our men
was moved by Christian English, but only by mates English, and then not
so very quickly. The officers and engineers were English, and there the
sailors’ friend was right in her surmise; but I do not see how she could
have done more to put in awful jeopardy the soul of our wise and
spectacled chief engineer, for instance, than by approaching him with a
winning and philanthropic smile, under the impulse to do him good with a
statement of her religion in words of one syllable. He would have met
her politely, I know; but after she had gone——

Let her try to imagine her own feelings if our Chief, uninvited and
blankly unmindful, invaded the exclusive inner circle of Swansea
society, and approached her in the midst of her own with the childish
notion of instructing her in the first principles of his pronounced
Pyrrhonism; or say he went to her as a colporteur of the Society for
Instructing the Intelligence and Manners of Leisured Folk. But I must
say for our chief that this cannot be even supposed. He would never
offer the lowliest being such an indignity.

We pulled and dragged at the escaped mass of periodicals, looking for
something good, but found no pearls had been cast before us. There were
parish magazines and temperance monthlies, there were religious almanacs
for the years we have lost; by some sporting chance there were even a
few back numbers of the “Monumental Mason.” It is plain the latter could
be considered an added grievance, even though they were put in as a
kindly reminder of our narrow lease here. It was an aggravation of the
original offence to sailors who, when their short term here closes, have
to make shift with some firebars at their heels. What is Aberdeen
granite and indelible gold lettering to such men but a hint of the
hardships which follow them even beyond the end?

So overboard went the lot—I may as well tell the whole truth, overboard
also went the evangelical hymn books, new though they were. I will only
suppress the advice cried to the gulls astern as the literature went
floating and flying in their direction. We had to rely for our reading
on what had been brought aboard by our crowd, a collection which
gradually revealed itself in single books and magazines.

There was, for example, the “Morphology of the Cryptogamia,” an
exhaustive work which gave me much pleasure in wondering how it got
aboard at all. The chief mate used it as a wedge between his open door
and the bulkhead, to prevent the miserable knocking as the ship lolled
about. He would not lend me that book, because it jammed into the
opening nicely; but I borrowed from him “Three Fingered Jack, the Terror
of the Antilles,” and I made him a complete gift in return of “Robert
Elsmere” which I found marooned on a bunker hatch as I came along. There
you see the delightful chance and hazardous character of our literature.

I prided myself on the select reading I had brought aboard with me. But
what devilish black art the sea air worked on those choice volumes,
however, I cannot explain. I have no means of knowing. But there they
are, their covers bitten by cockroaches, and the words inside bleached
and sterilised of all meaning. There they will stop; Henry James, too.
For what is the use of him when big seas are running? He would be a
magician indeed who could capture our minds then. You get the right
amplitude of leisure and the flat undistracting circumstances he
demands, the emptiness and the immobility necessary, when you are
waiting for cargo long in coming at a low seaboard. I suppose we want
the representation of life only when we are not very much alive. In
heavy weather there is no doubt old newspapers make the best reading,
especially if they have good bold advertisements. For I know it requires
the same courage and concentration needed ashore for reading Another
Great Speech by the Premier; indeed, the steel blue quality of deadly
resolution used only by men of letters who write biographies and spin
literary causeries, to manage even novels when great billows are moving.
The mind is inclined to absent itself then. Then it is you put all
reading aside with a promise of a long and leisurely festival of books
when the ship is steaming uniformly down the unvarying “trades.”

But when you get near the neighbourhood of the constant sun, during the
day you fall asleep over “Three Fingered Jack” and the old magazines
which you had on your knees while musing on the colours of the sea and
the mounting architecture of the clouds; and beyond sundown listen to
the mate’s accordion or the engineer’s flute. Perhaps, moved by the
hu-s-s-h of the waves, the silky and purple dark, and the loneliness of
your little company under the mid-ocean stars, tentatively (though your
shipmates are very forgiving) lift a ballad yourself; for something is
expected of you, and singing seems right.

Of all the books aboard the “Capella” I got most out of the Skipper’s
sailing directories and his charts. Talk of romance! There was that
chart-room under the bridge, across its open doors on either side
creaming waves going by in the moonlight, and the steamer inclining each
side alternately, and the shadows of the rigging sliding back and forth
on the pale deck. You cannot know what romance is till you are in seas
you have never sailed before, where the marks will be few when landfall
comes; that ocean where the Skipper is to find his own way by his lore
of the sea, and may even ask your opinion about alternatives; and there
read sailing directories. The romance of these books cannot be
translated or quoted. It would leave them, as though a glimmer went out,
if you attempted to take them from that chart-room where pendant things
are swaying leisurely, where you can hear the bells tell the watches,
and the skipper’s gold-laced cap is on the mahogany table. The South
Atlantic Sailing Directions, our own guide, is fine, especially when it
gets down to the uninhabited islands in far southern latitudes. I do not
think this noble volume is included in the best hundred books, but I
know it can release the mind from the body.

But what’s this talk of landfalls? as the old man would say. There will
be no landfall yet for us; and this is Christmas Eve. I knew it was an
auspicious occasion of some kind, for the steward just went aft with two
big plum cakes cuddled in his apron. That made me look at the calendar.
We are now 800 miles out, and the steamer has reached six knots. This
was the best night we had yet found. The steamer was on an even keel,
with but occasional spasms of sharp rolling, for there was no sea, but
only old ocean breathing deeply and regularly in its sleep, and
sometimes making a slight movement. The light of the full moon was the
shining ghost of noon. The steamer was distinct but immaterial,
saliently accentuated, as a phantom. A deep shadow would have detached
the forecastle head but for a length of luminous bulwark which still
held it, and some quiet voices of men who were within the shadow,
yarning. The line of bulwark and the murmuring voices held us together.
The prow as it dipped sank into drifts of lambent snow. The snow fled by
the steamer’s sides, melting and musical. Two engineers off duty leaned
on the rails amidships, smoking, looking into the vacancy in which the
moonlight laid a floor of troubled silver. As if drawn by its light a
few little clouds were poised near the moon, grouped round the bright
heart of the night. There was the moon and its small company of clouds,
and ourselves below in our own defined allotment of sea. The only thing
outside and far was Sirius, burning independently in the east, looking
unwinking through the wall of night into our world.

On such a night and with Christmas morning but sixty minutes away it
would have been wasting life to go to bed. I glanced expectantly at the
door of the Chief’s cabin, and saw indeed it was open, a yellow
rectangle within which was the profile of the Chief beneath his lamp,
talking to somebody. The Doctor was there, and he made room for me on
the settee. Then the captain joined us, and I perched myself on the
washstand.

“Well, we can undress to-night when we turn in,” said the Chief. (None
of us had, so far.) In a long silence which filled the cabin with
tobacco smoke I could hear the engines below uplifted in confident song.

“Now they’re walking round,” said the Skipper, nodding his head. “Now
she feels it.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

When we met thus, between the hours of nine and midnight, as was our
irregular habit, the talk first was always desultory, and about our own
ship and our own circumstances, for the concerns of our little world
strangely occupied our minds, as you would think, and the large affairs
of that great world we had left, of which we heard now no sound nor
rumour, had lessened in the mind, faded and vanished, all the huge
consequence and loud clangour of it, so that now there was an empty
horizon astern, and nothing between us and that void but a few gulls,
like small and pursuing recollections. Our little microcosm, afloat and
sundered in the wastes, was occupied in its own polity. We talked of the
carpenter’s bad leg; complained of the cook’s bread; heard that Tinker
the dog, being young, had the habit at night, while honest folk slept,
of eating the saloon mats; grumbled that the ship’s tobacco was mouldy.
The deck was getting dry, the Skipper said, and now we could get the men
chipping it, and then it could be tarred.

“That donkeyman,” said the Skipper, “that man wastes the fresh water.
I’ll have a lock put on the pump handle. He works it as if we were laid
out to the main. I spoke to him about it this morning.” The fresh water
is a vital affair with us. We may not drink the water of the country to
which we are bound, so eighty tons of Welsh mountain spring is in our
cleansed and whitewashed tanks. Woe to the man caught overflowing his
can, if an officer sees him. “The handle can’t be locked,” said the
Chief, “because it’s next to the galley. The cook wants it all day
long.”

“Well, let me catch anyone wasting it. We’d look all right with a lot of
dysentery, drinking that river water out there.”

This common meeting-place of ours, the Chief’s cabin, is on a highway of
the ship, being on the direct route from the poop to the bridge, and so
it is a hostel, for the Chief is a kindly and popular man, big and
robust in body and mind; though he has a knack, at odd and unexpected
times, of being candid in a way that shocks, treading on corns without
ruth, the Skipper’s particularly, when their two departments are at a
difference.

This cabin was one which I always visited first, for, especially in the
morning when other folk had not rubbed the night out of their eyes, and
so looked darkly upon their fellows, my friend the Chief had the early
eye of a child and the soaring spirit of the lark. I never met him when
he had got out of bed on the wrong side. His cabin became a refuge to
me, for, unlike the Doctor’s and my own place (we both were birds of
passage, therefore our cabins were cold and stark), the Chief’s was
comfortable with settled furniture, cosy and habitable, like a fixed
home. There was a wicker chair, with cushions, and a writing-desk where
the engineer’s log lay handy and bearing some plug tobacco, freshly cut,
on its cover, and a pipe rack above the desk carrying a most foul
assortment waiting their turns again for favour. Portraits of the
Chief’s family were on the walls, smiling boys and girls, with their
mother in a chief place, looking upon daddy by proxy. There was a
bookshelf bearing some engineering manuals, a few novels and magazines,
a tape measure, some gauge glasses, some tin whistles, a flute, and a
palm leaf fan. Above the washstand was a rack with glasses and a carafe.
A settee ran along one side, and his bunk upon the other side. There we
sat on Christmas Eve, while the wicker chair bent and complained with
the Skipper’s weight as he swayed to the leisurely rocking of the ship.
The tobacco smoke floated in coils and blue smears in the room. A bottle
of Hollands rested for security on the bed, and we held our glasses on
our knees.

The pallid and puffy face of the steward, a very honest man secretly
free with his small store of apples on my account because I am green and
my palate not yet used to the flatness of tinned provisions, looked in
on us from the right. “Vhere is der dog, sir? I haf not seen der dog.”
“Must be about,” we cried. “We had seen him,” we said, “nosing about the
poop for rats, or asleep on the saloon mat, or padding round the casing
looking for friends.” “But no, I haf looked. He is not found. Vhere is
der dog?” A hole in our little community, it was apparent from our
intent looks, could not be thought of with equanimity. Tinker’s
importance became quite large. The second engineer passed the door,
caught the drift of our anxious converse, and turned to say the dog was
then asleep in his room. “Ach! zat is all right.” We struck matches for
our pipes again.

“That dog, I shouldn’t like to lose him,” said the Skipper, stroking his
beard. “There’s no luck in that. I shot a dog once on a ship; and first
we ran into a blow and lost a lot of gear, and then the mate got his
hand smashed, and then everything got cross-grained till I’d have paid,
ah, fifty pounds to have had the brute back again, and an ugly customer
he was. Ah, you can smile, Doctor, but there it is. I’m not
superstitious and never was. But you can’t tell me. Look at the things
that happen. When I was a youngster, my ship was off Rio, and I dreamt
my father was dead. I took my bearings and the time. I dreamt my father
died in a red brick house with a laylock tree by the door and that tree
was in blossom plain enough to smell. I didn’t know the house. There was
a path of clean red bricks leading up to the porch, through a garden. I
didn’t see my father. But you know what dreams are like—no sense in
them—there the house was and not a soul in sight. I knew he was dying
inside it.”

“How do you account for that? Have you got it down in your books? I lay
you haven’t. I forgot all about that dream. Long after I was at Cape
Town and met my brother. That reminded me. After a bit I said to him,
‘Father’s dead.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but how did you know?’ Said I, ‘Was
the house like this?’ and I told him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was like that.
A place he was staying at in Essex. But how did you know?’ I didn’t tell
him. What’s the good? He wouldn’t have believed it. People don’t.”

All through the anxious time when we were being soused and buffeted I
noticed how our company, every man of them, even the Pyrrhonist, saw
omens in all the chance variety of the vast menace under the frown of
which we huddled in our iron box; porpoises alongside; one of Mother
Cary’s dark brood accompanying us, glancing about the vagaries of the
flowing hills with swift precision; the form of a cloud; a loom far out,
as though day were there at least. The fall of a portrait in the Chief’s
room once set him wondering and melancholy. Again, when the dog whined
and moped, the Skipper eyed the animal narrowly, as though the creature
had prescience but could tell us what it knew only by drooping and
quivering its hind quarters. You might have thought that Fate, dumb and
cruel, but a little relenting for something inevitably to come to our
mishap, were trying to stretch a point, and so induced the Skipper to
put his shirt on inside out one morning, after dreaming he saw drowned
rats, in case the horse were not too blind to see both the nod and the
wink.

The Sphinx makes subtle dumb motions, as it were, when closely regarded.
I do not wonder if it does. Sometimes in those dark days I thought I got
a hint or two. I cannot tell you what they were. The weather grew
brighter afterwards and I forgot them. From our narrow and weltering
security, where the wind searched through us like the judgment eye, I
know, looking out upon the wilderness in turmoil where was no help, and
no witness of our undoing, where the gleams were fleeting as though the
very day were riven and tumbling, that I saw the filmy shapes of those
things which darken the minds of primitives. While the sky is changeful,
and there are storms at sea when our fellows are absent, and mischance
and death are veiled but here, we shall have gods and ghosts. The
sharp-sighted collectors of old brain-lumber and such curios may still
keep busy, and tie up their dry bundles of mythology and religions; but
I myself could make plenty more.

So it was my shipmates’ yarns were most of the dire kind, with some dim
warning precedent. I do not recall a story that was gay, except those of
the wanton sort. They were of close calls and of women, as, I suppose,
have been those of all hard livers, from the cave men on.

Eight bells were rung on the bridge, and, like a faint echo in a higher
pitch, answered from the fo’castle. Christmas morning! By my pocket
compass we toasted the folk at home. We had heard a good many stories of
wreck this night, and the Chief was now at his contribution to the
unseasonable memories. (“I’ve had enough of it. Here goes,” said the
Doctor; and he went.) “Don’t leave us. It lets in the draught. Well, the
compliments to you. This typhoon—I had had four others—but this one
made me think it was good-bye. She was a small steamer, that ‘Samuel
Plimsoll,’ and old, but well-behaved. But her light nearly went out in
that blow. It was that dark you could find nothing but the noise, and we
were just the same as a chunk of wood under a waterfall, because the
Lord knows how many feet of water were in the engine-room, for she was
rolling so. Her fires were out. She had a list of 22 degrees to port.
She simply lay in it, and it went over her. Every time she rolled over
on the deep side, thinks I, this is the last of her. All this, mind you,
went on for two days, and the skipper was in the chart-room, waiting.
I’ve found that when the danger is not much you get excited, but when
there seems no chance you get cool and cunning and try to make one. One
time I thought she seemed easier, and I was able to get the donkey
engine going. I felt better as soon as I heard the steam, even though it
was only in the donkey. Thinks I, there’s power, and it’s mine—a canful
of steam to a typhoon. It was a chance to laugh at. Then I took the
other engineers with me and we went below. The water there, full of
cinders and trash, pouring through the gear as she turned from side to
side, made it look a pretty poor show. You see, the donkey wouldn’t work
the pumps, for the coal and muck were sucked in. So I took a basket and
got into the tank, holding the basket under the pump. The water was up
to my neck, and every time she rolled I was ducked. But the dodge
worked, and that list of hers to port was a bit of luck in its way, for
it helped us to get the starboard boiler going. When I saw the throws
moving, and the wash angry when it splashed on the hot metal, I said,
‘So much for your old typhoon.’ We were not counted out then. We crawled
under the lee of an island, and lay for four days repairing her. The
funny thing was when we got to Hong Kong the papers were full of our
loss. ‘“Samuel Plimsoll” lost with all hands.’ It was funny to see a
bill like that. I met the placard as it came running round a corner, and
it made me stand and shuffle my feet on the ground to see if the earth
was all right. I knew the editor of that paper, and I was then going up
to give him something good. And here he was making money out of us like
that. He stood at the door of his office and saw me coming. I went up
laughing, waving his paper in my hand. He looked quite surprised. His
mouth was wide open. ‘You’re a nice sort of chap,’ I said.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Christmas Day. In case it has become necessary for me to show again the
symbols of verity, as this is a book of travel, here they are: “Lat.
37.2 N., long. 14.14 W. Light wind and moderate swell from S.W. Vessel
rolling heavily at intervals. 961 miles out. Miles by engines 226.
Actual distance travelled (because of the swell on our starboard bow)
197 miles.” I cannot see that these particulars do more than help me out
with the book, but as they have been considered essential in narratives
of voyaging, here they are, and much good may they do anybody. Thoreau,
in one of his quaintly superior moods when speaking of travel, said, “It
is not worth while going round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
In nearly every book of travel this is proved to be true. They show it
was not worth the while, seeing it was either to shoot cats or to count
degrees of latitude. (As for me, I have no reason whatever for being at
sea.) Consider Arctic travel. I have read long rows of books on that,
but recall few emotional moments. The finest passage in any book of
Arctic travel is in Warburton Pikes’ “Barren Grounds,” where he quotes
what the Indian said to the missionary who had been speaking of heaven.
The Indian asked, “And is it like the land of the Musk-ox in summer,
when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very often?”

You feel at once that the country the Indian saw around him would be
easily missed by us, even when in the midst of it. For taking the
bearings of such a land, the sextant, and the miles already travelled,
would not be factors to help much. Now the Indian knew nothing of
artificial horizons and the aids to discovering where they are which
strangers use. But in summer the mists of his lakes were but the vapour
of his musings, the penumbra of the unfathomed deeps of his mind whereon
he paddled his own canoe; and when the wild-fowl called, it was his
memory heard; it was his thought become vocal then while he dreamed on.
I myself learned that the treasures found in travel, the chance rewards
of travel which make it worth while, cannot be accounted beforehand, and
seldom are matters a listener would care to hear about afterwards; for
they have no substance. They are no matter. They are untranslatable from
their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to
sleep on the tumulus where the little people dance on midsummer night,
and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were
filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the
traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when
he tries. Such fair things cannot be taken from the magic moment. They
are but filmy, high in the ceiling of your thoughts then, rosy and
sunlit by the chance of the light, transitory, melting as you watch. You
come down to your lead again. These occasions are not on your itinerary.
They are like the Indian’s lakes in summer. They have no names. They
cannot be found on the best maps. Not you nor any other will ever
discover them again. Nor do they fill the hunger which sent you
travelling; they are not provender for notebooks. They do not come to
accord with your mood, but they come unaware to compel, and it is your
own adverse and darkling atoms that are changed, at once dancing in
accord with the rare incidence of that unreasonable and transcendent
moment of your world, the rhythm of which you feel, as you would the
beat of drums.

And what are these things?—but how can we tell? A strip of coral beach,
as once I saw it, which was as all other coral beaches; but the ship
passed close in, and by favour of the hour and the sun this strand did
not glare, but was resplendent, and the colours of the sea, green, gold,
and purple, were not its common virtues, but the emotional and passing
attar of those hues. There was the long, slow labouring of our burdened
tramp in the Atlantic storm. Or one April, and a wild cherry-tree in
blossom by an English hedge, a white cloud tinctured with rose, and in
it moving a dozen tropical chaffinches; the petals were on the grass.

And now, this is Christmas morning. I am in the Chief’s bunk, and he
still sleeps on the settee. We fell asleep where we lay yarning on our
backs after midnight. I wake at the right moment, opening my eyes with
the serene and secure conviction that things are very well. The slow
rocking of the ship is perfect rest. There is no sound but the faint
tap-tap of something loose on the desk and responding to the ship’s
movements. The cabin is strangely illuminated to its deepest corner by
an extraordinary light, as though the intense glow of a rare dawn had
penetrated even our ironwork. On the white top of the cabin a bright
moon quivers about, the shine from live waters sent up through the round
of our port. When we lean over, the port shows first the roof of the
alleyway dappled with bright reflections; then a circle of sky, which
the horizon soon halves; and then the dazzling white and blue of the
near waves; we reverse.

This is life. This is what I have come for. I do not repose merely in a
bunk. I am prone and easy in the deepest assurance of good. This
conviction has penetrated even the unconsciousness of the Chief; he
snores in profound luxury. If in a ship you are brought sometimes too
cruelly close to the scrutiny of the terms of your narrow tenure,
expecting momentarily to see the document torn across by invisible
fingers, yet nowhere else do you feel those terms to be so suddenly
expanded in the sun. And nowhere else is got such release, secure and
absolute, from the nudging of insistent trifles. There is nothing
between your eyes and the confines of your own place. Empty day is all
round. In the entire circle there is not the farthest impertinent
interruption—through all the degrees there is not one fool standing in
the light; and you yourself are on nobody’s horizon. No history stains
that place. There is not a black doubt anywhere. It is the first day
again, and no need yet for a rubbish heap.

Yet when, singing to myself, I went outside to matins, I found Sandy our
third engineer with the toothache. So much of truth is got from being a
gymnosophist and regarding your own toes with aloof abstraction on a
sunny Christmas morning. I became Sandy’s courage for him instead, took
his arm firmly, and led him aft to the doctor. We would start a rubbish
heap for a pristine world with a decayed tooth. Something to be going on
with.

Seeing we were almost off Madeira we had some amount of right to the
July sun under which we had run. For the first time since the Mumbles
our decks were quite dry, and cherry red with rust. There were
glittering crusts of salt in odd places. At eight bells (midday) the
captain ordered a general holiday, except for the routine duties; and
the donkeyman appeared to startle us as the apparition of a stranger on
the ship, for he had a clean face, though his eyes still were dark and
spectral, and he wore a suit of new dungarees, stiff and creased from a
paper parcel, but just opened, out of a Swansea slop shop. His mates
were some seconds realising him. Then they made derisive signs, and the
boldest some ribald cries. I thought their resentment was really aroused
by Donkey’s new shirt; it was that touch which pushed matters too far,
and made him unfriendly. He saw this himself. Soon he changed the new
shirt for one that had been rendered neutral in the stoke-hold and the
bucket.

There was something neutral, like Donkey’s old shirt, about most of our
crowd. Each one of the mob which gathered with mess kits a little before
midday about the galley door seemed reduced, was faded in a noticeable
measure from the sharp and strong pattern of a man. Their conversation
about the galley was always in subdued mutterings, not direct, but out
of the mouth corners, sideways. Their only independence was in the
negligence of their attitudes. They might have been keeping in mind an
austere and invisible presence, whose swift words from nowhere might at
any time cleave their soft babble. If I made to pass through them the
babble ceased, and from limp poses they sprang upright in the narrow way
to let me pass, their eyes cast down. A man who had not seen me coming,
but still sprawled on the rail, talking quietly, would be nudged by his
neighbour. It struck me this attitude would change when they knew us
better; but it never did. These deckhands and firemen were mostly
youngsters, steadied by a few older hands. Chips and Donkey were the
veterans. In that crowd the boatswain was the admirable figure. He was a
young Britisher, tall, upright, and weighty, with a smiling, respectful
eye in which sometimes, I thought, there was a faint hint of mockery. He
had an easy balance and confidence in his movements which made him worth
watching when about his business. Clean shaven when he came aboard, he
now had a tawny beard which caught gold lights, and it was singularly
good on his weather-darkened face. He seldom wore a cap, for it could
have added little protection to the taut vigour of his hair, and would
have spoilt, as perhaps he himself guessed, that proper flourish and
climax to the poise of his head.

Donkey was an Irishman, and he was the huge frame of what, maybe thirty
years before, had been a powerful man. This morning his big cadaverous
face, white only on the bony ridges surrounding the depressions of the
temples, the cheeks, and the dark pits of the eyes, and with the shadowy
hollow of the mouth which gaped through the weight of the massive jaw,
would have resembled, from a little distance, that of a skeleton head of
one of the monsters in a geological gallery, but for the dewlap
sustained by sinews running from his chin down his throat. Donkey was a
silent man, and never caught your glance as you passed him, but lumbered
along with so much of the surprising celerity of a gaunt elephant that
you thought you might hear the rasp of his loose clothes. He was a
simple and docile fellow. I never heard him speak, but he used to come
to the Chief, fill the door with his massive front, his small eyes which
expressed nothing and were but sparks of life, looking nowhere in
particular, and make guttural sounds; and the Chief, being used to him,
understood. At sea Donkey did his small duties like a plain but
cumbersome mechanism that had somewhere in it an obscure point of
rationality. When ashore, though, he was said to go mad, and to roll
trampling and trumpeting through the squalid littoral of the world;
being brought aboard afterwards an enormity of lax bones and flesh, with
the cogitating glim in his bulk quite doused.

Of the others, there was a Teutonic bunch of lads, deckhands, which I
never succeeded in segregating, they looked so much alike. They had
pimpled, idle faces, and neutral eyes, cast down when they sidled by
one, thin down on their chins, and grimy raiment which, by the look of
it, was an integument never cast after we left port. One name would have
covered that lot, and frequently I heard the mates use it. But Olsen,
the Norwegian with a blond moustache which covered his mouth like a
fog-protector, and stern blue eyes, was a sailor. The firemen made a
better bunch. There was among them a swarthy Brazilian, whose constant
smile seemed ever on the point of breaking into song, but that he was
always chewing the end of a sweat rag he wore twisted round his neck.
The happy feature of our firemen was a Dutchman, whose hollow face was
full of silent woe and endurance. He was our chief joy. When once we
found the sun, he then appeared in a single garment, trousers and braces
cut in one piece of brown canvas, hauled up well under his arms, leaving
his slab feet remote and forlorn. His torso was bare, a dancing girl in
red and blue tattooed on his chest. He wore a bowler hat without a brim.

We will get Christmas over. It was a pagan festival. Looking back at it,
I see—with the astonishment of the sedate who is native to a
geometrical suburb where the morning train follows the night and every
numbered house shelters a moral agnostic—I see a dancing baccanal with
free gestures who fades, as I look back intently, doubting my senses, in
a roseous haze. The lawless movements of that wild, bright and laughing
figure, its exultant blasphemy, its confident mockery, are remembered by
me as though once I had been admitted to the green room of heaven.
Surely I have seen a god whose deathless knowledge derides the solemn
gods, behind the curtain. It was Christmas night, and our little
“Capella,” our point of night shine, a star moving through the void to
its dark destiny, filled the vault with its song, while its fellows in
the heavens stood round. Christmas is over.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The day following was Sunday, a grey day of penance, the men soberly
washing their shirts in buckets under the forecastle head, smoking moody
pipes. The garments were tied to any convenient gear where they could
hang free. The sky was leaden. This grey day was distinguished by the
strange phenomenon of an horizon which was almost level; the skyline and
the clouds did not slant first this way, then that. The swell had almost
gone. Already I began to feel the large patience and tranquillity of a
mind losing its shadows, and contemplating the light and space of a long
voyage in which the same men do the same things in the same place daily
under the centre of the empty sky. Sitting on a hatch with the Doctor,
smoking, we confessed, with ease at the heart, and with minds in which
nervous vibrations had ceased, that we must have reached this place that
was nowhere, and that now time was not for us. We had escaped you all.
We were free. There was not anything to engage us. There was nothing to
do, and nobody who wanted us. Never before had I felt so still and
conscious of myself. I realised, with a little start of surprise, that
it was Me who felt the warm air, and who looked at the slow pulse of the
waters, and the fulgent breaks in the roof, and heard the droning of the
wake, and not that mere skin, eyes and ears which, as in London, break
in upon our preoccupied minds with agitating sensations; and I took in
this newly-discovered world of ocean and cloudland and my own sure
identity centred therein with the complacency of an immortal who will
see all the things which do not matter pass away. When we left England
we were tense, and sometimes white (though there were others who went
red) about a Great Crisis in our Country’s History. The Doctor and I
arrived on board, detached from the opposing armies in the impending
conflict, and at first put our hands swiftly to our swords every ten
minutes or so during meals. Of that crisis only one small gull now was
left, and he was following us astern with a melancholy cry at intervals,
of which we took no more notice. (And that gull departed, I see by my
diary, the very next day.)

So ended the Great Crisis. I did not even note the ship’s position at
the time, though I can see now that was a serious fault for which future
historians may blame me. I can but state vaguely that it was about sixty
miles north-west of the Fortunate Isles. The change in the quality of
the sun and air became most marked; I remember that. The horizon
expanded to a surprising distance. According to letters from home, sent
about that date, which I received long afterwards, I am unable to find
that similar phenomena were witnessed in England. Probably they were but
local. These manifestations in the heavens filled the few of us
privileged to witness them with awe, and a new faith in the power and
compassion of God. Nothing further of note occurred on this day, except
that Chips, as a further miracle, suddenly was raised whole from where
he lay in his bunk with a useless leg. His leg, you may remember, was
damaged in the gale off Cornwall. The Doctor, going his rounds, was
surprised to find Chips dancing the hoola-hoola in the forecastle, and a
stoker, with a cut eye, wailing for a lost half bottle of gin taken from
his box while he was on duty. Thereafter Chips returned to work, his leg
becoming halt again only when he knew we saw him stepping it too
blithely.

                   *       *       *       *       *

“_Decr. 27._ Distance run for past 24 hours to midday 219. Total
distance 1177 miles. Fine weather. Glass rising.”

Have you ever heard of the monotony of a long voyage? The same sky you
know, the same waters, the same deck; and now I can see it should be
added, the same old self, dismayed by the contemplation of its features
daily, week after week, within that spacious empty hall, where is no
escape from the bright stare overhead which reveals your baldness and
blemishes without ruth. You get found out. You want to mix with the mob
again, to get lost in the sameness of your fellows. He who goes
travelling should leave his self at home, or as much of it as is not
wanted on the voyage. It is surprising to find how little you want of
yourself. The ideal traveller would venture out merely as a disembodied
thought, or, at most, as an eye.

A mere eye would see no monotony, for the sky may be the same sky, but
its moods are like those of the same woman; and the ocean, though young
as the morning, is older than Asia—you never know what to expect from
that profound enigma. As for the sunny deck, I see the Doctor sitting on
a spare spar, waiting for someone to sit beside him. The Chief is filing
a piece of small gear outside his cabin. The Skipper is overlooking,
with a hard frown, a group of men busy repairing his chart-room, which
is just forward of the engine-room casing (I could get a job from him at
once for the asking, though I shall not ask). The first mate is trying
to be in three places at once. The second mate patrols the bridge. The
German steward, who tells curious stories in a Teutonised dialect of
Shadwell, is hanging mattresses and bed clothes over a boom. The men are
chipping and tarring the deck; and the boatswain, bare-legged, wildly
bearded, a sheath knife on his hams, looks like a fine pirate brought to
menial tasks.

I have watched this day’s monotonous sky onwards from the dawn. We are
in the neighbourhood of the Hesperides. For some early hours of the
morning it was grey. But the grey roof soon broke with the incumbent
weight of light, letting sunshine through narrow fractures to the sea,
far out. There were partitions of thin gold in the dim hall. The moving
floor was patterned in day and night. The low ceiling was fused where
the day poured through, became a candent vapour, volatilised. We had
over us before breakfast the ultimate blue, where a few cirrus clouds
showed its great height.

Then it was August. The sea ran in broad heavy mounds, blue-black and
vitreous, which hardly moved our bulk. In the afternoon, the ocean, a
short distance from the ship, grew filmed and opaque, a milky blue shot
with purple shadows. Its surface, though heaving, was smooth and
flawless. No light entered its deeps, but the radiant heat was mirrored
on it as on the pallor of fluid lava. The water ploughed up by the bows
did not break, but rolled over viscidly. The sun dropped behind the sea
about a point west of our course. Night was near. Yet still the high
dome with its circular floor the sea was magically illuminated, as by
the proximity of a wonderful presence. We, solitary and privileged in
the theatre, waited expectant. The doors of glory were somewhere ajar.
The western wall was clear, shining and empty, enclosed by a proscenium
of amber flames. In the north-east, astern of us, were some high
fair-weather clouds, like a faint host of little cherubs, and from their
superior galleries they watched a light invisible to us; it made their
faces bright. Beneath them the glazed sea was coral pink. Even our own
prosaic iron gear was sublimated; our ship became lustrous and strange.
We were the Argonauts, and our world was bright with the veritable
self-radiance of a world of romance where the things that would happen
were undreamed of, and we watched for them from our argosy’s side, calm
and expectant; my fellows were transfigured, looked huge, were rosy and
awful, immortals in that light no mortal is given to see.

Now had been given me fellowship with the ship and her men; we were one
body. I had been absorbed by our enterprise. For a long while our
steamer was a harsh and foreign thing to me, unfriendly to the eye,
difficult to understand. But now she had become intelligible and proper.
She and her men were all my world, and I could find my way about that
world in the dark. Getting used to a ship has the process of the growth
of a lasting friendship. Chance begins it. You regard your luck askance,
as you accept a new acquaintance with no joy, to make the best of him.
But presently, to put the matter at its lowest, you arrive at an
understanding. You have learned your friend’s worth. Familiarity would
breed contempt only in the mouse-hearted. You never have to account him
afresh, or he is no comrade; there can be no surprises again, no
encounters with a stranger in him. His value, at the least reckoning, is
that you know his value. Any hour of the day or night you can guess with
assurance where his mind would be found. And here my “Capella” has no
strange doors and startling declivities and traps for me any more. I
know her. She is not exactly all she should be, but I apprehend exactly
what she is. If I hurt myself against her it is my own fault. She is as
familiar to me as home now. I should resent any alteration. Having
learned to know her faults I like her as she is; the trestle bridge with
its sagging hand-ropes and wobbling stanchions (look out, you, when she
rolls) which crosses the main deck aft on the port side from the
amidships section, where I live, to the poop, where the Doctor lives.
The two little streets of three doors each, to port and starboard of her
amidships, the doors that open out under the shade of the boat deck to
sea. There, amidships also, are the Chief’s room and the galley, the
engineers’ messroom, and the engine-room entrance; but these last do not
open overside, but look aft, from a connecting alley which runs across
the ship to join the side alleyways. Forward of these cabins is the
engine-room casing, where the ’midship deck broadens, but is cumbered
with bunker hatches (mind your feet, at night, there); and beyond,
again, is the chart-room, and over the chart-room the bridge and the
wheelhouse, from which is a sheer long drop to the main deck foreward.
At the finish of that deck is an iron wall, with the entrance to the
mysterious forecastle in its centre; and over that is the uplifted head
of our world watching our course, a bleak windswept place of rails,
cable chains, and windlass. The poop has a timber deck, and there in
fine weather the deck chairs are. The poop is a place needing exact
navigation at night. Long boxes enclosing the rudder chains are on
either side of it. In the centre is the saloon skylight, the companion,
the steward’s ice chest, and the hand-steering gear. Also there are two
boats. I gained my night knowledge of the poop deck by assault, and
retained my gains with sticking plaster. I am really proud of the
privilege which has been given me to roam now this rolling shadow at
night, this little dark cloud blowing between the stars and the deep,
the unseen abyss below as with its profound reverberations, and the
height above with its scattered lights as remote as the sounds in the
deeps. With calm faith in our swaying shadow I place my feet where
nothing shows, sure that my angel will bear me up. I put out my hands
and a support comes to them; the pitfalls have ladders for me, and by
touching at some places in the black shadow, as by magic, a lighted and
comfortable room at once materialises for my rest in the void.

                   *       *       *       *       *

I think I liked her better as a formless shadow after sundown. Whether
it was then a noise in my head, my tranquil thoughts murmuring in their
sleep, or whether the sound I heard was the deep humming of the world’s
speed, I don’t know; whatever it was, it was the only sound. Our
mainmasthead light was but a nearer star of the host. I was not
surprised to see one of the stars so close. I was within the luminous
porch of the Milky Way.

It was midnight. In that silence, where I was alone in space, adrift on
a night cloud in the constellations, the stars were really my familiars;
once, when in London, though they had been named to me and were constant
there, they were far in the place to which one lifts one’s eyes from the
dust and traffic, nothing to do with London and with me. But now there
was no more dust and traffic. I was among them at last. Splendid Orion
was near and vast in his hunting. The Pleiades no longer dimmered on the
very limit of vision, but were separate points of delicate light. The
night moved with diamond fire.

I was so far absent from the body that a human voice beside me was like
a surprising concussion with something invisible in space. Turning,
there was the glow of Sandy’s pipe. Sandy is an elderly man, and an
engineer. He was leaning over the rail, cooling after his watch below.
The magic of the star shine had got into his mind too. He began with
guesses about the things which are not known, parrying doubt with,
“Ah—but it’s hard to say; there are things——”; and, “you bright young
fellers don’t know everything”; and, “somebody told me a queer thing
now.”

“There was a bright young feller, same as yourself, and he was first
mate of the ‘Abertawe,’ out of Cardiff. Jack Driscoll was his name. It
was a funny thing happened to him. I heard about it afterwards.

“All the girls thought Jack Driscoll was so nice. One of the girls was
his owner’s daughter, and she was the best of the bunch, anyway, for she
was an only child, and her father would have given her the earth. He was
a good owner, was her father, as things go in Cardiff. Do you know
Cardiff? Well, a little goes a long way on the Welsh coast. Jack was a
smart sailor, with the first chance of the next new boat, if he watched
out. I reckon Jack was a fool. Why, he needn’t have gone to sea any
more. But what did he do?

“Jack was one of them fellers who think if they put a gold-laced cap
saucy over one ear, and laugh with the eyes, they can whistle up a
duchess. And I daresay Jack could in summer, in his white suit, when
he’d just shaved. He was a bit of all right was Jack. He was a proper
tall lad, and the way he carried himself—It was a treat to see him move
about a ship. His black hair was like one of the big fiddler chap’s, and
his smile would take in one of his pals.

“Well, it was happy days for Jack. He got good things to come to him. He
didn’t have to look for ’em, like me and you. He knew his work, too. He
was a good sailor. He could get off the mark, at the first word, like a
bird, and he never left a job while there was a loose bit to it.
Sometimes when there was nothing doing it was pretty rotten, Jack would
say, to be stuck there in a Welsh tramp with a crowd of dagoes, and
drink coffee essence and condensed milk out of a pint mug, and never go
to a music hall only once in six months. Jack reckoned it would be fine
to be brass-bound always, in one of the liners, and have a deck like a
skating rink, and a lot of lady passengers who wanted a chap like him to
talk to them.

“He could tell stories, too, on the quiet, could Jack. They were pretty
blue, though. Sailor stories. They were all about himself in the West
Coast ports. Do you know the Chili coast? Well, it’s mind your eye
there, and no half larks. They’re pretty handy with knives out there.
But when Jack was out for fun you couldn’t stop him. He was like all you
young chaps. He wouldn’t listen to sense.

“The ‘Abertawe’ went light ship to Barry, one trip, from Buenos Aires,
and Jack saw her snug, and told all the men to be at the shipping office
early and sober in the morning, because they got in on a Sunday, and
Jack saw the old man safe on his way to Cardiff, and then shaved, and
sang while he was shaving. He got himself up west-end style, new yellow
boots and all, and tied his red tie Spanish fashion. And he went down
the quay, looking for anything that was about, and he felt like the best
man on the Welsh coast.

“But Barry is a dull place. Do you know Barry? Well, it’s a one-eyed
God-forsaken town, made out of odds and ends stuck down anywhere, all
new houses, docks, coal tips, and railway sidings, and nowhere to go.
It’s best to stay aboard, in Barry. Jack began to feel like the only
bird on a mudbank. He got out of the town, and walked along a road till
he came to an old woman sitting in the hedge, with her back up against a
telegraph post. Her face was brown and wrinkled, and she had an
orange-coloured handkerchief round her face, and tied under her chin.
She was smoking a pipe, and looking at her blucher boots. As Jack came
along, she said, ‘Tell your fortune, pretty gentleman?’ Jack laughed,
and told her his face was his fortune.

“‘What do you see when you look in the glass?’ said she.

“Now that was dead easy to Jack, because he knew as well as the girls;
and he told her. There was none of your silly modesty about Jack. Then
the old woman laughed; but I reckon Jack thought she was only pleased
with him, because he made it a point to make the mothers and the
grandmothers smile, the same as the girls.

“‘What do you see in this glass?’ said she to Jack. She was fumbling in
her dress, and hauls out a mirror like you see in the old-fashion shops,
a mirror made of silver, and it had a frame of ebony. She polished it on
her skirt, and gave it to him, and told him to pass a bit of silver with
the other hand. Well, Jack saw sport, and he could always pay for that,
and he did what she said. But he only saw himself in the mirror.

“‘Hi,’ said Jack, ‘here, what’s your little game now? None of your larks
now,’ he said, ‘or I’ll ask a policeman what he can see in this tin
glass of yours.’

“‘You and your policeman,’ she said. ‘Look now, my dandy boy, and see
more than your money’s worth.’ And she rubbed the glass again. Then Jack
took another look. It was a dull day, but that mirror was bright with
sunshine. There was something funny about that mirror. He saw a fine
place in it, all cool and white and gold, like you see out East. It was
a palace, I reckon. There was a fountain in the middle, and some girls
with not a lot on, like some of the Amsterdam postcard girls, were lying
around, just anyhow. And there was Jack’s own self among ’em, and they
were laughing and talking to him. It was fine. Jack turned his head,
just like you would do, to see if the real place was behind him. But, of
course, there was the funnels and topmasts of Barry, and the sky looked
like rain. I bet it gave him a shock.

“‘Now you’ve seen what’ll be your luck, honey, if you’re not careful,’
said the old woman. ‘Mind your eye,’ she said, ‘mind your eye, you with
the saucy face. What’s more,’ she called after him, ‘don’t you speak to
the girl with the odd eyes in Cardiff, though I know you will, and sorry
you’ll be.’

“‘Go to the devil,’ said Jack.

“He was just like all you young chaps. Thought she was an artful old
shark who’d got his money dead easy. That’s what you always think. If
you don’t understand anything, then there’s nothing in it. You call in
at the next pub and chatter to the barmaid. What happened? Why, the very
next day the Skipper came back, and told him the new boat was near
ready, and the owner wanted to see him. Jack went, and forgot about
everything, except that he was going to be the handsome boy all right
with the owner’s own daughter to look at him. A pretty girl she was too.
I saw her once, holding up her skirts off the deck while she looked
round. The Skipper introduced me. ‘Good morning, Mr. Brown,’ she said to
me.

“Coming out of the Great Western Station at Cardiff Jack saw a place
he’d never noticed before. It wasn’t Cardiff style. ‘It’s a new place,’
Jack thinks to himself, ‘and a ripping good place it looks,’ for he was
thirsty, and there was plenty of time. ‘It must have been run up since I
was here last,’ says Jack to himself, ‘though that’s queer, for I reckon
it’d take years to rig up a dandy show of this sort.’ But in he went.

“He was surprised, when he got in, and so would you have been. It was
like the place I saw on the stage at London once. It was in Aladdin, at
a place in the Mile End Road. You know what those things are like, when
the curtain goes up. You can see a long way, but you can’t see all the
way. You expect something to happen there. It was full of pillars, all
white and gold, in a pink light. There was a lot of ladies and gentlemen
sitting on sofas full of cushions, talking, and they were too grand to
even notice Jack as he stood there looking round for a chair. But it
took a lot to get on Jack’s nerves. There was one girl in a white silk
dress, with red roses in her golden belt, and she had a white hat with
red roses in that, and she looked like a summer day. Jack was glad to
see that the only vacant chair was at a table where she sat alone. Of
course, over there goes Jack. The place was as quiet as a church before
the service begins. There was only a faint whispering. He got to where
the girl sat, as if she was waiting for him. She looked up and smiled at
Jack. Jack sat down beside her and said what a fine day it was. She had
a face the colour of moonlight, and her eyes were odd. But there wasn’t
a girl who could make Jack wonder if his tie was straight, in those
days, and he began to order things, and talk.

“Once he took a look round, leaning back in his chair, feeling pretty
large, and he noticed the other people were looking at him artful-like,
out of the corners of their eyes, as if he was talking too loud. But
Jack thought he’d jolly well talk as he liked, and he’d got just the
best girl in that room or anywhere else. He looked at his watch. It was
near twelve o’clock. He had to be at his owner’s by one. There was
plenty of time.

“The drink had a funny taste, but it was the best liquor he’d ever had.
He marked down that place. He didn’t know there was a show like that in
Cardiff. He caught hold of the girl’s hand, which he noticed was white,
and very cold, and pretended he wanted to look at her ring. There was a
stone in the ring, just like a bit of soda. She asked him to try it on
his own finger, because the stone changed colour then, but Jack couldn’t
get the ring off till he’d placed her finger to his lips, to moisten the
ring. He was the boy, was Jack, to see things didn’t drag along. When he
got the ring on his finger the stone was full of red fire. So the time
went; but he forgot all about time, and the owner, and the owner’s
daughter, and everything. The girl’s hair was scented, too, and it was
close to him.

“Presently he looked up, and saw what he’d never noticed before. He
could see further into the building than ever. There seemed to be a
garden beyond, full of sunshine, and all the men and women were walking
that way, talking loud, and laughing. His own girl got up too, and said,
‘Come along, Jack Driscoll,’ and he never even wondered how she knew his
name, nor why her face was like snow by moonlight, nor why she smiled
like that.

“No. Not Jack. All he thought was what a ripping garden that was, with
palms, and marble courts, like you see in the East. There was music far
away, two notes and a drum, like you hear in a native dance, before the
dancers come. It made Jack feel like a millionaire or a lord, able to do
anything, but just then only wanting a good time. Then he noticed they
were alone in the garden, which was full of trees in blossom. All the
other people had gone. There was only that music. The place was very
quiet. He could hear water tinkling in a fountain, and he reckoned he
would stay there till closing time. The girl talked to him in whispers,
and he put his arm around her. I don’t know how long he stayed there,
but he kept telling the girl she was the best girl he’d ever had, and
he’d never had such a good time in his life.

“It was funny the way he got out. Jack reckoned in there that the world
would never come to an end, like young fellers do, when they’re enjoying
themselves proper. But once he took her ring off his finger, to have
another look at it. Then he was in the street again, looking up at a
building which had its doors shut, and Jack only thought he was looking
there for a number he wanted.

“It had started to rain. He looked at his watch. It was just twelve
o’clock. He didn’t know what he wanted with an address in that street,
so he started off in a hurry for his owner’s house, feeling pretty
stiff, as if he’d been sleeping rough. When he got to his owner’s house,
he rang the bell.

“The owner’s daughter came to the door, and looked at him like she
didn’t know him, and was a bit afraid of him. ‘No, thank you,’ she said
kindly, ‘not to-day.’ And shut the door at once.

“What puzzled Jack was that he didn’t feel surprised and angry. He
turned and went down those steps again, and down the street, thinking it
over. He looked back at the house. Yes, that was the house all right.
And that was Annie all right. Well, what the devil was the matter with
him? There was a public-house at the corner, and he stopped there,
thinking things over, and staring at the window. Then he saw his face in
a mirror, and shouted so that the barman came and ordered him out of
that, sharp now. But he kept looking at the glass, not believing his
eyes. He knew his own face again, but only just knew it. His eyes were
dull and red and gummy, same as those old men have who’ve lived too
long, and his face was puffed and pimpled, and he had a lousy white
beard.”




II


December 28. Lat. 39.10 N., long. 16.3 W. Course, S.W. 1/2 west. We are
nearing the tropics. Now the ship has such a complete set of grumblers,
good fellows who know their work better than anyone less than God, that
our great distance at sea is plain. Our men, casually gathered and
speaking divers tongues, detached from earth and set afloat on a mobile
islet to mix on it if they can, have become one body to deal with the
common enemy. We are corporate to face each trouble as it meets us, and
free to explain afterwards how much better we should have done under
another captain. The skipper knows this broad spirit now possesses us,
and so is contented and blithe, wearing only on deck that weary look
which is the sober badge of high office, as though he were an
unfortunate man to have us about him, we being what we are, but that he
would do his best with the fools, seeing we are in his charge.

This morning at six, hearing the men at the hosepipes giving the decks
their daily wash, I tumbled out for a cold tub. This is a simple affair.
You leave the cabin with a towel about you, stand in a clear space, and
rotate before the hydrant, to general cheering. A hot bath on the
“Capella” is not so easy, because, although there is a bath-room aboard,
it has become a paint locker. One must descend into the engine-room,
after warning the engineer on duty, who then will have ready a barrel,
filled from the boilers. The ingenious man will fix a shower bath also.
This is a perforated meat tin, hanging from a grating above the tub, and
connected with a pump. After a hot bath in the engine-room, where the
temperature was often well over 120°, that shower of cold sea water
would strike loud cries from any man whose self-control was uncertain.

This morning was the right prelude to the tropics. This was the morning
when, if our planet had been till then untenanted, a world unconsummated
and waiting approval, the divine approval would have come, and a child
would have been born, an immortal, the offspring of Aurora and the Sea
God, flame-haired and lusty, with eyes as bright as joy, and a rosy body
to be kissed from toes to crown. The dancing light, and the warm shower
suddenly born alive in it from one ripe cloud, the golden air, the waves
of the north-east trades, the seas of the world in the first dawn,
moving along like a multitude released to play, their blue passionate
and profound, their crests innocent and dazzling, made me think I might
hear faint cheering, if I listened intently. In the west was a steep
range of cloudland rising from the sea, and against it was inclined the
flame of a rainbow. There was that rainbow, as constant as the pennant
hoisted over an uplighted occasion. The world’s noble emblem was aloft.
I demanded of the Skipper if he would run up our ensign in reply to it;
but he only peered at me curiously.

The heat increased with the day. We had run well down from the bleak
apex of the world with its nimbus of fogs. Here was the entrance to the
place where our youthful dreams began. I recognised it. Every feature
was as we both have seen it from afar, across the roofs from our outlook
in the arid city when the path to it had appeared as hopeless to our
feet as the path to the moon. This pioneer can assure his fellows whose
bright illusions grow fainter with age that their dreams must be
followed up, to be reached.

At midday we began to cast clothes. As to the afternoon, of that I
remember the less. There was the chief’s empty bunk, so much more
alluring than my own. Into that I climbed, my mind steeled against
drowsy weakness. I would digest my dinner with a book, eyes sternly
alert.

The “Capella” rocked slowly, a big cradle. My body was lax and
responsive. There was about us the silent emptiness which is far from
the centres where many men believe it is necessary to get lots of things
done. The Chief suspired on his settee. The waves were singing to
themselves. A ray of light laughed in my eyes, playing hide and seek
across the wisdom of my book.... I put the book down.

As you know, where I had come from we do not dare to sleep during
daylight without first arguing with the conscience, which usually we
fail to convince. This comes of our mental trick which takes a pleasure
we wholly desire and puts on it a prohibitive label. Self-indulgence,
you understand; softening of the character; courage, brothers, do not
stumble. The solemn forefinger wags gravely in our faces. Before I fell
asleep, my habit, born of the hard grey weather which makes an
Englishman hard and prosperous, did come with its admonitory forefinger.
Remembering that I was secure in a sunnier world I cried out with ribald
mockery across the abyss I had safely crossed, knowing my old self could
not follow, and shut my eyes happily. And also, let me say—sitting up
again with an urgent afterthought, which I must get rid of before I
sleep—if this were not a plain narrative of travel without any wise
asides I would get off the “Capella” here to argue that what all you
fellows want in the place I have luckily left is not more
self-restraint, in which wan virtue you have long shown yourselves to be
so proficient that our awards for your merit have overcrowded the
workhouses, but more rollicking self-indulgence and a ruddy and bright
eyed insistence on the means to it. Look at me now in this bunk! Not
since I was last in a cradle have I felt the world would buoy me up if I
dared to shut my eyes to affairs while the sun was shining. But I am
going to try it again now, and risk my future. I repeat, I would argue
this with you, only I want to sleep....

It is worth recording that when I awoke I found nothing had happened to
me, except benefit. The venture can be made safely. Others had kept the
course for me. The ship had not stopped. Through the door I could see a
half-naked, blackened, and sweating stoker, who had been keeping the
fires while I slept, and he was getting back his breath in loud sobs.
Something had made him sick. These stupid and dirty men will drink too
much while they are attending to the furnaces. They have been warned of
the danger, of which they take no heed, and so they have to suffer. On
the poop was the second officer, busy in the hot sun with a gang,
overhauling a boat. And I found, on enquiry, that a man was still at the
wheel. So thereafter, while in the land of the constant sun, I slept
every afternoon, and was never a penny the worse. Somehow, you know,
things went on. I think I shall become one of the intelligent leisured
class.

It was within an hour of midnight. The moon had set. I was idling
amidships about the ship’s shadowy structure when I was asked to take
charge of the bridge till eight bells. The second mate was ill, and the
first mate was asleep through overwork. The skipper said he would not
keep me up there long. I had but to call if a light came into view, and
to keep an eye on the wheelhouse. Ah, but it is long since I played at
ships, and was a pirate captain. I remembered there are dull folk who
wonder what it feels like to be a king. The king does not know. Ask the
small boy who is surprised with an order to hold a horse’s head. I took
my promotion, mounting the steep ladder to the open height in the night.

I felt then I was more than sundered from my kind. I had been taken and
placed remotely from the comfort of the “Capella’s” isolated community
also. There was me, and there were the stars. They were my nearest
neighbours. I stood for you among them alone. When the last man hears
but does not see the deep waters of this dark sphere in that night to
which there shall be no morning sun, he shall know what was my sensation
aloft in the saddle of the “Capella”; the only inhabitant of a congealed
asteroid off the main track in space, with the sun diminished to a point
through travel, and the Milky Way not reached yet; though I could see we
were approaching its bay of light. An appreciable journey had been made.
But by the faintness of its shine there was a timeless vacancy to be
travelled still. We should make that faint glow, that congregation of
suns, that archipelago of worlds; though not yet. But had we not all the
night to travel in? The night would be long. We should not be disrupted
any more by the old day. The final morning had passed. I had no doubt
the drift of the dark lump to which I clung in space, while my hair
streamed with our speed, would at length reach the bright fraternity, no
more than a dimmer of removed promise though it seemed.

A bell rang beside me in the night. It was answered at once from
somewhere ahead. Others, then, were journeying with me. The void was
peopled, though the travellers were all invisible; and I heard a
confident voice call, “Lights are burning bright.” The lights were. I
could see that. But when the profundities are about you, and you think
you are alone in outer night, that is the kind of word to hear. Joyously
I shouted into what seemed to be boundless nothing, “All Right!”

                   *       *       *       *       *

One dayfall we saw the Canary Islands a great distance on the port beam.
I do not know which day it was. The Hesperides were as blurred as the
place in the calendar. The days had run together into a measureless
sense of well-being. We had passed the last of the trivial allotments of
time. The islands loomed, and I wondered whether that land was the hint
of something in a past life which the memory saw but could not shape.
Whatever was there it was too long forgotten. That apparition which a
whisper told me was land faded as I gazed at it overseas, lazily trying
to remember what it once meant. It was gone again. It was no matter now.
Perhaps I was deceiving myself. Perhaps I had had no other life. This
“Capella,” always under the height of a blue dome, always the centre of
a circular floor of waters, waters to be seen beating against the steep
and luminous walls encompassing us, though nowhere finding an outlet,
was all my experience. I could recall only the faintest shadows of a
past into that limpid present. I could see nothing clearly that was not
confined within the dark faultless line where the sky was inseparably
annealed to the sea. Here I had been always. All I knew was this length
of sheltered deck, and those doors behind me where I leaned on a rail
between the stanchions, doors which sheltered a few familiars with their
clothes on hooks, their pipe racks, and photographs of women, a length
of deck finishing on either hand in two iron ladders, the ladder
forward, just past the radiation and coal grit by the engine-room
casing, descending to a broad walk which led to the forecastle head,
that bare outlook always at a difference with the horizon; and the
ladder aft going down to another broad walk, sticky with new tar, where
the bulwarks were as high as the breast, and Tinker, the dog, glad of a
word from you, trotted about the rusty winches and around the hatches;
and that walk aft finished in the door of the alleyway opening upon the
asylum of the doctor’s cabin, and the saloon, the skipper’s sanctum, and
the domain of the friendly steward. There was the smell of the cargo
drawing from the ventilators on the deck, when you went by their trumpet
mouths. There was the warm oily gush of air from the engine-room
entrance. And in the saloon alleyway I used to think the store of
potatoes, right behind, was generating gases. (But nobody knows every
origin of the marine smells.) Well, here were all the things my senses
apprehended. I could walk round my universe in five minutes. And when I
had finished I could do it again. Here I had been always. Nothing could
be clearer than that. Looking out from my immediate circumstances I saw
no entrance to the place where we were rocking, the place where the
“Capella” was alone. The walls of the enclosure were flawless. There was
not a door through them anywhere. There was not a rift in the precision
of the dark circle about us where one could crawl out between the sky
and the sea.

There we indubitably were though, and I dwelt constantly on the miracle
of that lucky existence. I could not doubt that we were there. Yet how
had we got there? I leave that to the metaphysicians. There we were; and
no man who merely trusted his experience could explain our presence.
There was some evidence to my simple mind that such a life in such
surroundings perchance was the gift of the gods, and that we could never
get any nearer the limits of the world in which we had been placed to
see what was beyond, could never approach that enclosure of blue walls
where the distant waves, which beat against them, could not get out.
Morning after morning I watched them, the dark leaping shapes of the far
rebels, mounting their prison at its base, and collapsing, beaten.

The seas never changed. They followed us and the wind, a living host,
the blue of their slopes and hollows as deep as ecstasy, their crests
white and lambent. They were buoyant, they were leisurely, they were the
right companions of travel. They just kept pace with us. They ran after
us like happy children, as though they had been lagging. They came abeam
to turn up to us their shining faces, calling to us musically, then
dropping behind again in silence. When I looked overside into the
pellucid depths, peering below the surface in long forgetfulness,
leaving the body and gliding the mind in that palpable and hyacinthine
air beneath us where the sunken foam dimmered in pale clouds, I felt
myself not afloat but hovering in the midst of a hollow sphere filled
with light. The blue water was only a heavier and a darker air. I had no
weight there. I was only a quiet thought tinctured with the royal colour
of the space wherein I drifted.

The upper half of the sphere was blue also, but of a different blue. The
rarer and more volatile ether was above us. The sea was its essence and
precipitate. The sea colour was profound and satisfying; but the colour
of the sky was diffused, as though the heaven were an idea which was
beyond you, which you stood regarding, and azure were it symbol, and
that by concentration you might fathom its meaning. But I can report no
luck from my concentrated efforts on that symbol. The colour may have
been its own reward.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Every morning after breakfast the Skipper and the Doctor made a visit to
the forecastle. Then, after the Doctor had carefully searched his dress
for insects, we spent the day together. We mounted the forecastle to
begin with, watching the acre of dazzling foam which the “Capella’s”
bows broke around us. Out of that the flying fish would get up, just
under us, to go skimming off, flights of silver locusts. This reminded
the surgeon that we might try for albacore and bonito, which would be a
change from tinned mutton. The Skipper found a long fir pole, to which
was attached sixty fathoms of line, with a large hook which we covered
with a white rag, lapping a cutting of tin round the shank. When this
object was dropped over the stern in its leaps from wave to wave it bore
a distant resemblance to a flying fish. The weight of the trailing line,
breaking a cord “tell-tale,” frequently gave us false alarms and long
tiring hauls. But on the second day the scaffold pole vibrated to some
purpose, and we knew we were hauling in more than the bait. We got
aboard a coryphene, the dolphin of the sailors. It gave us in its death
agony the famous display, beautiful, but rather painful to watch, for
the wonderful hues, as they changed, stayed in the eye, and sent to the
mind only a message of a creature in a violent death struggle.

The contours of this predatory fish express extraordinary speed and
power, and its armed mouth has been upturned by Providence the better to
catch the flying fish as they drop back to sea after an effort to escape
from it. But Providence, or evolution, had never taught the coryphene
that there are times when the little flying fish, as it falls back
exhausted, may be a rag of white shirt and a scrap of bright tin ware
with a large hook in its deceptive little belly. So there the dolphin
was, glowing and fading with the hues of faery. Its life really
illuminating it from within. As its life ebbed, or strove convulsively,
its colours waned and pulsed. It was gold when it came on board, and
darkened to ultramarine as it thrashed the deck, and its broad dorsal
fin showed violet eyes. Its body changed to a pale metallic green; and
then its light went out.

Now as I look back upon the “Capella” and her company as they were in
that period of our adventure when our place was but somewhere in
mid-ocean between Senegambia and Trinidad, I see us but indifferently,
for we are mellowed in that haze in which retrospection just discerns
those affairs, long since accomplished, that were not altogether
wearisome. It is better to go to my log again, for there the matter was
noted by the stub of a pencil at the very time, and when, unless a
beautiful mist was seen, it had not the remotest chance of being
recorded. When I turn to the diary for further evidence of those days of
blue and gold in the north-east trades its faithfulness is seen at once.

“_30 Decr._ A grey day. The sun fitful. Wind and seas on the port
quarter, and the large following billows occasionally lopping inboard as
she rolled. The decks therefore are sloppy again. We had a sharp
reminder at six bells that we are not bound to any health resort, as
Sandy put it. We were told to go aft, where the doctor would give each
of us five grains of quinine. This is to be a daily rite. To encourage
the men to take the quinine it is to be given to them in gin. Being
foreigners, they did not understand the advice about the quinine, but
they caught the word gin quite well, and they were outside the saloon
alleyway, a smiling queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to see
the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man was a big German deckhand.
He took the glass from the doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this
unexpected charity from the skipper dissolved instantly when the quinine
got behind it. His eyes opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise of
his fellows he turned violently to the ship’s side, rested his hands on
it, and spat; spat carefully, continuously and with grave deliberation.

“Distance run since noon yesterday 230 miles. Actual knots 9,5. Total
distance 2072 miles. There was not a living thing in sight to-day; not
even a flying fish.

“The night is fine and starlit, the Milky Way a brilliant arch from east
to west, under which we are steaming. When Venus rose she was a tiny
moon, so refulgent that she gave a faint pallor to a large area of sky,
outlined the coast of a cloud, and made a broad shining path on the sea.
The moon rose after nine, veiled in filmy air, peeping motionless at the
edge of a black curtain.

“The moon later was quite obscured, and the steamer ceased to exist
except where in my heated cabin the smoky oil lamp showed me my dismal
cubicle. I went in and sat on the mate’s sea chest. The mate was on
duty. On the washstand was his mug of cocoa, and on top of the mug two
thick sandwiches of bread and meat. That food was black with
cockroaches. The oil lamp stank but gave little light. The engines were
throbbing, and out of the open door I saw the gleam of the wash, and
heard its harassing note. I could not read. I loathed the idea of
getting into the hot bunk and lying there, stewing, a clear keen,
clangour of thoughts making sleep impossible. The mate appeared, drove
off the cockroaches cheerfully, examined the sandwiches for
inconspicuous deer, opening each to make sure, and then muffled himself
with one. My God! I could have killed him with these two hands. What
right had he to be cheerful? But he is such a ginger-headed boy, and to
break that unconsciously happy smile of his would be sacrilege. Besides,
he began to tell me about his sweetheart. Her portrait hangs in our
cabin. It is an enlargement. You pay for the frame, and the
photographer, overjoyed I suppose, gives you the enlargement. I prefer
the second engineer’s sweet-hearts, who are in colours, and are Dutch
picture postcards and cuttings from French comic papers; and he calls
them his recollections of Sundays at home. I listened, patient and kind,
to the second mate’s reminiscences of rapturous evening walks under the
lamps of Swansea with this girl in the picture—no doubt it eased his
heart to tell me—till I could have howled aloud, like the dog who hears
music at night. Then I broke away, and ran to the chief’s cabin for
sanctuary.

“The Chief was making an abstract, and was searching through his log for
ten tons of coal which were missing. In the hunt for the lost coal I
lost myself. I grew excited wherever a thick bush of figures promised
the hidden quarry; and in an hour’s search found the strayed tons in
hiding at the bottom of a column. They had been left there, and not
transported into the next. Again the dread of that bunk had to be faced
and dealt with. I stood at the chief’s door, knocking out my pipe,
looking astern into the night, looking to where Ursa-Major, our
celestial familiar of home, was low down and preparing to leave us
altogether to the strange and perhaps unlucky gods of other skies. O the
nights at sea!

“_31 Decr._ Wakened with my heart jumping because of a devastating sound
without. In the early morning, Tinker was being thrashed by the Old Man
for eating the saloon mats. When at 11.30 the men congregated amidships
with their tins for dinner the sun was a near furnace and the breeze a
balm. The white of the ship is now a glare, and the sea foam cannot be
looked at. Donkey lumbered out of his place where he attends to the
minor boiler, his face the colour of putty, and held to a rail, gazing
out with dead eyes overside, gasping. He declared he couldn’t stick his
job. The flying fish are getting up in flights all day long. I saw one
fish go a distance of about fifty yards in a semi-circle, making a bight
in the direction of the wind. We caught another large coryphene to-day,
and had him in steaks for tea. He was much better cooked than the last,
which had the texture of white wool; and to increase our happiness the
cook had not given us sour bread. At midday we were 17.22 N. and 33.27
W.

“I had a lonely evening with the chief. This is New Year’s eve. We
talked of the East India Dock Road, and of much else in London Town. At
eight bells, when we held up our glasses in the direction of Polaris,
the moon was bright and the waters hushed. Then we took each a hurricane
lamp, and went about the decks collecting flying fish for breakfast,
finding a dozen of them.

“_1 Jan._ The uplifted splendour of these days persists; but the
splendour sags now a little at midday with the weight of the heat. The
poop deck is now sheltered with an awning; and lying there in lazy
chairs, with a wind following and barely overtaking us, idly watching
the shadows of the overhead gear move on the bright awning as the ship
rolls, is to get caught in the toils of the droning wake, and to sleep
before you know you are a prisoner. The wake itself, in these seas, when
the sun is on it, a broad road going home straight and white over the
hills, the road which is not for us, is one of the good things of the
voyage. Straight beneath the rail the wake is an upheaval of gems,
sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, always instantly melting in the sun,
always fusing and fleeting in swift coils of malachite and chrysoprase,
but never gone. As you watch that coloured turmoil it draws your mind
from your body. You feel your careless gaze snatched in the revolving
hues speeding astern, and your consciousness is instantly unwound from
your spinning brain, and you are left standing on the ship, an empty
spool.

“Under the awning at night, to the Doctor and to me, the first mate
played his accordion. He is a little Welshman, this mate, with a
childish nose and a brutish moustache, and in his face is blended a
girlish innocence of large affairs, and the hirsute nature of the adult
male animal, a nature he relieves on the “Capella” with bawdy talk and
guffaws. He played ‘Come, Birdie, Come,’ and things like that, and then
told us some Monte Videan stories. As they were true stories about
himself and other young sailors they ought really to be included in a
faithful diary of a sea voyage, yet as I cannot reproduce the Doctor’s
antiseptic judgment, of which I know nothing but the glow of his pipe in
the unresponding dark at the end of the stories—the last titter of the
mate had died away—it is better to leave this matter alone.

“_3 Jan._ The hottest day we have had. I descended at midday to the
engines to see Sandy at work with his shining giants. Standing on the
middle platform, while he was shouting his greetings to me over the
uproar, I felt the heat of the grating through my boot soles, and
shifted. The temperature there was 122°. Sandy was but in his drawers
and a pair of old boots, and the tongues of the boots, properly, were
hanging out. His noble torso was glistening with moisture, and as I
talked, energetically vaulting my words above the roar of the crank
throws in that hot and oleaginous place, the perspiration began a sudden
drop from my own face and hands, and in a copious way which startled me.
For a time I had some difficulty in breathing, as though in a vacuum,
but gradually forgot this danger of suffocation in the love of the
artist Sandy showed while offering me the spectacle of ‘his job.’ I
think I understood him. At first one would see no order in that haze of
rioting steel. The massive metal waves of the shaft were walloping and
plunging in their pits with an astonishing bird-like alacrity; about
fifteen tons of polished steel were moving with swift and somewhat awful
desperation. The big room shook and hummed with the vigour of it. But
order came as Sandy talked, and presently I found the continuous
thunder, that deadening bass of the crank throws, seemed to lessen as we
conversed, sitting together on a tool chest. Our voices easily
penetrated it. And listening more attentively at length I found what
Sandy said was true, that each tossing and circling part of the
room-full could be heard contributing its strident or profound note to
the chorus, and each became constant and expected, a singing personality
which was heard through the others whenever listened for. Above all, at
regular intervals, a rod rang clear, like the bell in Parsifal; yet,
curiously enough, Sandy declared he could not catch that note, though it
tolled clear and resonant enough in my ears. The skylight was so far
above us that we got little daylight. Hanging from the gratings in a few
places, some black iron pots, shaped like kettles, had cotton rags in
their spouts, and were giving us oil flares instead. The terrific
unremitting energy of the ponderous arms, moving thunderously, and still
with a speed which made tons as aery as flashes of light; and Sandy in
the midst of it, quick in nothing but his eyes, moving about his raging
but tethered monsters cock-sure and casual, rubbing his hands on a pull
of cotton waste, putting his ear down to listen attentively at a
bearing, his face turned from a steel fist which flung violently at his
head, missed him, and withdrew to shoot at him again, gave me the first
distinct feeling that our enterprise had its purpose powerfully
energised and cunningly directed. I felt as I watched the dance of the
eccentrics and the connecting rods that our ship was getting along
famously. I think I detected in Sandy himself a faint contempt for the
chap at the upper end of the telegraph. I stayed two hours, and then my
shirt was as though I had been overboard; and ascending a greasy and
almost perpendicular series of ladders to the upper world, I discovered,
from the drag of my feet and the weight of my body, that I had had just
as much of an engineer’s watch in the tropics as I could stand. There
was a burst of cool light. The tumult ceased; and again there was the
old “Capella” rocking in the singing seas, for ever under the tranquil
clouds. We had stopped again.

“_4 Jan._ A moderate north-east wind and sea, and a bright morning; but
far out a dark cloud formed, and drew, and driving towards us, covered
us presently with a blue-black canopy. The warm torrent fell with
outrageous violence, and for all we could see of our way the “Capella”
might have been in a dense fog. The mosquito curtains were served out
to-day, and we amused ourselves draping our bunks. Later, the weather
cleared. The night was stiflingly hot; and in that reeking bunk, with an
iron bulkhead separating me from the engine room, it was like lying on
the shelf of an oven. Though wide open on its catch, the door admitted
no air, but did allow a miserable tap-tapping as the ship rolled. At
eleven o’clock a pale face floated in the black vacancy of the door, and
I could see the Doctor peering in to find if I were awake. ‘I say,
Purser, I can’t sleep. Will you come and have a gossip, old dear?’ We
went aft in our pyjamas, the Doctor cleared away bottles and things from
his settee, and we disembarked from the ‘Capella,’ visiting other and
distant stars, returning to our own again not before three next morning.

“_5 Jan._ We seem to have got to a dead end of the trade winds. The heat
of the forenoon was oppressively humid and dinner was nearly lost
through it. The cook, a fair and plump Dutchman, broke down in the midst
of his pans, and was carried out to find his breath again. This poor
chef is up at four o’clock every morning coffee making; is working in
the galley, which is badly ventilated, all day, getting two hours’ rest
in the early afternoon. Then he goes on till the saloon tea is over;
when he begins to bake bread. He fills in his leisure in peeling
potatoes.

“All round the horizon motionless and permanent storm clouds are banked.
Their forms do not alter, but their colours change with the hours. They
seem to encompass us in a circular lake, a range of precipitous and
intricately piled Alps, high and massive. Cleaving those steeps of
calamitous rocks—for so they looked, and not in the least like
vapour—are chasms full of night, and the upper slopes and summits are
lucent in amber and pearl. In the south and east the ranges are indigo
dark and threatening, and the water between us and that closed country
is opaque and heavy as molten lead. Across the peaks of the mountains
rest horizontal strata of mist. Some petrels were about to-day. The
evening is cool, with a slight head breeze.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

After weeks at sea, imprisoned within the walls of the sky, walls which
have not opened once to admit another vessel to give the assurance of
communion, you begin to doubt your direction and destination, and the
possibility of change. Only the clouds change. The ship is no nearer
breaking that rigid circle. She cannot escape from her place under the
centre of the dome. The most cheering assurance I had was the pulse of
the steamer, felt whenever I rested against her warm body. Purposeful
life was there, at least. Though the day may have been brazen, and
without a hint of progress, and the sea the same empty wilderness, yet
when most disheartened in the blind and melancholy night I felt under me
the beatings, energetic and insistent, of her lively heart, some of that
vitality was communicated, and I got sleep as a child would in the arms
of a strong and wakeful guardian.

Poised between two profundities—though nearer the clouds, cirrus and
lofty though they are, than the land straight beneath the keel—and with
morning and night the only variety in the round, the days flicker by
white and black like a magic lantern working without a story. Tired of
watching for the fruits of our enterprise I went to sleep. Old Captain
Morgan must have lived a dull life, monotonous with adventure. What is
the use of travel, I asked myself. The stars are as near to London as
they are to the Spanish main. In their planetary journey through the
void the passengers at Peckham see as much as their fellows who peer
through the windows in Macassar. The sun rises in the east, and the moon
is horned; but some of the passengers on the mudball, strangely enough,
take their tea without milk. Yet what of that?

In the chart room some days ago I learned we had 3000 fathoms under us.
Well; these waves of the tropics, curling over such abysmal deeps, look
much the same as the waves off Land’s End. I began to see what I had
done. I had changed the murk of winter in London for the discomforts of
the dog days. I had come thousands of miles to see the thermometer rise.
Where are the Spanish Main, the Guianas, and the Brazils? At last I had
discovered them. I found their true bearings. They are in Raleigh’s
“Golden City of Manoa,” in Burney’s “Buccaneers of America,” with Drake,
Humboldt, Bates, and Wallace; and I had left them all at home. We borrow
the light of an observant and imaginative traveller, and see the foreign
land bright with his aura; and we think it is the country which shines.

                   *       *       *       *       *

At eight this morning we crossed the equator. I paid my footing in
whisky, and forgot all about the equator. Soon after that, idling under
the poop awning, I picked up the Doctor’s book from his vacant chair. I
took the essays of Emerson carelessly and read at once—the sage plainly
had laid a trap for me—“Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and
night, a house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve as well as
all trades and spectacles.” So——. At this moment the first mate
crossed my light, and presently I heard the sounding machine whirring,
and then stop. There was a pause, and then the mate’s unimportant voice,
“Twenty-five fathoms, sir, grey sand!”

Emerson went sprawling. I stood up. Twenty-five fathoms! Then that grey
sand stuck to the tallow of the weight was the first of the Brazils. The
circle of waters was still complete about us, but over the bows, at a
great distance, were thunder clouds and wild lights. The oceanic swell
had decreased to a languid and glassy beat, and the water had become
jade green in colour, shot with turquoise gleams. The Skipper, himself
interested and almost jolly, announced a pound of tobacco to the first
man who spied the coast. We were nearing it at last. Those far clouds
canopied the forests of the Amazon. We stood in at slow speed.

I know those forests. I mean I have often navigated their obscure
waterways, rafting through the wilds on a map, in my slippers, at night.
Now those forests soon were to loom on a veritable skyline. I should see
them where they stood, their roots in the unfrequented floods. I should
see Santa Maria de Belem, its aerial foliage over its shipping and
squalor. It was quite near now. I should see Santarem and Obydos, and
Itacoatiara; and then, turning from the King of Rivers to his tributary,
the Madeira, follow the Madeira to the San Antonio falls in the heart of
the South American continent. We drew over 23 feet, with this “Capella.”
We were going to try what had never been attempted before by an ocean
steamer. This, too, was pioneering. I also was on an adventure, going
two thousand miles under those clouds of the equatorial rains, to live
for a while in the forests of the Orellana. And our vessel’s rigging, so
they tell me, sometimes shall drag the foliage in showers on our decks,
and where we anchor at night the creatures of the jungle will call.

Our nearness to land stirs up some old dreads in our minds also. We
discuss those dreads again, though with more concern than we did at
Swansea. Over the bows is now the prelude. We have heard many unsettling
legends of yellow fever, malaria, blackwater fever, dysentery, and
beri-beri. The mates, looking for land, swear they were fools to come a
voyage like this. They ought to have known better. The Doctor, who does
not always smile when he is amused, advises us not to buy a white sun
umbrella at Para, but a black one; then it will do for the funerals.

“Land O!” That was the Skipper’s own perfunctory cry. He had saved his
pound of tobacco.

It was two in the afternoon. There was America. I rediscovered it with
some difficulty. All I could see was a mere local thickening of the
horizon, as though the pen which drew the faint line dividing the world
ahead into an upper and a nether opalescence had run a little freely at
one point. That thickening of the horizon was the island of Monjui.
Soon, though, there was a palpable something athwart our course. The
skyline heightened into a bluish barrier, which, as we approached still
nearer, broke into sections. The chart showed that a series of low
wooded islands skirted the mainland. Yet it was hard to believe we were
approaching land again. What showed as land was of too unsubstantial a
quality, too thin and broken a rind on that vast area of water to be of
any use as a foothold. Where luminous sky was behind an island groups of
diminutive palms showed, as tiny and distinct as the forms of mildew
under a magnifying glass, delicate black pencillings along the foot of
the sky-wall. Often that hairlike tracery seemed to rest upon the sea.
The “Capella” continued to stand in, till America was more than a frail
and tinted illusion which sometimes faded the more the eye sought it.
Presently it cast reflections. The islands grew into cobalt layers, with
vistas of silver water between them, giving them body. The course was
changed to west, and we cruised along for Atalaia point, towards the
pilot station. Over the thin and futile rind of land which topped the
sea—it might have undulated on the low swell—ponderous thunder clouds
towered, continents of night in the sky, with translucent areas dividing
them which were strangely illuminated from the hither side. Curtains as
black as bitumen draped to the waters from great heights. Two of these
appalling curtains, trailing over America, were a little withdrawn. We
could look beyond them to a diminishing array of glowing cloud summits,
as if we saw there an accidental revelation of a secret and wonderful
region with a sun of its own. And all, gigantic clouds, the sea, the far
and frail coast, were serene and still. The air had ceased to breathe. I
thought this new lucent world we had found might prove but a lucky dream
after all, to be seen but not to be entered, and that some noise would
presently shatter it and wake me. But we came alongside the white pilot
schooner, and the pilot put off in a boat manned by such a crowd of
grinning, ragged, and cinnamon skinned pirates as would have broken the
fragile wonder of any spell. Ours, though, did not break, and I was able
to believe we had arrived. At sunset the great clouds were full of
explosions of electric fire, and there were momentary revelations above
us of huge impending shapes. We went slowly over a lower world obscurely
lighted by phosphorescent waves.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was not easy to make out, before sunrise, what it was we had come to.
I saw a phantom and indeterminate country; but as though we guessed it
was suspicious and observant, and its stillness a device, we moved
forward slowly and noiselessly, as a thief at an entrance. Low level
cliffs were near to either beam. The cliffs might have been the dense
residuum of the night. The night had been precipitated from the sky,
which was clearing and brightening. Our steamer was between banks of
these iron shades.

Suddenly the sunrise ran a long band of glowing saffron over the shadow
to port, and the vague summit became remarkable with a parapet of black
filigree, crowns and fronds of palms and strange trees showing in rigid
patterns of ebony. A faint air then moved from off shore as though under
the impulse of the pouring light. It was heated and humid, and bore a
curious odour, at once foreign and familiar, the smell of damp earth,
but not of the earth I knew, and of vegetation, but of vegetation exotic
and wild. For a time it puzzled me that I knew the smell; and then I
remembered where we had met before. It was in the palm house at Kew
Gardens. At Kew that odour once made a deeper impression on me than the
extraordinary vegetation itself, for as a boy I thought that I inhaled
the very spirit of the tropics of which it was born. After the first
minute on the Para River that smell went, and I never noticed it again.

Full day came quickly to show me the reality of one of my early visions,
and I suppose I may not expect many more such minutes as I spent when
watching from the “Capella’s” bridge the forest of the Amazon take
shape. It was soon over. The morning light brimmed at the forest top,
and spilled into the river. The channel filled with sunshine. There it
was then. In the northern cliff I could see even the boughs and trunks;
they were veins of silver in a mass of solid chrysolite. This forest had
not the rounded and dull verdure of our own woods in midsummer, with
deep bays of shadow. It was a sheer front, uniform, shadowless, and
astonishingly vivid. I thought then the appearance of the forest was but
a local feature, and so gazed at it for what it would show me next. It
had nothing else to show me. Clumps of palms threw their fronds above
the forest roof in some places, or a giant exogen raised a dome; but
that was all. Those strong characters in the growth were seen only in
passing. They did not change the outlook ahead of converging lines of
level green heights rising directly from a brownish flood.

Occasionally the river narrowed, or we passed close to one wall, and
then we could see the texture of the forest surface, the microstructure
of the cliff, though we could never look into it for more than a few
yards, except where, in some places, habitations were thrust into the
base of the woods, as in lower caverns. An exuberant wealth of forms
built up that forest which was so featureless from a little distance.
The numerous palms gave grace and life to the façade, for their plumes
flung in noble arcs from tall and slender columns, or sprayed directly
from the ground in emerald fountains. The rest was inextricable
confusion. Vines looped across the front of green, binding the forest
with cordage, and the roots of epiphytes dropped from upper boughs, like
hanks of twine.

In some places the river widened into lagoons, and we seemed to be in a
maze of islands. Canoes shot across the waterways, and river schooners,
shaped very like junks, with high poops and blue and red sails, were
diminished beneath the verdure, betraying the great height of the woods.
Because of its longitudinal extension, fining down to a point in the
distance, the elevation of the forest, when uncontrasted, looked much
less than it really was. The scene was so luminous, still, and
voiceless, it was so like a radiant mirage, or a vivid remembrance of an
emotional dream got from books read and read again, that only the
unquestionable verity of our iron steamer, present with her smoke and
prosaic gear, convinced me that what was outside us was there. Across a
hatch a large butterfly hovered and flickered like a flame. Dragon flies
were suspended invisibly over our awning, jewels in shimmering enamels.

                   *       *       *       *       *

We anchored just before breakfast, and a small launch flying a large
Brazilian flag was soon fussing at our gangway. The Brazilian customs
men boarded us, and the official who was left in charge to overlook the
“Capella” while we remained was a tall and majestic Latin with dark eyes
of such nobility and brooding melancholy that it never occurred to me
that our doctor, who has travelled much, was other than a fellow with a
dull Anglo-Saxon mind when he removed some loose property to his cabin
and locked his door, before he went ashore. So I left my field glasses
on the ice-chest; and that was the last I saw of them. Yet that fellow
had such lovely hair, as the ladies would say, and his smile and his
courtesy were fit for kings. He carried a scented pink handkerchief and
wore patent leather boots. Our surgeon had but a faint laugh when these
explanations were made to him, taking my hand fondly, and saying he
loved little children.

Para, a flat congestion of white buildings and red roofs in the sun, was
about a mile beyond our anchorage, over the port bow; and as its name
has been to me one that had the appeal of the world not ours, like
Tripoli of Barbary, Macassar, the Marquesas, and the Rio Madre de Dios,
the agent’s launch, as it took us towards the small craft lying
immediately before the front of that spread of houses between the river
and the forest, was so momentous an occasion that the small talk of the
dainty Englishmen in linen suits, a gossiping group around the agent and
the Skipper, hardly came into the picture, to my mind. The launch rudely
hustled through a cluster of gaily painted native boats, the dingiest of
them bearing some sonorous name, and I landed in Brazil.

There was an esplanade, shadowed by an avenue of mangoes. We crossed
that, and went along hot narrow streets, by blotched and shabby walls,
to the office to which our ship was consigned. We met a fisherman
carrying a large turtle by a flipper. We came to a dim cool warehouse.
There, some negroes and half-breeds were lazily hauling packages in the
shadows. It had an office railed off where a few English clerks, in
immaculate white, overlooked a staff of natives. The warehouse had a
strange and memorable odour, evasive, sweet, and pungent, as barbaric a
note as I found in Para, and I understood at once I had come to a place
where there were things I did not know. I felt almost timorous and yet
compelled when I sniffed at those shadows; though what the eye saw in
the squalid streets of the riverside, where brown folk stood regarding
us carelessly from openings in the walls, I had thought no more than a
little interesting.

What length of time we should have in Belem was uncertain, but presently
the Skipper, looking most morose, came away from his discussion with the
agent and told us, at some length, what he thought of people who kept a
ship waiting because of a few unimportant papers. Then he mumbled, very
reluctantly, that we had plenty of time to see all Para. The Doctor and
I were out of that office before the Skipper had time to change his
mind. Our captain is a very excellent master mariner, but occasionally
he likes to test the security of his absolute autocracy, to see if it is
still sound. I never knew it when it was not; but yet he must, to assure
himself of a certainty, or to exercise some devilish choler in his
nature, sometimes beat our poor weak bodies against the adamant thing,
to see which first will break. I will say for him that he is always
polite when handing back to us our bruised fragments. Here he was giving
us a day’s freedom, and one’s first city of the tropics in which to
spend it; and we agreed with him that such a waste of time was almost
unbearable, and left hurriedly.

Outside the office was a small public square where grew palms which ran
flexible boles, swaying with the weight of their crowns, clear above the
surrounding buildings, shadowing them except in one place, where the
front of a ruinous church showed, topped by a crucifix. The church, a
white and dilapidated structure, was hoary with ficus and other plants
which grew from ledges and crevices. Through the crowns of the palms the
sunlight fell in dazzling lathes and partitions, chequering the stones.
An ox-cart stood beneath.

The Paraenses, passing by at a lazy gait—which I was soon compelled to
imitate—in the heat, were puzzling folk to one used to the features of
a race of pure blood, like ourselves. Portuguese, negro, and Indian were
there, but rarely a true type of one. Except where the black was the
predominant factor the men were impoverished bodies, sallow, meagre, and
listless; though there were some brown and brawny ruffians by the
foreshore. But the women often were very showy creatures, certainly
indolent in movement, but not listless, and built in notable curves.
They were usually of a richer colour than their mates, and moved as
though their blood were of a quicker temper. They had slow and insolent
eyes. The Indian has given them the black hair and brown skin, the negro
the figure, and Portugal their features and eyes. Of course, the ladies
of Para society, boasting their straight Portuguese descent, are not
included in this insulting description; and I do not think I saw them.
Unless, indeed, they were the ladies who boldly eyed us in the
fashionable Para hotel, where we lunched, at a great price, off imported
potatoes, tinned peas, and beef which in England would be sold to a glue
factory; I mean the women in those Parisian costumes erring something on
the sides of emphasis, and whose remarkable pallor was even a little
greenish in the throat shadows.

After lunch some disappointment and irresolution crept into our
holiday....There had been a time—but that was when Para was only in a
book; that was when its mere printed name was to me a token of the
tropics. You know the place I mean. You can picture it. Paths that go at
noon but a little way into the jungle which overshadows an isolated
community of strange but kindly folk, paths that end in a twilight
stillness; ardent hues, flowers of vanilla, warm rain, a luscious and
generative earth, fireflies in the scented dusk of gardens; and
mystery—every outlook disappearing in the dark of the unknown.

Well, here I was, placed by the ordinary moves of circumstance in the
very place the name of which once had been to me like a chord of that
music none hears but oneself. I stood in Para, outside a picture
postcard shop. Electric cars were bumping down a narrow street. The
glitter of a cheap jeweller’s was next to the stationer’s; and on the
other side was a vendor of American and Parisian boots. There have been
changes in Para since Bates wrote his idylls of the forest. We two
travellers, after ordering some red earthenware chatties, went to find
Bates’ village of Nazareth. In 1850 it was a mile from the town. It is
part of the town now, and an electric tram took us there, a tram which
drove vultures off the line as it bumped along. The heat was a serious
burden. The many dogs, which found energy enough to limp out of the way
of the car only when at the point of death, were thin and diseased, and
most unfortunate to our nice eyes. The Brazilian men of better quality
we passed were dressed in black cloth suits, and one mocked the equator
with a silk hat and yellow boots. I set down these things as the tram
showed them. The evident pride and hauteur, too, of these Latins, was a
surprise to one of a stronger race. We stopped at a street corner, and
this was Nazareth. Bates’ pleasant hamlet is now the place of Para’s
fashionable homes—pleasant still, though the overhead tram cables, and
the electric light standards which interrupt the avenues of trees, place
you there, now your own turn comes to look for the romance of the
tropics, in another century. But the villas are in heliotrope, primrose,
azure, and rose, bowered in extravagant arbours of papaws mangoes,
bananas, and palms, with shrubberies beneath of feathery mimosas, and
cassias with orange and crimson blooms. And my last walk ashore was in
Swansea High Street in the winter rain! From Nazareth’s main street the
side turnings go down to the forest. For, in spite of its quays, its
steamers, and its electric trams, Para is but built in a larger clearing
of the wilderness. The jungle stood at the bottom of all suburban
streets, a definite city wall. The spontaneity and savage freedom of the
plant life in this land of alternate hot sun and warm showers at last
blurred and made insignificant to me the men who braved it in silk hats
and broadcloth there, and the trams, and the jewellers’ shops, for my
experience of vegetation was got on my knees in a London suburb, praying
things to come out of the cold mud. Here, I began to suspect, they
besieged us, quick and turbulent, an exhaustible army, ready to
reconquer the foothold man had hardly won, and to obliterate his works.

We passed through by-ways, where naked brown babies played before the
doors. We happened upon the cathedral, and went on to the little dock
where native vessels rested on garbage, the tide being out. Vultures
pulled at stuff beneath the bilges. The crews, more Indian than
anything, and men of better body than the sallow fellows in the town,
sprawled on the hot stones of the quays and about the decks. There was a
huge negress, arms akimbo, a shapeless monument in black indiarubber
draped in cotton print, who talked loudly with a red boneless mouth to
two disregarding Indians sitting with their backs to a wall. She had a
rabbit’s foot, mounted in silver, hanging between her dugs. The
schooners, ranged in an arcade, were rigged for lateen sails, very like
Mediterranean craft. The forest was a narrow neutral tinted ribbon far
beyond. The sky was blue, the texture of porcelain. The river was
yellow. And I was grievously disappointed; yet if you put it to me I
cannot say why. There was something missing, and I don’t know what.
There was something I could not find; but as it is too intangible a
matter for me to describe even now, you may say, if you like, that the
fault was with me, and not with Para. We stood in a shady place, and the
doctor, looking down at his hand, suddenly struck it. “Let us go,” he
said. He showed me the corpse of a mosquito. “Have you ever seen the
yellow fever chap?” the Doctor asked. “That is he.” We left.

Near the agent’s office we met an English shipping clerk, and he took us
into a drink shop, and sat us at a marble-topped table having gilded
iron legs, and called for gin tonics. We began to tell him what we
thought of Para. It did not seem much of a place. It was neither here
nor there.

He was a pallid fellow with a contemplative smile, and with weary eyes
and tired movements. “I know all that,” he said. “It’s a bit of a hole.
Still—You’d be surprised. There’s a lot here you don’t see at first.
It’s big. All out there—he waved his arm west inclusively—it’s a world
with no light yet. You get lost in it. But you’re going up. You’ll see.
The other end of the forest is as far from the people in the streets
here as London is—it’s farther—and they know no more about it. I was
like you when I first came. I gave the place a week, and then reckoned I
knew it near enough. Now, I’m—well, I’m half afraid of it ... not
afraid of anything I can see ... I don’t know. There’s something dam
strange about it. Something you never can find out. It’s something
that’s been here since the beginning, and it’s too big and strong for
us. It waits its time. I can feel it now. Look at those palm trees,
outside. Don’t they look as if they’re waiting? What are they waiting
for? You get that feeling here in the afternoon when you can’t get air,
and the rain clouds are banking up round the woods, and nothing moves.
‘Lord,’ said a fellow to me when I first came, ‘tell us about Peckham.
But for the spicy talk about yellow fever I’d think I was dead and
waiting wide awake for the judgment day.’ That’s just the feeling. As if
something dark was coming and you couldn’t move. There the forest is,
all round us. Nobody knows what’s at the back of it. Men leave Para,
going up river. We have a drink in here, and they go up river, and don’t
come back.

“Down by the square one day I saw an old boy in white ducks and a sun
helmet having a shindy with the sentry at the barracks. The old fellow
was kicking up a dust. He was English, and I suppose he thought the
sentry would understand him, if he shouted. English and Americans do.

“You have to get into the road here, when you approach the barracks.
It’s the custom. The sentry always sends you off the pavement. The old
chap was quite red in the face about it. And the things he was saying!
Lucky for him the soldier didn’t know what he meant. So I went over, as
he was an Englishman, and told him what the sentry wanted. ‘What,’ said
the man, ‘walk in the road? Not me. I’d sooner go back.’

“Go back he did, too. I walked with him and we got rather pally. We came
in here. We sat at that table in the corner. He said he was Captain
Davis, of Barry. Ever heard of him? He said he had brought out a
shallow-draught river boat, and he was taking her up the Rio Japura. The
way he talked! Do you know the Japura? Well, it’s a deuce of a way from
here. But that old captain talked—he talked like a child. He was so
obstinate about it. He was going to take that boat up the Japura, and
you’d have thought it was above Boulter’s Lock. Then he began to swear
about the dagoes.

“The old chap got quite wild again when he thought of that soldier. He
was a little man, nothing of him, and his face was screwed up as if he
was always annoyed about something. You have to take things as they
come, here, and let it go. But this Davis man was an irritable old boy,
and most of his talk was about money. He said he was through with the
boat running jobs. No more of ’em. It was as bare as boards. Nothing to
be made at the game, he said. Over his left eye he had a funny hairy
wart, a sort of knob, and whenever he got excited it turned red. I may
say he let me pay for all the drinks. I reckon he was pretty close with
his money.

“He told me he knew a man in Barry who’d got a fine pub—a little
gold-mine. He said there was a stuffed bear at the pub and it brought
lots of customers. Seemed to think I must know the place. He said he was
going to try to get an alligator for the chap who kept the pub. The
alligator could stand on its hind legs at the other side of the door,
with an electric bulb in its mouth, like a lemon. That was his fine
idea. He reckoned that would bring customers. Then old Davis started to
fidget about. I began to think he wanted to tell me something, and I
wondered what the deuce it was. I thought it was money. It generally is.
At last he told me. He wanted one of those dried Indian heads for that
pub. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘The Indians kill somebody, and
make his head smaller than a baby’s, and the hair hangs down all round.’

“Have you ever seen one of those heads? The Indians bone ’em, and stuff
’em with spice and gums, and let ’em dry in the sun. They don’t look
nice. I’ve seen one or two.

“But I tried to persuade him to let the head go. The Government has
stopped that business, you know. Got a bit too thick. If you ordered a
head, the Johnnies would just go out and have somebody’s napper.

“I missed old Davis after that. I was transferred to Manaos, up river. I
don’t know what became of him. It was nearly a year when I came back to
Para. Our people had had the clearing of that boat old Davis brought
out, and I found some of his papers, still unsettled. I asked about him,
in a general way, and found he hadn’t arrived. His tug had been back
twice. When it was here last it seemed the native skipper explained
Davis went ashore, when returning, at a place where they touched for
rubber. He went into the village and didn’t come back. Well, it seems
the skipper waited. No Davis. So he tootled his whistle and went on up
stream, because the river was falling, and he had some more stations to
do in the season. He was at the village again in a few days, though, and
Davis wasn’t there then. The tug captain said the village was deserted,
and he supposed the old chap had gone down river in another boat. But
he’s not back yet. The boss said the fever had got him, somewhere.
That’s the way things go here.

“A month ago an American civil engineer touched here, and had to wait
for a boat for New York. He’d been right up country surveying for some
job or another, Peru way. I went up to his hotel with the fellows to see
him one evening. He was on his knees packing his trunks. ‘Say, boys,’ he
said, sitting on the floor, ‘I brought a whole lot of truck from way up,
and now it hasn’t got a smile for me.’ He offered me his collection of
butterflies. Then the Yankee picked up a ball of newspaper off the
floor, and began to peel it. ‘This goes home,’ he said. ‘Have you seen
anything like that? I bet you haven’t.’ He held out the opened packet in
his hand, and there was a brown core to it. ‘I reckon that is thousands
of years old,’ said the American.

“It was a little dried head, no bigger than a cricket ball, and about
the same colour. Very like an Indian’s too. The features were quite
plain, and there was a tiny wart over the left eyebrow. ‘I bet you
that’s thousands of years old,’ said the American. ‘I bet you it isn’t
two,’ I said.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

We returned to the steamer in the late afternoon, bringing with us two
Brazilian pilots, who were to take us as far as Itacoatiara. We sailed
next morning for the interior. Para, like all the towns on the Amazon,
has but one way out of it. There is a continent behind Para, but you
cannot go that way; when you leave the city you must take the river.
Para stands by the only entrance to what is now the greatest region of
virgin tropics left in the world. Always at anchor off the city’s front
are at least a dozen European steamers, most of them flying the red
ensign. A famous engineering contractor, also British, is busy
constructing modern wharves there; and Thames tugs and mudhoppers,
flying the Brazilian flag, as the law insists, but bawling London
compliments as they pass your ship, help the native schooners with their
rakish lateen sails, blue and scarlet, to make the anchorage brisk and
lively. Looking out from the “Capella’s” bridge she appeared to be
within a lagoon. The lake was elliptical, and so large it was a world
for the eye to range in. It was bound by a low barrier of forest, a
barrier distant enough to lose colour, nature, and significance. Para,
white and red, lay reflecting the sunset from many facets in the
south-west, with a cheerful array of superior towers and spires. From
the ship Para looked big, modern, and prosperous; and with those vast
rounded clouds of the rains assembling and mounting over the bright
city, and brooding there, impassive and dark, but with impending keels
lustrous with the burnish of copper and steel, and seeing a rainbow
curving down from one cloud over the city’s white front, I, being a
new-comer, and with a pardonable feeling of exhilaration which was of my
own well-being in a new and a wide and radiant place, thought of man
there as a conqueror who had overcome the wilderness, builded him a
city, bridled the exuberance of a savage land, and directed the sap and
life, born in a rich soil of ardent sun and rain, into the forms useful
to him. So I entered the chart-room, and looked with a new interest on
the chart of the place. Then I felt less certain of the conqueror and
his taming bridle. I saw that this lagoon in which the “Capella” showed
large and important was but a point in an immense area of tractless
islands and meandering waterways, a region intricate, and, the chart
confessed, little known. The coast opposite the city, which I had taken
for mainland, was the trivial Ihla des Oncas. The main channel of the
river was beyond that island, with the coast of Marajo for the farther
shore; and Marajo also was but an island, though as large as Wales. The
north channel of the Amazon was beyond again, with more islands, about
which the chart confessed less knowledge. One of the pilots was with me;
and when I spoke of those points in the ultimate Amazons, the alluring
names on maps you read in England, here they were, at Para, just what
they are at home, still vague and far, journeys thither to be reckoned
by time; a shrug of the shoulders and a look of amusement; two months,
Senhor, or perhaps three or four. The idea came slowly; but it dawned,
something like the conception of astronomy’s amplitudes, of the
remoteness of the beyond of Amazonas, that new world I had just entered.

I crept within the mosquito curtain that night, and the still heated
dark lay on my mind, the pressure of an unknown full of dread. I thought
of the pale shipping clerk and his tired smile, and of Captain Davis,
his face no bigger than a cricket ball, and the same colour, with a wart
over his eye; and recalled the anxious canvass I had heard made for news
of sickness up-river. A ship had passed outwards that morning, the
consul told us, with twenty men on board down with fever.

And Thorwaldsen. I forgot to tell you about Thorwaldsen. He was a
trader, and last rainy season he took his vessel up some far backwater,
beyond Manaos, with his wife and his little daughter. News had just come
from nowhere to Para that his wife had died in childbirth in the wilds,
and Thorwaldsen had been murdered; but nothing was known of his
daughter. There it was. I did not know the Thorwaldsens. But the
trader’s little girl who might then be alone in the gloom of the jungle
with savages, helped to keep me awake. And the wife, that fair-haired
Swede; she was in the alien wilderness, beyond all gentlehood, when her
time came. I could see two mosquitoes doing their best to work backwards
through the curtain mesh. They were after me, the emissaries of the
unknown, and their pertinacity was astonishing.

                   *       *       *       *       *

“_Jan. 9._ The ‘Capella’ left Para at three o’clock this morning, and
continued up the Para River. Daylight found us in a wide brownish
stream, with the shores low and indistinguishable on either beam. When
the sun grew hot, the jungle came close in; it was often so close that
we could see the nests of wasps on the trees, like grey shields hanging
there. Between the Para River and the Amazon the waters dissipate into a
maze of serpenting ditches. In width these channels usually are no more
than canals, but they were deep enough to float our big tramp steamer.
They thread a multitude of islands, islands overloaded with a massed
growth which topped our mast-heads. Our steamer was enclosed within
resonant chasms, and the noise and incongruity of our progress awoke
deep protests there.

“The dilated loom of the rains, the cloud shapes so continental that
they occupied, where they stood not so far away, all the space between
the earth and sky, bulged over the forest at the end of every view. The
heat was luscious; but then I had nothing to do but to look on from a
hammock under the awning. The foliage which was pressed out over the
water, not many yards from the hurrying ‘Capella,’ had a closeness of
texture astonishing, and even awful, to one who knew only the thin woods
of the north. It ascended directly from the water’s edge, sometimes out
of the water, and we did not often see its foundation. There were no
shady aisles and glades. The sight was stopped on a front of polished
emerald, a congestion of stiff leaves. The air was still. Individual
sprays and fronds, projecting from the mass in parabolas with flamboyant
abandon and poise, were as rigid as metallic and enamelled shapes. The
diversity of forms, and especially the number and variety of the palms,
so overloaded an unseen standing that the parapets of the woods
occasionally leaned outwards to form an arcade above our masts. One
should not call this the jungle; it was even a soft and benignant Eden.
This was the forest I really wished to find. Often the heavy parapets of
the woods were upheld on long colonnades of grey palm boles; or the
whole upper structure appeared based on low green arches, the pennate
fronds of smaller palms flung direct from the earth.

“There was not a sound but the noise of our intruding steamer.
Occasionally we brushed a projecting spray, or a vine pendent from a
cornice. We proved the forest then. In some shallow places were
regiments of aquatic grasses, bearing long plumes. There were trees
which stood in the water on a tangle of straight pallid roots, as though
on stilts. This up-burst of intense life so seldom showed the land to
which it was fast, and the side rivers and paranas were so many, that I
could believe the forest afloat, an archipelago of opaque green vapours.
Our heavy wash swayed and undulated the aquatic plants and grasses, as
though disturbing the fringe of those green clouds which clung to the
water because of their weight in a still air.

“There was seldom a sign of life but the infrequent snowy herons, and
those curious brown fowl, the ciganas. The sun was flaming on the
majestic assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by our steamer,
coiled over us in a lazy flux. I did not hear the bell calling to meals.
We all hung over the ‘Capella’s’ side, gaping, like a lot of boys.

“Sometimes we passed single habitations on the water side. Ephemeral
huts of palm-leaves were forced down by the forest, which overhung them,
to wade on frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a toy jetty, and on
the jetty a sad woman and several naked children would stand, with no
show of emotion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the impenetrable
foliage. I thought of the precarious tenure on earth of these brown folk
with some sadness, especially as the day was going. The easy dominance
of the wilderness, and man’s intelligent morsel of life resisting it,
was made plain when we came suddenly upon one of his little shacks
secreted among the aqueous roots of a great tree, cowering, as it were,
between two of the giant’s toes. Those brown babies on the jetties never
cheered us. They watched us, serious and forlorn. Alongside their
primitive hut were a few rubber trees, which we knew by their scars.
Late in the afternoon we came to a large cavern in the base of the
forest, a shadowy place where at last we did see a gathering of the
folk. A number of little wooden crosses peeped above the floor in the
hollow. The sundering floods and the forest do not always keep these
folk from congregation, and the comfort of the last communion.

“There was a question at night as to whether our pilots would anchor or
not. They decided to go on. We did not go the route of Bates, _via_
Breves, but took the Parana de Buyassa on our way to the Amazon. It was
night when we got to the Parana, and but for the trailing lights, the
fairy mooring lines of habitations in the woods, and what the silent
explosions of lightning revealed of great heads of trees, startlingly
close and monstrous, as though watching us in silent and intent regard,
we saw nothing of it.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Once I knew a small boy, and on a summer day too much in the past now to
be recalled without some private emotion, he said to his father, on the
beach of a popular East Anglian resort, “And where is the sea?” He stood
then, for the first time, where the sea, by all the promises of pictures
and poems, should have been breaking on its cold grey crags. “The sea?”
said the father, in astonishment, “why, there it is. Didn’t you know?”

And that father, being an exact man, there beyond appeal the sea was.
And what was it? A discoloured wash, of mean limit, which flopped
wearily on some shabby sands littered with people and luncheon papers.
Such a flat, stupid, and leaden disillusion surely never before fell on
the upturned, bright and expectant soul of a young human, who, I can
vouch, began life, like most others, believing the noblest of
everything. It was an ocean which was inferior even to the
bathing-machines, and could be seen but in division when that child,
walking along the rank of those boxes on wheels, peeped between them.

You will have noticed with what simple indifference the people who
really know what they call the truth will shatter an illusion we have
long cherished; though, as we alone see our private dreams, those honest
folk cannot be blamed for poking their feet through fine pictures they
did not know were there.

I had a picture of the Amazon, which I had long cherished. I was leaning
to-day over the bulwarks of the “Capella,” watching the jungle pass. The
Doctor was with me. I thought we were still on the Para River, and was
waiting for our vessel to emerge from that stream, as through a narrow
gate, dramatically, into the broad sunlight of the greatest river in the
world, the king of rivers, the Amazon of my picture. We idly scanned the
forest with binoculars, having nothing to do, and saw some herons, and
the ciganas, and once a sloth which was hanging to a tree. Para, I felt,
was as distant as London. The silence, the immobility of it all, and the
pour of the tropic sun, were just beginning to be a little subduing. We
had come already to the wilderness. There was, I thought, a very great
deal of this forest; and it never varied.

“We shall be on the Amazon soon,” I said hopefully, to the doctor.

“We have been on it for hours,” he replied. And that is how I got there.

But the Amazon is not seen, any more than is the sea, at the first
glance. What the eye first gathers, is, naturally (for it is but an
eye), nothing like commensurate with your own image of the river. The
mind, by suggestive symbols, builds something portentous, a vague and
tremendous idea. What I saw was only a very swift and opaque yellow
flood, not much broader, it seemed to me, than the Thames at Gravesend,
and the monotonous green of the forest. It was all I saw for a
considerable time.

I see something different now. It is not easily explained merely as a
yellow river, with a verdant elevation on either hand, and over it a
blue sky. It would be difficult to find, except by luck, a word which
would convey the immensity of the land of the Amazons, something of the
aloofness and separation of the points of its extremes, with months and
months of adventure between them. What a journey it would be from Ino in
Bolivia, on the Rio Madre de Dios, to Conception in Colombia, on the Rio
Putumayo; there is another “Odyssey” in a voyage like that. And think of
the names of those places and rivers! When I take the map of South
America now, and hold it with the estuary of the Amazon as its base, my
thoughts are like those might be of a lost ant, crawling in and over the
furrows and ridges of an exposed root as he regards all he may of the
trunk rising into the whole upper cosmos of a spreading oak. The Amazon
then looks to me, properly symbolical, as a monstrous tree, and its
tributaries, paranas, furos, and igarapes, as the great boughs, little
boughs, and twigs of its ascending and spreading ramifications, so
minutely dissecting the continent with its numberless watercourses that
the mind sees that dark region as an impenetrable density of green and
secret leaves; which, literally, when you go there, is what you will
find. You enter the leaves, and vanish. You creep about the region of
but one of its branches, under a roof of foliage which stays the midday
shine and lets it through to you in the dusk of the interior but as
points of distant starlight. Occasionally, as we did upon a day, you see
something like Santarem. There is a break and a change in the journey.
Moving blindly through the maze of green, there, hanging in the clear
day at the end of a bough, is a golden fruit.

                   *       *       *       *       *

“_Jan. 10._ The torrid morning, tempered by a cooling breeze which
followed us up river, was soon overcast. Disappointingly narrow at
first, the Amazon broadened later, but not to one’s conception of its
magnitude. But the greatness of this stream, I have already learned,
dawns upon you in time, and if you sufficiently endure. It persists
about you, this forest and this river, like the stark desolation of the
sea. The real width of the river is not often seen because of the
islands which fringe its banks, many of them of considerable size. The
side channels, or paranas-miris, between the islands and the shores, are
used in preference to the main stream by the native sailing craft, to
avoid the strength of the current. We had the river to ourselves. The
‘Capella’ was taken by the pilots, first over to one side and then to
the other, dodging the set of the stream. The forest has changed. It has
now a graceless and savage aspect when we are close to it. There are not
so many palms. At a little distance the growth appears a mass of spindly
oaks and beeches, though with a more vivid and lighter green foliage.
But when near it shows itself alien enough, a front of nameless and
congested leaves. I suppose it would be more than a hundred feet in
altitude. Sometimes the forest stands in the water. At other times a
yellow bank shows, a narrow strip under the trees, rarely more than four
feet high, and strewn with the bleaching skeletons of trees and
entanglements of vine. There is rarely a sign of life. Once this morning
a bird called in the woods when we were close. Butterflies are
continually crossing the ship, and dragonflies and great wasps and
hornets are hawking over us. The sight of one swallowtail butterfly, a
big black and yellow fellow, sent the cook insane. The insect stayed its
noble flight, poised over our hatch, and then came down to see what we
were. It settled on a coil of rope, leisurely pulsing its wings. The
cook, at the sight of this bold and bright being, sprang from the
galley, and leaped down to the deck with a dish cloth. To our surprise
he caught the insect, and explained with eagerness how that the
shattered pattern of colours, which more than covered his gross palm,
would improve his firescreen in a Rotterdam parlour.

“Early in the forenoon sections of the forest vanished in grey rain
squalls, though elsewhere the sun was brilliant. The plane of the dingy
yellow flood was variegated with transient areas of bright sulphur and
chocolate. We were hugging the right bank, and so saw the mouth of the
Xingu as we passed. At midday some hills ahead, the Serra de Almerim,
gave us relief from the dead level of the wearying green walls. The
sight of those blue heights with their flat tops—they were perhaps no
more than 1000 feet above the forest—curiously stimulated the eye and
lifted one’s humour, long depressed by the everlasting sameness of the
prospect and the heat. Later in the day we passed more of the welcome
hills, the Serra de Maranuaqua, Velha Pobre, and Serras de Tapaiunaquara
and Paranaquara, their cones, truncated pyramids, knolls and hog backs,
ranging contrary to our course. Bates says some of them are bare, or
covered only with a short herbage; but all those I examined with a good
telescope had forest to the summits; though a few of the inferior
heights, which stood behind the island of Jurupari (the island where
dreams come at night) were grassy. Those cobalt prominences rose like
precipitous islands from a green sea. We were the only spectators. One
high range, as we passed, was veiled in a glittering mesh of rain. The
river, after we left Jurupari, bent round, and brought the heights
astern of us. The sun set.

“The river and the forest are best at sundown. The serene level rays
discovered the woods. We saw trees then distinctly, almost as a
surprise. Till then the forest had been but a gloom by day. Behind us
was the jungle front. It changed from green to gold, a band of light
between the river and the darkling sky. Some greater trees emerged
majestically. It was the first time that day we had really seen the
features of the jungle. It was but a momentary revelation. The clouds
were reflectors, throwing amber lights below. In the hills astern of us
ravines hitherto unsuspected caught the transitory glory. The dark
heights had many polished facets. One range, round-shouldered and
wooded, I thought resembled the promontories about Clovelly, and for a
few minutes the Amazon had the bright eyes of a friend. On a ridge of
those heights I could see the sky through some of its trees. The light
quickly gave out, and it was night.

“We continued cruising along the south shore. The usual pulsations of
lightning made night intermittent; the forest was not more than 150 feet
from our vessel, and sitting under the awning the trees kept jumping out
of the night, startlingly near. The night was still and hot, and my
cabin lamp had attracted myriads of insects through the door which had
been left open for air. A heap of crawlers lay dead on the desk, and the
bunk curtain was smothered with grotesque winged shapes, flies, cicadas,
mantis, phasmas, moths, beetles, and mosquitoes.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Next morning found us running along the north shore. Parrots were
squawking in the woods alongside. A large alligator floated close by the
ship, its jaws open in menace. At breakfast time a strip of white beach
came into view on the opposite coast, a place in that world of three
colours on which one’s tired eyes could alight and rest. That was
Santarem. Sharp hills rose immediately behind the town. The town is in a
saddle of the hills, slipping down to the river in terraces of white,
chrome, and blue houses. The Rio Tapajos, a black water tributary and a
noble river, enters the main stream by Santarem, its dark flood sharply
contrasted with the tawny Amazon. But the Amazon sweeps right across its
mouth in a masterful way. There is a definite line dividing black from
yellow water, and then no more Tapajos.

We passed numerous floating islands (Ilhas de Caapim) and trees adrift,
evidence, the pilots said, that the river was rising. These grass
islands are a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush pastures
adrift. Some of them are so large it is difficult to believe they are
really afloat till they come alongside. Then, if the river is at all
broken by a breeze, the meadow plainly undulates. This floating cane and
grass grows in the sheltered bays and quiet paranas-miris, for though
the latter are navigable side-channels of the river in the rainy season,
in the dry they are merely isolated swamps. But when the river is in
flood the earth is washed away from the roots of this marsh growth, and
it moves off, a flourishing, mobile field, often twenty feet in
thickness. Such islands, when large, can be dangerous to small craft.
Small flowers blossom on these aquatic fields, which shelter snakes and
turtles, and sometimes the peixe-boi, the manatee.

Obydos was in sight in the afternoon, but presently we lost it in a
violent squall of rain. The squall came down like a gun burst, and
nearly carried away the awnings. It was evening before we were abreast
of that most picturesque town I saw on the river. Obydos rests on one of
the rare Amazon cliffs of rufus clay and sandstone. The forest mounts
the hill above it, and the scattered red roofs of the town show in a
surf of foliage. The cliffs glowed in cream and cherry tints, with a
cascade of vines falling over them, though not reaching the shore. The
dainty little houses sit high in a loop of the cliffs. We left the city
behind, with a huge cumulus cloud resting over it, and the evening light
on all.

But Obydos and sunsets and rain squalls, and the fireflies which flit
about the dark ship at night in myriads, tiny blue and yellow glow-lamps
which burn with puzzling inconstancy, as though being switched on and
off, though they help me with this narrative, yet candour compels me to
tell you that they take up more space in this book than they do in the
land of the Amazon. They were incidental and small to us, dominated by
the shadowing presence of the forest.

We have been on the river nearly a week. But our steamer’s decks, even
by day, are deserted now. We lean overside no longer looking at this
strange country. The heat is the most noteworthy fact, and drives every
one to what little leeward to the glare there is. Our cook, who is a
salamander of a fellow, and has no need to fear the possibilities of his
future life—though I do not remember he ever told me he was really
thoughtful for them—feeling a little uncomfortable one day when at work
on our dinner, glanced at his thermometer, and fled in terror. It
registered 134°. He begged me to go in and verify it, and once inside I
was hardly any time doing that. We have such days, without a breath of
air, and two vivid walls of still jungle, and between them a yellow
river serpentining under the torrid sun, and a silence which is like
deafness.

Under the shadow of the awning aft, in his deck chair, the Doctor is
preparing our defences by sounding a profound volume on tropical
diseases. This gives us but little confidence; though, as to our
surgeon, recently I overheard one fireman to another, “I tell yer
the—doc’s a Man. That’s what he is.” (This is the result of the gin
with the quinine.) Yet, good man as he is, his book on the consequences
of the tropics is so large that we fear we all cannot escape so many
impediments to joy. But our health’s guardian is careful we do not
anticipate anything from peeps into the mysteries. He never leaves his
big book about, much as some of us would like to see the pictures in it,
after what the donkeyman told us.

This is how it was. Donkey, in spite of instructions, and I know how
emphatic the Skipper usually is, slept on deck away from his mosquito
bar a few nights ago. He said at the time that he wasn’t afraid of them
little fanciful biters, or something of the kind. I have no doubt the
Doctor would have had some trouble in making clear to Donkey’s
understanding exactly what are the links, delicate but sure, between
mosquitoes and dissolution and decay in man. So he showed Donkey a
picture. I wish I knew what it was—but the surgeon preserves the usual
professional reticence in the affairs of his patients. For now Donkey is
convinced it is very bad to sleep outside his curtain, and when he tries
to tell us how unwholesome such sleeping can be, just at the point when
he gets most entertaining his vocabulary wears into holes and tatters.
You could not conjure that man from his curtain now, no, not if you
showed him, in a vision, Cardiff, and the fairy lights of all its dock
hotels. I know that in the Doctor’s book there is a picture of a negro
who acquired, in a superb way, a wonderful form of elephantiasis, for
the Doctor showed it to me once, as a treat, when he thought I was
growing slack and bored.

We require now such childish laughter at each other’s discomfiture to
break the spell of this land into which we are sinking deeper. Still the
forest glides by. It is a shadow on the mind. It stands over us, an
insistent riddle, every morning when I look out from my bunk. I watch it
all day, drawn against my will; and as day is dying it is still there,
paramount, enigmatic, silent, its question implied in its mere
persistence—meeting me again on the next day, still with its mute
interrogation.

We have been passing it for nearly a week. It should have convinced me
by now that it is something material. But why should I suppose it is
that? We have had no chance to examine it. It does not look real. It
does not remind me of anything I know of vegetation. When you sight your
first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you
reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so
long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the
sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just
as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the
Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye.
The mind is not deceived by what merely shows. Wherever the steamer
drives the forest recedes, as does the sky at sea; but it never leaves
us.

The jungle gains nothing, and loses nothing, at noon. It is only a
sombre thought still, as at midnight. It is still, at noon, so obscure
and dumb a presence that I suspect the sun does not illuminate it so
much as reveal our steamer in its midst. We are revealed instead. The
presence sees us advancing into its solitudes, a small, busy, and
impudent intruder. But the forest does not greet, and does not resent
us. It regards us with the vacancy of large composure, with a lofty
watchfulness which has no need to show its mind. I think it knows our
fears of its domain. It knows the secret of our fate. It makes no sign.
The pallid boles of the trees, the sentinels by the water with the press
of verdure behind them, stand, as we pass, like soundless exclamations.
So when we go close in shore I find myself listening for a chance
whisper, a careless betrayal of the secret. There is not a murmur in the
host; though once a white bird flew yauping from a tree, and then it
seemed the desolation had been surprised into a cry, a prolonged and
melancholy admonition. Following that the silence was deepened, as
though an indiscretion were regretted. A sustained and angry protest at
our presence would have been natural; but not that infinite line of
lofty trees, darkly superior, silently watching us pass.

                   *       *       *       *       *

One night we anchored off the south shore in twenty fathoms, but close
under the trees. At daybreak we stood over to the opposite bank. The
river here was of great width, the north coast being low and indistinct.
These tacks across stream look so purposeless, in a place where there
are no men and all the water looks the same. You go over for nothing.
But this morning, high above the land ahead, some specks were seen
drifting like fragments of burnt paper, the sport of an idle and distant
wind. Those drifting dots were urubus, the vultures, generally the first
sign that a settlement is near. To come upon a settlement upon the
Amazons is like landfall at sea. It brings all on deck. And there, at
last, was Itacoatiara or Serpa. From one of the infrequent, low,
ferruginous cliffs of this river the jungle had been cleared, and on
that short range of modest, undulating heights which displaced the green
palisades with soft glowings of rose, cherry, and orange rock, the sight
escaped to a disorder of arboured houses, like a disarray of little
white cubes; Serpa was, in appearance, half a basketful of white bricks
shot into a portico of the forest.

That morning was no inducement to exertion, but when an Indian paddled
his canoe alongside our anchored steamer the Doctor and the Purser got
into it, and away. The hot earth would be a change from hot iron.
Besides, I was eager for my first walk in equatorial woods. Our steamer
was anchored below the town, off a small campo, or clearing. The native
swashed his canoe into a margin of floating plants, which had rounded
leaves and inflated stalks, like buoys. I looked at them, and indeed at
the least thing, as keenly as though we were now going to land in the
moon. Nothing should escape me; the colour of the mud, the water tepid
to my hand, the bronze canoeman in his pair of old cotton pants split
just where they should have been scrupulous, and the weeds and grass. I
would drain my tropics to the last precious drop. I myself was seeing
what I had thought others lucky to have seen. It was like being born
into the world as an understanding adult. We got to a steep bank of red
clay, fissured by the heat, and as hard as brickwork. Green and brown
lizards whisked before us as we broke the quiet. From the top of the
bank the anchored steamer looked a little stranger. Aboard her, and she
is a busy village. Now she appeared but a mark I did not recognise in
that reticent solitude. The Amazon was an immensity of water, a plain of
burnished silver, where headlands, islands, and lines of cliff were all
cut in one level mass of emerald veined with white. The canoe going
downstream appeared to dissolve in candent vapour. Cloudland low down
over the forest to the south, a far disorder of violet heights, waiting
to fill the sky at sunset and to shock our unimportance then with
convulsions of blue flames, did not seem more aloof and inaccessible to
me than our immediate surroundings.

The clearing was a small bay in the jungle. A few statuesque silk-cotton
trees, buttressed giants, were isolated in its centre. A bunch of
dun-coloured cattle with twisted horns stood beneath them, though the
trees gave them no shade, for each grey trunk was as bare of branches
for sixty feet of its length as a stone column. The wall of the jungle
was quite near, and as I stood watching it intently, I could hear but
the throb of my own life. The faint sibilation of insects was only as
if, in the silence, you heard the sharp rays of the sun impinge on the
earth; your finer ear caught that sound when you forgot the ring and
beat of your body. It was something below mere silence.

We approached the wall to the west, as a path went through the harsh
swamp herbage that way, and entered the jungle. The sun went out almost
at once. It was cellar cool under the trees. We had no idea where the
path would lead us. That did not matter. No doubt it would be the place
desired. The Doctor walked ahead, and I could just see his helmet, the
way was so narrow and uncertain. I kept missing the helmet, for
everything in the half-lighted solitude was strange. One could not keep
an eye on a white hat on one’s first equatorial ramble, and only when
the quiet was heavy enough to be a burden did I look up from a puzzling
leaf, or some busy ants, to find myself alone. There was a feeling that
you were being watched; but there were no eyes, when you glanced round
quickly. Do you remember that dream which sometimes came when we were
children? There were, I remember, empty corridors prolonging into the
shadows of a nameless house where not a sign showed of what was there.
We went on, and no words we could think of when we woke could tell what
we felt when we looked into those long silent aisles of the house
without a name; for we knew something was there; but there was no
telling what the thing would be like when it showed. That is your
sensation in a first walk in a Brazilian forest.

I stopped at lianas, and curious foliage, trying to trace them to a
beginning, but rarely with any success. There were some mantis, which
commenced to run on a tree while I was examining its bark. They were
like flakes of the bark. For a moment the tree seemed to quiver its hide
at my irritating touch. Then the Doctor called, and I pushed along to
find him stooping over a land snail, the size of a man’s fist, which
rather puzzled him, for it had what he called an operculum; that is, a
cap such as a winkle’s, only in this case it was as large as a crown
piece. I do not know if it was the operculum, for my knowledge of such
things is small; but I did feel this was the only twelfth birthday which
had come to me for many years.

Presently we saw light, as you would from the interior of a tunnel. Some
beams of sunshine slanted from a break in the roof to where a tree had
fallen, making a bridge for us across an igaripe, a stream, that is,
large enough to be a way for a canoe. The sundered, buttressed roots of
the tree formed a steep climb to begin with, but the buttresses going
straight along the trunk as handrails made crossing the bridge an easy
matter. Raising my hand to a root which was hot in the sun, and watching
a helicon butterfly, a black and yellow fellow, which settled near us,
slowly open and shut his wings, I jumped, because it felt as though a
lighted match had dropped into my sleeve. But I couldn’t douse it. It
burned in ten places at once. It was a first lesson in constant
watchfulness in this new world. I had placed my hand in a swarm of
inconspicuous fire ants. The dead tree was alive with them, and our
passage quickened. We rubbed ourselves hysterically, for the Doctor had
got some too; and there was no professional reserve about him that time.

After crossing the igaripe the character of the forest changed. It was
now a growth of wild cacao trees. Nothing grew beneath them. The floor
was a black paste, littered with dead sticks. The woods were more open,
but darker and more dank than before. The sooty limbs of the cacao trees
grew low, and filled the view ahead with a perplexity of leafless and
tortured boughs. They were hung about with fruit, pendent lamps lit with
a pale greenish light. We saw nothing move there but two delicate
butterflies, which had transparent wings with opaque crimson spots, such
as might have been served Titania herself; yet the gloom and black ooze,
and the eerie globes, with their illusion of light hung upon distorted
shapes, was more the home of the fabulous sucuruja, the serpent which is
forty feet long.

A dry stick snapping underfoot had the same effect as that crash which
resounds for some embarrassing seconds when your umbrella drops in a
gallery of the British Museum. The impulse was to apologise to
something. We had been so long in the twilight, recoiling at nameless
objects in the path, a monstrous legume perhaps a yard long and coiled
like a reptile, seeing things only with a second look, that the sudden
entrance into a malocal, a forest clearing, which, as though it were a
reservoir, the sun had filled with bright light, was like a plunge into
a warm, fluid, and lustrous element.

In the clearing were the huts of an Indian village. Only the roofs could
be seen, through some plantations of bananas. Around the clearing, a
side of which was cut off by a stream, was the overshadowing green
presence. Some chocolate babies, as serious as gnomes, looked up as we
came into daylight, opened their eyes wide, and fled up the path between
the plantains.

If I could sing, I would sing the banana. It has the loveliest leaf I
know. I feel intemperate about it, because I came upon it after our
passage through a wood which could have been underground, a tangle of
bare roots joining floor and ceiling in limitless caverns. We stood
looking at the plantation till our mind was fed with grace and light.
The plantain jets upwards with a copious stem, and the fountain returns
in broad rippled pennants, falling outwardly, refined to points, when
the impulse is lost. A world could not be old on which such a plant
grows. It is sure evidence of earth’s vitality. To look at it you would
not think that growing is a long process, a matter of months and natural
difficulties. The plantain is an instant and joyous answer to the sun.
The midribs of the leaves, powerful but resilient, held aloft in
generous arches the broad planes of translucent green substance. It is
not a fragile and dainty thing, except in colour and form. It is lush
and solid, though its ascent is so aerial, and its form is content to
the eye. There is no green like that of its leaves, except at sea. The
stout midribs are sometimes rosy, but the banners they hold well above
your upturned face are as the crest of a wave in the moment of collapse,
the day showing through its fluid glass. And after the place of dead
matter and mummied husks in gloom, where we had been wandering, this
burst of leaves in full light was a return to life.

We continued along the path, in the way of the vanished children. Among
the bananas were some rubber trees, their pale trunks scored with brown
wounds, and under some of the incisions small tin cups adhered, fastened
there with clay. In most of the cups the collected latex was congealed,
for the cups were half full of rain-water, which was alive with mosquito
larvæ. The path led to the top of the river bank. The stream was narrow,
but full and deep. A number of women and children were bathing below,
and they looked up stolidly as we appeared. Some were negligent on the
grass, sunning themselves. Others were combing their long, straight hair
over their honey- and snuff-coloured bodies. The figures of the women
were full, lissom, and rounded, and they posed as if they were aware
that this place was theirs. They were as unconscious of their grace as
animals. They looked round and up at us, and one stayed her hand, her
comb half through the length of her hair, and all gazed intently at us
with faces having no expression but a little surprise; then they turned
again to proceed with their toilets and their gossip. They looked as
proper with their brown and satiny limbs and bodies, in the secluded and
sunny arbour where the water ran, framed in exuberant tropical foliage,
as a herd of deer.

I had never seen primitive man in his native place till then. There he
was, as at the beginning, and I saw with a new respect from what a
splendid creature we are derived. It was, I am glad to say, to cheer the
existence of these people that I had put money in a church plate at
Poplar. Poplar, you may have heard, is a parish in civilisation where an
organised community is able, through its heritage of the best of two
thousand years of religion, science, commerce, and politics, to eke out
to a finish the lives of its members (warped as they so often are by
arid dispensations of Providence) with the humane Poor Law. The Poor Law
is the civilised man’s ironic rebuke to a parsimonious Creator. It is a
jest which will ruin the solemnity of the Judgment Day. Only the man of
long culture could think of such a shattering insult to the All Wise who
made this earth too small for the children He continues to send to it,
trailing their clouds of glory which prove a sad hindrance and get so
fouled in the fight for standing room on their arrival. But these
savages of the Brazilian forest know nothing of the immortal joke
conceived by their cleverer brothers. They have all they want.
Experience has not taught them to devise such a cosmic mock as a Poor
Law. How do these poor savages live then, who have not been vouchsafed
such light? They pluck bananas, I suppose, and eat them, swinging in
hammocks. They live a purely animal existence. More than that, I even
hear that should you find a child hungry in an Indian village, you may
be sure all the strong men there are hungry too. I was not able to prove
that; yet it may be true there are people to-day to whom the law that
the fittest must survive has not yet been helpfully revealed. (This is
really the Doctor’s fault. I should never have thought of Poplar if he
had not wondered aloud how those bathers under the palms managed without
a workhouse.)

Behind us were the shelters of these settled Indians, the “cabaclos,” as
they are called in Brazil (literally, copper coloured). Each house was
but a square roof of the fronds of a species of attalea palm, upheld at
each corner by poles seven feet high. The houses had no sides, but were
quite open, except that some had a quarter of the interior partitioned
off with a screen of leaves. There was a rough attempt at a garden about
each dwelling, with rose bushes and coleas in the midst of gourds and
patches of maize. The roses were scented, and of the single briar kind.
We entered one of the dwellings, and surprised a young woman within who
was swinging in a hammock smoking a native pipe of red clay through a
grass stem. One fine limb, free of her cotton gown to the thigh, hung
indolently over the hammock, the toes touching the earth and giving the
couch movement. Her black hair, all at first we could see of her head,
nearly reached the ground.

A well-grown girl, innocent from head to feet, saw us enter, and cried
to her mother, who rose in the hammock, threw her gown over her leg,
smiled gravely at us, and alighted, to vanish behind the screen with the
child, reappearing presently with the girl neatly attired. Other
children came, and soon had confidence to examine us closely and
critically, grave little mortals with eyes which spoke the only language
I understood there. The men and women who gathered stood behind the
children, smiling sadly and kindly. They were gentle, undemonstrative,
and observant, with features of the conventional Indian type. The men
were spare and lithe, of medium height, wearing only shorts tied with
string below their bronze busts. The women were of fuller build, with
heavier but more cheerful features, and each was dressed in a single
cotton garment, open above, revealing the breasts.

The noon shadows of the hut, and the trees, were deep as the stains of
ink. A tray of mandioca root, farinha, was set in the hot sun to dry.
Under a gourd tree was a heap of turtle shells. A little game, a
capybara, and a bird like a crow with a brown rump, were hung on the
screen. But the most remarkable feature of the house in the forest was
its pets. A pair of parraquets ran in and out the bushes like green
mice. My helmet was tipped over my eyes, and, looking upwards, there was
an audience of monkeys in the shadow, quite beside themselves with
curiosity. My sudden movement sent them off like fireworks. One was a
most engaging little fellow, a jet-black tamarin slightly larger than a
squirrel. Presently he found courage to come closer, with a companion, a
brown monkey of his own size. As they sat side by side the Doctor
pointed out that the expressions in the faces of these monkeys showed
temperaments separating them even more widely than they were separated
by those physical differences which made them species. I saw at once,
with some pleasure and a little vanity, that I might be more nearly
related to the friendly cabaclos than I am to some people in England.
The brown chap would be no doubt a master of industry on the tree tops,
keeping a whole tree to himself, and living on nuts which others
gathered. You could see it in his keen and domineering look, and in the
quick, casual way he crowded his fellow, who always made room for him. I
have seen such a face, and such manners, in great industrial centres.
They are the marks of the ablest and best, who get on. His hard, eager
eyes showed censoriousness, cruelty, and acquisitiveness. But his
companion, with a sooty and hairless face, and black hair parted in the
middle of a frail forehead, was a pal of ours, and knew it. The brown
midget showed angry distrust of us, knowing what devilry was in his own
mind. But the black, though more delicate and nervous a monkey, his mind
being innocent of secret plots, had gentleness and faith in his looks,
and showed a laughable and welcome curiosity in us. He made friendly
twitterings—not the harsh and menacing chatter of the other—and
perfectly self-possessed, his pure soul giving him quiethood, examined
us in a brotherly way with an ebon paw which was as small and fragile as
a black fairy’s.

A jabiru stork stood on one leg, beak on breast, meditating, caring
nothing for all that was outside its ruminating mind. There were parrots
on the cross-ties of the roof, on the floor, on the shoulders of the
women, and in the hands of the children, and they were getting an
interesting time through the monkeys when their faces were not cocked
sideways at us in a knowing fashion. And what looked like a crow was
giving bitter and ruthless chase to a young agouti, in and out of the
bare feet of the company. I have never seen creatures so tame. But
Indian women, as I learned afterwards, have a fine gift for winning the
confidence of wild things, and that afternoon they took hold of the
creatures, anyhow and anywhere, to bring them for our inspection,
without the captives showing the least alarm or anger. There were the
dogs, too. But they were like all the dogs we saw in Brazil, looking
sorry for themselves; and they sat about in case they should fall if
they attempted to stand. Our audience broke up suddenly, in an uproar of
protests, to chase the brown monkey, who was towing a frantic parrot by
the tail.

We continued our walk, entering the forest again on another path. Here
the growth was secondary, and the underbush dense on both sides of the
trail. The voices of the village stopped as we entered the shades, and
there was no more sound except when a bird scurried away heavily, and
again, when some cicadas, the “scissors grinders,” suddenly sprang an
astonishing whirring from a tree. The sound was as loud as that of a
locomotive letting steam escape in a covered station. At a clearing so
small that the roof of the jungle had been but little broken, where a
hut stood as though at a well-bottom sunk in a depth of trees, we turned
back. That deep well in the trees contained but little light, for
already it was being choked with vines. The hut was of the usual light
construction, though its sides were of leaves, as well as its roof. I
think it was the most melancholy dwelling I have ever happened on in my
wanderings. It did not look as though it had been long deserted. There
were ashes and a broken flesh-pot outside it. The entrance was veiled
with gross spiders’ webs. On the earth floor within were puddles of
rain. Round it the forest stood, like night in abeyance. The tree tops
overhung, silently intent on what man had been doing at their feet. A
child’s chemise was stretched on a thorn, and close by was a small
grave, separated by little sticks from the secular earth. A dead plant
was in the centre of the grave, and a crude wooden crucifix.

                   *       *       *       *       *

We had plenty of opportunities for exploring Serpa, for the Amazon that
rainy season was slow in rising, and consequently it would have been
unsafe for us to venture into the Madeira. The tributary would have been
full, but it was necessary for the waters of the main stream to dam and
heighten the flood of its tributary before we could trust our draught
there. We were nine days at Serpa. The Amazon would rise as much as a
foot one day, and our distance from the shore would increase
perceptibly, with strong whirling eddies which made the trip ashore more
difficult. Then it would fall again. Some of the yellow Amazon porpoises
showed alongside occasionally, and alligators floated about, though
nothing was seen of them but their snouts.

Serpa is a small but growing place. It was but a missionary settlement
of Abacaxis Indians from the Madeira in 1759, and was called
Itacoatiara. When I was there it was renewing its old importance,
because the Madeira-Mamoré railway undertaking had placed a depôt a
little to the west of the village. The Doctor and I spent many memorable
days in its neighbourhood, butterfly-hunting and sauntering. Though
mosquitoes, anopeline and culex, are as common here as elsewhere in the
Brazils—the lighters which came alongside with cargo for us conveyed
clouds of them, and they took possession of every dark nook of the
“Capella”—it is noteworthy that Serpa has the reputation, in Amazonas,
of a health resort. I could find no explanation of that. There was
malaria at Serpa, of course; but compared with the really lethal
country, a country not so different in appearance and climate, of the
upper Madeira, the salubrity of Serpa is perplexing. That virulent form
of malaria peculiar to some tropical localities is a phenomenon which
medical research has not yet explained. In the almost unexplored region
of the Rio Madeira the fever is certain to every traveller, though the
land is largely without inhabitants; and it is almost equally certain
that it will be of the malignant type. Yet at an old settlement like
Serpa, where probably every inhabitant has had malaria, and every
mosquito is likely to be a host, the fever is but mild, and the
traveller may escape it entirely.

By now you will be asking what Itacoatiara is like, that community
contentedly lost in the secret forest. I am afraid you will not learn,
unless, in the happy future, you and I select a few friends, a few
books, and erect some houses of palm leaves to protect us from the too
vigorous sun there, and so, secure from all the really urgent and
important matters which do not matter a twinkle to the eternal stars,
noon it far and secure until the time comes for the gentle villagers to
carry us out and forget us; remembering us again when the annual Day of
the Dead comes round. They will leave some comfortable candles above us
that night.

There the earth is a warm and luscious body. The lazy paths are cool
with groves, and in the middle hours of the sun, when only a few
butterflies are abroad, and the grasshoppers are shrilling in the quiet,
you swing in a hammock under a thatch—the air has been through some
tree in blossom—and gossip, and drink coffee. Beyond the path of the
village there is—nobody knows what; not even the Royal Geographical
Society. One heard of a large and mysterious lake a day’s journey
inland. Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody cared. One old man once,
when hunting, saw its mirror through the forest’s aisles, and heard the
multitude of its birds.

The foreshore of the village is rugged with boulders richly tinctured
with iron oxide, and often having a scoriaceous surface. There we would
land, and scramble up to a street which ends on the height above the
river. It is a broad road, with white, substantial, one-story houses on
either side. The dwellings and stores have no windows, but are built
with open fronts, for ventilation. This is Serpa’s main street. It is
shaded with avenues of trees. In the narrower side turnings the trees
meet to form arcades. One day we saw such an avenue covered with yellow,
trumpet-shaped blossoms. Ox-carts with solid wheels stand in the walks.
The sunlight, broken in the leaves of the trees, patterned the roads
with white fire, and so dappled the cattle that they were obscure; you
saw the oxen only when they moved. There is a large square, grass-grown,
in the centre of the village, where stands the church, a white, simple
building with an open belfry in which the bell hangs plain, bright with
verdigris. About here the merchants and tradesmen of Serpa have their
places. The men, hearty and friendly souls, walk abroad in clean linen
suits and straw hats, and their ladies, pallid, slight, but often
singularly beautiful, are dressed as Europeans, but without hats;
sometimes, when out walking late in the day, a lady would have a scarlet
flower in her hair.

By the foreshore were the cabins, of mud and wood, of the negroes.
Beyond the town, the roads run through the clearings, and end on the
forest. In the clearings were the huts, wattle and daub, and of leaves,
of the settled Indians and half-breeds. These were often prettily placed
beneath groups of graceful palms. It was in the last direction that most
often we made our way with our butterfly nets while other folk were
sleeping during the sun’s height. The humid heat, I suppose, was really
a trial. One did perspire in an alarming way and with the least
exertion. The Doctor, who carries substance, would have dark patches in
his khaki uniform, and would wonder, with foreboding, whether any more
in this life he would catch hold of a cold jug which held a straight
pint in which ice tinkled. But to me the illumination, the heat, the
odour, and the quiethood of those noons made life a great prize. I will
say that my comrade, the Doctor, did much to make it so, with his gentle
fun, and his wide knowledge of earth-lore. There was so much, wherever
we went, to keep me on the magic side of time, and out of its shadow. On
the west of the town were some huts, with plantations of bananas,
pineapples, papaws, and maize, where blossomed cannas, mimosas,
passion-flowers, and where other unseen blooms, especially after rain,
made breathing a sensuous pleasure. There we tried to intercept the
swallow-like flight of big sulphur and orange butterflies, though never
with success. We had more success with the butterflies in the clearings,
where some new huts stood, beyond the village. Over the stagnant pools
in those open spaces dragonflies hovered, fellows that moved, when we
approached, like lines of red light. The butterflies, particularly a
vermilion beauty with black bars on his wings, and a swift flier, used
to settle and gem the mud about these pools. Other species frequented
the flowering shrubs which had grown over the burnt wreckage and stumps
of the forest. That area was full of insects and birds. There we saw
daily the Sauba ants, sometimes called the parasol ants, in endless
processions, each ant holding a piece of leaf, the size of a sixpenny
bit, over its tiny body. Tanagers shot amongst the bushes like blue
projectiles. We saw a ficus there on one occasion, of fair size, with
large leathery leaves, which carried a colony of remarkable
caterpillars, each about seven inches long, thick in proportion, blue
black in colour with yellow stripes, and a coral head, and filaments at
the latter end. They were pugnacious worms, fighting each other
desperately when two met on a leaf. The larvæ stripped that tree in a
day. We were not always sure that the people in this part of Serpa were
friendly. Mostly they were half-breeds, varying mixtures of Indian and
negro, and no doubt very superstitious. The rodent’s foot was commonly
worn by the women, who, if we took notice of their children, sometimes
would spit, to avert the evil eye. But when the thunder clouds banked
close, and the air, being still, became loaded with the scent of the
wood fires of the villagers, promising rain, we would enter a hut, and
then always found we were welcome.

Even when kept to the ship for any reason this country offered constant
new things to keep our thoughts moving. A regatao, the river pedlar,
would bring his roomy montario, the gipsy van of the river, his family
aboard—the wife, the grandmother, and the sad, shy, little
children—and offer us fruits, and perhaps his monkey and parrots.
Gradually the “Capella” added to her company. The Chief bought a parrot
which had many Indian and Portuguese phrases. It tried to climb a funnel
guy, in escaping the curiosity of our terrier, and fell into the river.
We fished her out with a bucket. The vampire bats came aboard every
night. They were not very terrible creatures to look at; but we
discovered they frequented the forecastle for no good purpose. Again,
stories filtered through to us of sickness on the Madeira, and abruptly
they gave the palms and the sunsets a new light. One man was brought in
from beyond and died of beri-beri. This shook the nerves of one of our
Brazilian pilots, and he refused to go beyond where we were. As for me,
there at Serpa the “Capella” was at anchor, and we were not near the
Madeira, and seemed never likely to go. I watched the sunsets. The
brief, cool evenings prompted me (fever in the future or not) to praise
and grace. Crickets chirped everywhere on the ship then, and the air was
full of the sparks of fireflies. You could smell this good earth.

There was one sunset when the overspreading of violet clouds would have
shut out the day quite, but that the canopy was not closely adjusted to
the low barrier of forest to the westward. Through that narrow chink a
yellow light streamed, and traced shapes on the lurid walls and roof
which narrowly enclosed us. This was the beginning of the most alarming
of our daily electrical storms. There was no wind. Serpa and all the
coast facing that rift where the light entered our prison, stood
prominent and strange, and surprised us as much as if we had not looked
in that direction till then. The curtain dropped behind the forest, and
all light was shut out. We could not see across the ship. Knowing how
strong and bright could be the electrical discharges (though they were
rarely accompanied by thunder) when not heralded in so portentous a way,
we waited with some anxiety for this display to begin. It began over the
trees behind Serpa. Blue fire flickered low down, and was quickly
doused. Then a crack of light sprang across the inverted black bowl from
east to west in three quick movements. Its instant ramifications
fractured all the roof in a network of dazzling blue lines. The
reticulations of light were fleeting, but never gone. Night contracted
and expanded, and the sharp sounds, which were not like thunder, might
have been the tumbling flinders of night’s roof. We saw not only the
river, and the shapes of the trees and the village, as in wavering
daylight, but their colours. One flash sheeted the heavens, and its
overbright glare extinguished everything. It came with an explosion,
like the firing of a great gun close to our ears, and for a time we
thought the ship was struck. In this effort the storm exhausted itself.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The day before we left for the Madeira we took aboard sixty head of
cattle. They were wild things, which had been collected in the campo
with great difficulty, and driven into lighters. A rope was dropped over
the horns of each beast: this was attached to a crane hook, the winch
was started, and up the poor wretch came, all its weight on its horns,
bumping inertly against the ship’s side in its passage, like a bale, and
was then dumped in a heap on deck. This treatment seemed to subdue it.
Each quietly submitted to a halter. Several lost horns, and one hurt its
leg, and had to be dragged to its place. But, to our great joy—we were
watching the scene from the bridge—the Brazilian herdsmen on the
lighter shouted an anxious warning to their fellows on our deck as a
small black heifer, a potbellied lump with a stretched neck, rotated in
her unusual efforts to free her horns. She even bellowed. She bumped
heavily against the ship’s side, and tried desperately to find her feet.
She was, and I offered up thanks for this benefit, most plainly an
implacable rebel. The cattlemen, as punishment for the trouble she had
given them ashore, kept her dangling over the deck, and one got level
with her face and mocked her, slapping her nose. She actually defied
him, though she was quite helpless, with some minatory sounds. She was
no cow. She was insurrection, she was the hate for tyrants incarnated.
They dropped her. She was up and away like a cat, straight for the
winchman, and tried to get the winch out of her path, bellowing as she
worked. She put everybody on that deck in the shrouds or on the
forecastle head as she trotted round, with her tail up, looking for
brutes to put them to death. None of the cows (of course) helped her. By
a trick she was caught, and her horns were lashed down to a ring bolt in
a hatch coaming. Then she tried to kick all who passed. If the rest of
the cattle had been like her none would have suffered. Alas! They were
probably all scientific evolutionists, content to wait for men to become
kindly apple-lovers by slow and natural uplift; and gravely deprecated
the action of the heifer, from which, as peaceful cows, they
disassociated themselves.

The Indian says that if he eats a morsel of tiger he becomes fierce and
strong. I have not the faith of the Indian, or I would have begged the
heart of that heifer, and of it I would have brewed gallons of precious
liquor, and brought it home in jars for incomparable gifts to the meek
at heart who always do what the herdsmen tell them. The Doctor and I
made a pet of that black cow, to the extent of seeing she got her
rations regularly. It was no joke wading through manure among a press of
nervous animals on a ship’s deck in the tropics, in order to see that a
brave creature was justly dealt with; particularly as she swore
violently whenever she saw us, looking up from her tightly tethered head
with eyes full of unabated fury, and tried to get at us on the hatch
above her, bound though she was. What a heart! For her head was fixed
immovably, unlike the others; yet, till we arrived at Porto Velho she
kept her fierce spirit, often kicking over her water bucket with her
forefeet. Curse their charity!

With two new pilots, we upanchored next morning; and full of cattle,
flies, and new odours, and a gang of cattlemen who at least appeared
villainous, and carried long knives, the “Capella” continued up stream
for the Madeira. The cattle were sheltered, as far as possible, with
awnings improvised from spare canvas, and their fodder was bales of
American hay. The Skipper did his best to meliorate the harsh native
methods with dumb things.

And now it seems time to explain why we are bound for the centre of the
American continent, where the unexplored jungle still persists, and
disease or death, so the legends tell us, come to all white men who stay
there for but a few months. If you will get your map of the Brazils,
begin from Para, and cruise along the Amazon to the Madeira River—you
turn south just before Manaos—when you have reached Santo Antonio on
the tributary stream you have traversed the ultimate wilderness of a
continent, and stand on the threshold of Bolivia, almost under the
shadow of the Andes. If you find any pleasure in maps, flying in shoes
of that kind when affairs pursue you too urgently (and I suppose you do,
or you would not be so far into this narrative), you will hardly thank
me when I tell you it is possible for an ocean steamer exceeding 23 feet
in draught to make such a journey, and so break the romance of the
obscure place at the end of it. But it must be said. Even one who
travels for fun should keep to the truth in the matter of a ship’s
draught. As a reasonable being you would prefer to believe the map; and
that clearly shows the only way there (when the chance comes for you to
take it) must be by canoe, a long and arduous journey to a seclusion
remote, and so the more deeply desired. It certainly hurts our faith in
a favourite chart to find that its well-defined seaboard is no barrier
to modern traffic, but that, journeying over those pink and yellow
inland areas, which should have no traffic with great ships, a large
cargo steamer, full of Welsh coal, can come to an anchorage, still with
many fathoms under her, at a point where the cartographer, for lack of
place-names and other humane symbols, has set the word Forest, with the
letters spread widely to the full extent of his ignorance, and so
promised us sanctuary in plenty. I suppose that in a few years those
remote wilds, somehow cleared of Indians, jungle, and malaria—though I
do not see how all this can be done—will have no further interest for
us, because it will possess many of the common disadvantages of
civilisation’s benefits: it will be a point on a regular route of
commerce. I am really sorry for you; but in the sad and cruel code of
the sailor I can only reply as Jack did when he got the sole rag of beef
in the hash, “Blow you, Bill. I’m all right.” I had the fortune to go
when the route was still much as it was in the first chapter of Genesis.
“But after all,” you question me, hopeful yet, “nothing can be done with
5000 tons of Welsh cargo in a jungle.”

People with the nose for dollars can do wonders. It would be unwise to
back such a doughty opponent as the pristine jungle with its malaria
against people who smell money there. In the early ’seventies there was
a man with one idea, Colonel George Church. His idea was to give to
Bolivia, which the Andes shuts out from the Pacific, and two thousand
miles of virgin forest from the Atlantic, a door communicating with the
outside world. He said, for he was an enthusiast, that Bolivia is the
richest country in the world. The mines of Potosi are in Bolivia. Its
mountains rise from fertile tropical plains to Arctic altitudes. The
rubber tree grows below, and a climate for barley is found in a few
days’ journey towards the sky. But the riches of Bolivia are locked up.
Small parcels of precious goods may be got out over the Andean barrier,
on mule back; or they may dribble in a thin stream down the Beni,
Mamoré, and Madre de Dios rivers—rivers which unite not far from the
Brazilian boundary to form the Rio Madeira. The Beni is a very great and
deep river which has a course of 1500 miles before it contributes its
volume to the Madeira. The Rio Madeira, a broad and deep stream in the
rainy season, reaches the Amazon in another 1100 miles. But between
Guajara-Merim and San Antonio the Madeira comes down a terrace 250 miles
in length of nineteen dangerous cataracts. The Bolivian rubber
collectors shoot those rapids in their batelaōes, large vessels carrying
sometimes ten tons of produce and a crew of a dozen men, when the river
is full. Many are overturned, and the produce and the men are lost. The
Madeira traverses a country notorious even on the Amazon for its fever,
and quite unexplored a mile inland anywhere on its banks; the rubber
hunters, too, have to reckon with wandering tribes of hostile Indians.

The country is like that to-day. Then judge its value for a railway
route in the early ’seventies. But Colonel Church was a New Englander,
and again he was a visionary, so therefore most energetic and
compelling; he soon persuaded the practical business folk, who seldom
know much, and are at the mercy of every eloquent dreamer, to part with
a lot of money to buy his Bolivian dream. We do really find the Colonel,
on 1st November 1871, solemnly cutting the first sod of a railway in the
presence of a party of Indians, with the wild about him which had
persisted from the beginning of things. What the Indians thought of it
is not recorded. Anyhow, they seem to have humoured the infatuated man
who stopped to cut a square of grass in the land of the Parentintins,
the men who go stark naked, and make musical instruments out of the shin
bones of their victims.

An English company of engineering contractors was given the job of
building the line, and a small schooner, the “Silver Spray,” went up to
San Antonio with materials in 1872. Her captain, and some of her
officers, died on the way. A year later the contractors confessed utter
defeat. The jungle had won. They declared that “the country was a
charnel-house, their men dying like flies, that the road ran through an
inhospitable wilderness of alternating swamp and porphyry ridges, and
that, with the command of all the capital in the world, and half its
population, it would be impossible to build the road.” (There is a
quality of bitterness in their vehement hate which I recognise. I heard
the same emotional chord expressed concerning that land, though not
because of failure there, only two years ago.)

But the Bank of England held a large sum in trust for the pursuance of
this enterprise, and after the lawyers had attended to the trust money
in long debate in Chancery, there was yet enough of it left to justify
the indefatigable colonel in beginning the railway again. That was in
1876. Messrs. Collins, of Philadelphia, obtained the contract. The road,
of metre gauge, was to be built in three years. The matter excited the
United States into a wonderful attention. The press there went slightly
delirious, and the excited _Eagle_ was advised that “two Philadelphians
are to overcome the Madeira rapids, and to open up to the world a land
as fair as the Garden of the Lord.” The little steamer “Mercedita,” of
856 tons, with 54 engineers and material, was despatched to San Antonio
on 2nd January 1878. Her departure was made an important national
occasion, and it is an historic fact, which may be confirmed by a
reference to the files of Philadelphian papers of that date, that strong
men, as well as women and children, sobbed aloud on the departure of the
steamer. The vessel arrived at San Antonio on the 16th February. They
had barely started operations when, so they said, a Brazilian official
told them, betraying some feeling, “when the English came here they did
nothing but smoke and drink for two days, but Americans work like the
devil.” Yet, by all accounts, the English method was right. I prefer it,
on the Amazon. The preface to work there should be extended to three or
even more days of drinking and smoking.

Yet it must be said that if ever men should have honour for holding to a
duty when it was far more easy, and even more reasonable, to leave it,
then I submit the claim of those American engineers. Having lived in the
place where many of them died, and knowing their story, I feel a certain
kinship. There is no monument to them. No epic has been written of their
tragedy. But their story is, I should think, one of the saddest in the
annals of commerce. Of the 941 who left for San Antonio at different
times, 221 lost their lives, mostly of disease, though 80 perished in
the wreck of a transport ship. That is far higher a mortality rate than
that of, say, the South African or the American Civil War.

Few of those men appeared to know the tropics. They thought “the
tropics” meant only prodigal largess of fruits and sun and a wide
latitude of life—a common mistake. The enterprise became a lingering
disaster. Their state was already bad when a supply ship was lost; and
they hopefully waited, ill and starving, but with a gallant mockery of
their lot, as their letters and diaries attest, for food and medicine
which were not to reach them. The doctors continued the daily round of
the host of the fever-stricken, giving them quinine, which was a deceit
made of flour. The wages of all ceased for legal reasons, and they were
in a place where little is cultivated, and so most food has to be
imported in spite of a tariff which usually doubles the price of every
necessary of life. Some of the survivors, despairing and heroic souls,
attempted to escape on rafts down the river; they might as well have
tried to cut their way through the thousand miles of forest between them
and Manaos. The railway undertaking collapsed again, and the clearing,
the huts, and the workshops, and the short line that was actually laid,
were left for the vines and weeds to bury. But now again the conquering
forest is being attacked. The Madeira-Mamoré Railway has been
recommenced, and our steamer, the “Capella,” is taking up supplies for
the establishment at Porto Velho, from which the new railway begins,
three miles this side of San Antonio.




III


On the morning of the 23rd January, while we were still considering,
seeing what the sun was like, and the languid air, and that we were
reduced to tinned beans, fat bacon, and butter which was oil and flies,
whether it was worth while to note our breakfast bell—the steward stood
swinging it, with the gravity of a priest, under the break of the
poop—a shout came from the bridge that the Rio Madeira was in view.

As far back as Swansea we had heard legends of this stream, and they
were sufficiently disturbing. When we arrived at Para we heard more, and
worse. The pilot we engaged there called the Madeira the “long
cemetery.” At Serpa, for the first time, we saw what happened to frail
humanity when it ventured far on the Madeira. One day a river steamer
came to Serpa, with a cargo of men from San Antonio. The river steamers
of the Amazon are vessels of broad beam and shallow draft, painted the
dingy hue of the river itself, and they have two tiers of decks,
open-air shelves, between the supports of which the passengers sling
their hammocks. The passengers do not sleep in bunks. This paddleboat
came throbbing towards where we were at anchor. It was night, and she
was unseen, a palpitation in the dark accompanied somehow by a fountain
of sparks. Such boats burn wood in their furnaces. When her noise had
ceased, and her lights imperceptibly enlarged as the current dropped her
down abeam of us, a breath of her, a draught of air, passed our way. I
am more familiar now with the odour malaria causes, but then I thought
she must have a freight of the dead. She anchored. We could see her
loaded hammocks in the light of the few lamps she carried. Through the
binoculars next morning I inspected with peculiar interest the row of
cadaverous heads, with black tousled hair, lemon-coloured skins, open
mouths and vacant eyes, which stared at us over her rails. Each looked
as though once it had peered into the eyes of doom, and then was but
waiting, caring nothing.

There, ahead, was the Madeira now for us. We were then nearly a thousand
miles from the sea, well within South America. But that meeting-place of
the Amazon and its chief tributary was an expanse of water surprising in
its immensity. As much light was reflected from the floor as at sea. The
water was oceanic in amplitude. The forest boundaries were so far away
that one could not realise, even when the time we had been on the river
was remembered as a prolonged monotony, that this was the centre of a
continent. The forest on our port side was near enough for us to see its
limbs and its vines; but to the south-west, where we were heading for
Bolivia, and to the north, the way to the Guianas, and to the east, out
of which we had come, and to the west, where was Peru, the land was but
a low violet barrier, varying in altitude with distance, and with silver
sections in it, marking the river roads. In the north-west there was a
broad silver path through the wall, the way to the Rio Negro, Manaos,
and the Orinoco. In the south the near forest, being flooded, was a
puzzle of islands. As we progressed they opened out as a line of green
headlands. The Madeira appeared to have three widely separated mouths,
with a complexity of intermediate and connective minor ditches. Indeed,
the gate of the river was a region of inundated jungle. One began to
understand why travellers here sometimes find themselves on the wrong
river.

Our bows turned in to the forest wall, and for a few minutes I could not
see any way for us there. The jungle parted, and we were on a narrow
turgid flood, the colour of the main river, but swifter; a majestic
forest was near to either beam. We were enclosed. And after we entered
the Madeira my dark thoughts of our future at once left me. If they
returned, it was only to be joked about, in the dry way one does refer
to a dread that has been long in the distance, and then one day takes
shape, becomes material, and settles down with us. Its form, as you
know, nearly always allays your alarms. Your simple mind has expected
something with the lowering face of evil. Lo! evil has even bright eyes.
Its nature, its dark craft which you have dreaded, is not seen, and your
mind grows light with surprise. What, only this, then?

I never saw earth look more resplendent and chromatic than on the day
when we entered that river with a bad name. Presently, I thought—here
was a brief resurgence of the old gloom which had shrouded my
conjectural Madeira—I might be called upon to pay the price for this
surprising gift of intense colour, light, and luscious heat, for the
quickening of the blood, as though the tropic air were a stimulant as
well as a narcotic. Well, it does seem but fair, if chance, being happy,
gives you a place in the tropics, to expect to have less time there than
is given for the job of eking out a meagre existence in the north. It
would not be right to look for gain both ways. (You will have noticed
already, I suppose, that I have not been on the Madeira fifteen
minutes.) This, I thought, as I walked to and fro on the “Capella,” is
different from that endurance, bitter and prolonged, in the land where
there is no sun worth mentioning, where the north-east wind blows, where
the poor rate is so and so in the pound (and you are one of the
fortunate if you pay it), and Lord Rosebery lectures on Thrift. I
mentioned this to the Doctor. He did not remove his pipe from his mouth.

Because (the idea dawned on me as I sank into a deck chair beside the
surgeon under the poop awning, and borrowed his silver tobacco-box),
because, as to thrift and parching winds, abstinence and prudence, and
lectures by the solemn on how to thin out your life in cold climates
where all that is worth having is annexed, why praise a man who is
willing to deprave his life to sand and frost? There in merry England
the poor wretch is, where the riches of earth are not broadcast largess
as I see they are here, but are stacked on each side of the road, and
guarded by police, leaving to him but the inclement highway, with
nothing but Lord Rosebery’s advice and benediction to help him keep the
wind out of the holes in his trousers; that benefit, and the bleak
consideration that he may swink all day for a handful of beans, or go
without. What is prudence in that man? It is his goodwill for the
police. To be blue nosed and meek at heart, and to hoard half the crust
of your stinted bread, is to blaspheme the King of Glory. Some men will
touch their crowns to Carnegie in heaven.

Thrift and abstinence! They began to look the most snivelling of sins as
I watched, with spacious leisure, the near procession of gigantic trees,
that superb wild which did not arise from such niggard and flinty
maxims. Frugality and prudence! That is to regard the means to death in
life, the pallor and projecting bones of a warped existence, as good men
dwell on courage, motherhood, rebellion, and May time, and the other
proofs of vitality and growth. Now, I thought, I see what to do. All
those improving lectures, reform leagues, university settlements, labour
exchanges, and other props for crippled humanity, are idle. It is a
generative idea that is wanted, a revelation, a vision. It would be
easier and quicker to take regiments of folk out of Ancoats, Hanley,
Bethnal Green, and the cottages of the countryside, for one long glance
at the kind of earth I see now. The world would expand as they looked.
They would get the dynamic suggestion. In vain, afterwards, would the
monopolists and the superior persons chant patriotic verse to drown the
noise of chain forging at the Westminster foundry. Not the least good,
that. The folk would not hear. Their minds would be absent and outward,
not locked within to huddle with cramped and respectful thoughts. They
would not start instinctively at the word of command. They would begin
with dignity and assurance to compass their own affairs, and in an
enormous way; and they would make hardly a sound as they moved forward,
and they would have uplifted and shining eyes. (“Then you think more of
’em than I do,” said the surgeon.)

It would be no use, I saw clearly, sending the folk to Algeria, Egypt,
or New York. Such places never betray to the traveller that our world is
not a shapeless parcel of fields and buildings, tied up with bylaws, and
sealed by the Grand Lama as his last act in the stupendous work of
creation. There it is, an angular package in the sky, which the sun
reads, and directs on its way to heaven in advance of its limited
syndicate of proprietors.

Here on the Madeira I had a vision instead of the earth as a great and
shining sphere. There were no fences and private bounds. I saw for the
first time an horizon as an arc suggesting how wide is our ambit. That
bare shoulder of the world effaced regions and constellations in the
sky. Our earth had celestial magnitude. It was warm, a living body. The
abundant rain was vital, and the forest I saw, nobler in stature and
with an aspect of intensity beyond what the Amazon forests showed, rose
like a sign of life triumphant.

You see what that tropical wilderness did for me, and with but a single
glance. Whatever comes after, I shall never be the same again. The
complacent length of the ship was before us. Amidships were some of the
fellows staring overside, absorbed. Now and then, when his beat brought
him to the port side, I could see the head of the little pilot on the
bridge. His colleague was sleeping in one of the hammocks slung between
the stanchions of the poop awning. The Doctor was scrutinising a pair of
motuca flies which hovered about his ankles, waiting for him to go to
sleep. He wanted them for specimens. The Skipper, looking a little
anxious, came slowly up the poop ladder, crossed over, and stood by our
chairs. “The river is full of big timber,” he said. He went to stare
overside, and then came back to us. “The current is about five knots,
and those trees adrift are as big as barges. I hope they keep clear of
the propeller.” The Skipper’s eye was uneasy. He was glum with
suspicion; he spoke of the way his fools might meet the wiles of fortune
at a time when he was below and his ship was without its acute
protective intelligence. He stood, a spare figure in white, in a limp
grass hat with flapping eaves, gazing forward to the bridge
mistrustfully. He had brought us in a valuable vessel to a place
unknown, and now he had to go on, and afterwards get us all out again. I
began to feel a large respect for this elderly master mariner (who did
not give the beard of an onion for any man’s sympathy) who had skilfully
contrived to put us where we were, and now was unaware what mischance
would send us to rot under the forest wall, the bottom to fall out of
our adventure just when we were in its narrowest passage and achievement
was almost within view. “This is no place for a ship,” the captain
mumbled. “It isn’t right. We’re disturbing the mud all the time; and
look at those butterflies now, dodging about us!” He was continuing this
monologue as a dirty cap appeared at the head of the ladder, and a long
and ragged length of sorrowful sailor mounted there, and doffed the cap.
The Skipper brusquely signed to him to approach. He was a youngster in
an advanced stage of some trouble, and he had no English. I think he was
a Swede. He demonstrated his sickness, baring his arm, muttering
unintelligibly. The limb, like his hand, was distorted with large
blisters. There was his face, too. I mistrusted my equanimity for some
moments, but braced my eyes, compelling them to be scientific and
impersonal. By signs we gathered he had been sleeping on deck, such was
the heat of the forecastle, and the mosquitoes, the Doctor said, had
poisoned a body already tainted from the stews of Rotterdam. The
corroding spirit of the jungle was beginning to permeate through our
flaws.

The Doctor went to his surgery. The pilot sat up in his hammock, glanced
indifferently at the sick sailor, yawning and stretching his arms, his
dainty little brown feet dangling just clear of the deck. He began to
roll a cigarette of something which looked like tea. Then he dropped
out, and went forward to release his mate on the bridge, and the senior
pilot came up as the Doctor had finished his job. The junior pilot, a
fragile, girlish fellow, rather taciturn, greets us always with a
faintly supercilious smile. His chief is a round, jolly little man,
hearty, and lavish with ornamental gestures. We both smiled
involuntarily as he marched across to us, with his uniform cap, bearing
our ship’s badge, stuck on the back of his head with a bias to the right
ear. There is not enough of Portuguese in our ship’s company to serve
one conversation adequately, but we get on well with this pilot, and he
with us. He sits in a hammock, making pantomime explanatory of Brazil to
us strangers, and we pick him up with alacrity, after but brief pauses.
While the Doctor beguiled him into dramatic moments, I lay back and
watched him, searching for Brazilian characteristics, to report here.

You know that, when you have returned from a far country, you are asked
unanswerable questions about its people, and especially about its women.
We are easily flattered by the suggestion that we are authoritative,
with opinions got from uncommon experience, especially where women with
strange eyes and dark skins are concerned. So, once upon a time, I
caught myself—or rather, I caught that cold, critical, and impartial
part of me, which is a solemn fake—when answering a question of this
kind, explaining in a comprehensive way the character of the Brazilian
people, as though I were telling of the objective phenomena of one
simple soul. Presently the wise and ribald part of me woke, caught the
note of that inhuman voice, and raised a derisive cry, heard by me with
grave deprecation, but not heard at all by my listener. I stopped. For
what do I know of the Brazilian character? Very little. Is there such a
thing? I suppose the true Brazilian is like the true Englishman, or the
typical bird which is known by its bones, but may be anything from a
crow to a nightingale, but is more likely a lark. You can imagine the
foreigner taking his knowledge of the British pick-pocket who met him at
the landing-stage, the pen-portraits of Bernard Shaw, the Rev. Jeremiah
Hardshell, Father O’Flynn, You, Me, the cabman who swore at him, his
landlady and her daughter, Lloyd-George, Piccadilly by night, and Tom
Bowling, carefully adjusting all that valuable British data, just as
Professor Karl Pearson does his physical statistics, and explaining the
result as the modern English; adding, in the usual footnote, what
decadent tendencies are to be deduced, in addition, from the facts which
could not be worked into the major premises.

Now, there was the handsome Brazilian customs officer, tall, august,
with dark eyes haughty and slow with thought, the waves of his romantic
black hair faintly traced in silver, who might have been a poet, or a
philosophic revolutionist; but who was the man, as the first mate told
us (after we had searched everywhere for the articles) who “pinched your
bloomin’ field-glasses and my meerschaum.”

Take, if you like, the ultra-fashionable ladies at the Para hotel, who
looked at us with sleepy eyes, and who, I suspect, were not Brazilians
at all. Supposing they were, there must be counted the wife of the
official at Serpa. She came aboard there with her husband to see an
English ship; she reminded me of that picture of the Madonna by
Sassoferrato in the National Gallery; I am unable to come nearer to
justice to her than that. Again, there was a certain vain native
apothecary, and he had the idea that I was bottle-washer to the
“Capella’s” surgeon, much to that fellow’s secret delight. The chemist
treated me with a studied difference in consequence; and though our
surgeon could have undeceived the mistaken man, having some Portuguese,
he refused to do so. I remember the pilot who, when he left us at Serpa,
and I bade him farewell, did, before all our ship’s company, embrace me
heartily, rest his cheek against mine, and make loving noises in his
throat. And there is our present chief guide, now swinging in his
hammock, and looking down upon us waggishly.

He had not been a pilot always. Once he was a clown in a circus; that
little fact is a clue to much which otherwise would have been obscure in
him. When he boarded us at Serpa to take the place of the man who shrank
from the thought of the Madeira, the chart-room under the bridge was
given to him, and as the mate put it, “he moved in.” He had bundles,
boxes, bags, baskets, a tin trunk, a chair, a parrot, a hammock, and
some pictures. He was going to be with us for two months, but his affair
had the conclusive character of a migration, a final severance from his
old life. His friends came to see him depart, and they wound themselves
in each others arms, head laid in resignation on shoulders. “Looks as if
we’re bound for the Golden Shore,” commented the boatswain.

This little rounded man, the pilot, with his unctuous olive skin, tiny
moustache of black silk, and impudent eyes, looked ripe in middle age,
though actually he was but thirty. He wore a suit of azure cotton,
ironed faultlessly, and his tunic fitted with hooks and eyes across his
throat. His boots were sulphur coloured and Parisian. A massive gold
ring, which carried a carbonado nearly as large as the stopper of a beer
bottle, was embedded in a fat finger of his right hand. In the front of
his cap he had sewn the badge of our line, and he was curiously proud of
that gaudy symbol. He would wear the cap on one ear, and walk up and
down in display, with a lofty smile, and a carriage supposed to
appertain to a British officer in a grand moment. He had a great
admiration for all that was British, except our food. If you were up at
sunrise you could see him at his toilet, and the spectacle was worth the
effort. His array of toilet vesicles reminded me of the shelves in a
barber’s shop. Oiled and fragrant, he took his seat for breakfast with
much formal politeness. He shook our saloon company into a sense of its
responsibilities, for we had grown indifferent as to dress, and
sometimes we had three-day beards. His handkerchiefs and linen were
scented, and dainty with floral designs. And ours—oh, ours—! He took
wine at breakfast, and after idling a little with our foreign dishes he
would wipe his mouth on our tablecloth, and then leave for the bridge.
As he passed across the poop we would hear him hawk violently, and spit
on the deck. Then the Skipper would glare, and drive his chair backwards
in a dark passion.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Gazing at the foliage as it unfolded, our pilot named the paranas,
tributaries, and islands, when they drew abeam. He told us what the
trees were; and then with head shakes and uplifted hands and eyes,
indicated what grave things were behind that screen of leaves. (Though I
don’t suppose he knew.) His mimicry was so spontaneous and exact that it
was more entertaining and just as instructive as speech. He taught us
how the Indians kill you, and what some villagers did to a naughty
padre, and how the sucuruju swallows a deer, and how to make love to a
Brazilian girl. He kicked the slippers from his little feet, and
smuggled into the hammock mesh for a snooze, waving a hand coyly to us
over the edge of his nest.

The dinner bell rang. Because the saloon is now hot beyond endurance,
the steward has fixed a table on deck, and so, as we eat, we can see the
jungle pass. That keeps some of our mind from dwelling over much on the
dreary menu. The potatoes have begun to ferment. The meat is out of
tins; sometimes it is served as fritters, sometimes we recognise it in a
hash, and sometimes, shameless, it appears without dress, a naked and
shiny lump straight from its metal bed. Often the bread is sour. The
butter, too, is out of tins. Feeding is not a joy, but a duty. But it is
soon over. Although everybody now complains of indigestion, we have far
to go yet, and the cheerfulness which faces all circumstances brazenly
must be our manna. Our table, some deal planks on trestles, is mellowed
by a white tablecloth. We sit round on boxes. Over head the sun flames
on the awning, making it golden and translucent. I let the soup pass.
The next dish is a hot pot of tinned mutton and preserved vegetables.
Something must be done, and I do it then. There is some pickled beef and
pickled onions. I watch the forest pass. Then, for desert, the steward,
the hot beads touring about the mounts of his large pale face, brings
along oleaginous fritters of plum duff. The Doctor leaves. I follow him
to the chairs again, and we exchange tobacco-boxes and fill our pipes.
This may seem to you unendurable for long. I did not think so, though of
habits so regular and engrained that my chances of survival, when viewed
comparatively, for my ship mates were hardened and usually were more
robust, seemed poor enough. But I enjoyed it. There was nourishment, a
tonic stay, in our desire to greet every onset of the miseries, which
now were camped about us, besieging our souls, with sansculotte
insolence. We called to the Eumenides with mockery. Like Thoreau, I
believe I could live on a tenpenny nail, if it comes to that.

There is no doubt the forest influences our moods in a way you at home
could not understand. Our minds take its light and shade, and just as
our little company, gathered in the Chief’s room at a time when the seas
were running high, recalled sombre legends which told of foredoom, so
this forest, an intrusive presence which is with us morning, noon, and
night, voiceless, or making such sounds as we know are not for our ears,
now shadows us, the prescience of destiny, as though an eyeless mask sat
at table with us, a being which could tell us what we would know, but
though it stays, makes no sign.

This forest, since we entered the Para River, now a thousand miles away,
has not ceased. There have been the clearings of the settlements from
Para inwards; but as Spruce says in his Journal, those clearings and
campos alter the forest of the Amazon no more than would the culling of
a few weeds alter the aspect of an English cornfield. The few openings I
have seen in the forest do not derange my clear consciousness of a
limitless ocean of leaves, its deep billows of foliage rolling down to
the only paths there are in this country, the rivers, and there
overhanging, arrested in collapse. There is no land. One must travel by
boat from one settlement to another. The settlements are but islands,
narrow foot-holds, widely sundered by vast gulfs of jungle.

The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not
land. It is another element. Its inhabitants are arborean; they have
been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and birds to
the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the
ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveller cannot
reach, and its unchanging surface, merged through distance into a mere
reflector of the day, a brightness or a gloom, in his immediate vicinity
breaks into a complexity of green surges; then one day the voyager sees
land at last and is released from it. But we have not seen land since
Serpa. There are men whose lives are spent in the chasms of light where
the rivers are sunk in the dominant element, but who never venture
within its green surface, just as one would not go beneath the waves to
walk in the twilight of the sea bottom.

Now I have been watching it for so long I see the outer aspect of the
jungles does vary. When I saw it first on the Para River it appeared to
my wondering eyes but featureless green cliffs. Then in the Narrows
beyond Para I remember an impression of elegance and placidity, for
there, the waters still being tidal and saline, the palms were
conspicuous and in profuse abundance. The great palms are the chief
feature of that forest elevation, with their graceful columns, and their
generous and symmetrical fronds which sometimes are like gigantic green
feathers, and again are like fans. A tall palm, whatever its species,
being a definite expression of life—not an agglomeration of leaves, but
body and crown, a real personality—the forest of the Narrows, populous
with such exquisite beings, had marges of straight ascending lines and
flourishing and geometrical crests.

Beyond the river Xingu, on the main stream, the forest, persistent as a
presence, again changed its aspect. It was ragged and shapeless, an
impenetrable tangle, its front strewn with fallen trees, the vision of
outer desolation. By Obydos it was more aerial and shapely again, but
not of that light and soaring grace of the Narrows. It was contained,
yet mounted not in straight lines, as in the country of the palms, but
in convex masses. Here on the lower Madeira the forest seems of a nature
intermediate between the rolling structure of the growth by Obydos, and
the grace of the palm groves in the estuarine region of the Narrows. It
is barbaric and splendid, easily prodigal with illimitable riches,
sinking the river beneath a wealth of forms.

On the Madeira, as elsewhere in the world of the Amazons, some of the
forest is on “terra-firma,” as that land is called which is not flooded
when the waters rise. There the trees reach their greatest altitude and
diameter; it is the region of the caáapoam, the “great woods” of the
Indians. A stretch of _terra firma_ shows as a low, vertical bank of
clay, a narrow ribbon of yellow earth dividing the water from the
jungle. More rarely the river cuts a section through some undulating
heights of red conglomerate—heights I call these cliffs, as heights
they are in this flat country, though at home they would attract no more
attention than would the side of a gravel-pit—and again the bank may be
of that cherry and saffron clay which gives a name to Itacoatiara. On
such land the forest of the Madeira is immense, three or four species
among the greater trees lording it in the green tumult expansively,
always conspicuous where they stand, their huge boles showing in the
verdant façade of the jungle as grey and brown pilasters, their crowns
rising above the level roof of the forest in definite cupolas. There is
one, having a neat and compact dome and a grey, smooth, and rounded
trunk, and dense foliage as dark as that of the holm oak; and another,
resembling it, but with a flattened and somewhat disrupted dome. I
guessed these two giants to be silk-cottons. Another, which I supposed
to be of the leguminous order, had a silvery bole, and a texture of pale
green leafage open and light, which at a distance resembled that of the
birch. These three trees, when assembled and well grown, made most
stately riverside groups. The trunks were smooth and bare till somewhere
near ninety feet from the ground. Palms were intermediate, filling the
spaces between them, but the palms stood under the exogens, growing in
alcoves of the mass, rising no higher than the beginning of the branches
and foliage of their lords. The whole overhanging superstructure of the
forest—not a window, an inlet, anywhere there—was rolling clouds of
leaves from the lower rims of which vines were catenary, looping from
one green cloud to another, or pendent, like the sundered cordage of a
ship’s rigging. Two other trees were frequent, the pao mulatto, with
limbs so dark as to look black, and the castanheiro, the Brazil nut
tree.

The roof of the woods lowered when we were steaming past the igapo. The
igapo, or aqueous jungle, through which the waters go deeply for some
months of the year, is of a different character, and perhaps of a lesser
height—it seems less; but then it grows on lower ground. I was told to
note that its foliage is of a lighter green, but I cannot say I saw
that. It is in the igapo that the Hevea Braziliensis flourishes, its
pale bole, suggestive of the white poplar, deep in water for much of the
year, and its crown sheltered by its greater neighbours, so that it
grows in a still, heated, and humid twilight. This low ground is always
marked by growths of small cecropia trees. These, with their white
stems, their habit of free and regular branching, and their long leaves,
digital in the manner of the horse-chestnut, have the appearance of
great candelabra. Sometimes the igapo is prefaced by an area of cane.
The numberless islands, being of recent formation, have a forest of a
different nature, and they seldom carry the larger trees. The upper ends
of many of the islands terminate in sandy pits, where dwarf willows
grow. So foreign was the rest of the vegetation, that notwithstanding
its volume and intricacy, I detected those humble little willows at
once, as one would start surprised at an English word heard in the
meaningless uproar of an alien multitude.

The forest absorbed us; as one’s attention would be challenged and drawn
by the casual regard, never noticeably direct, but never withdrawn, of a
being superior and mysterious, so I was drawn to watch the still and
intent stature of the jungle, waiting for it to become vocal, for some
relaxing of its static form. Nothing ever happened. I never discovered
it. Rigid, watchful, enigmatic, its presence was constant, but without
so much as one blossom in all its green vacuity to show the least
friendly familiarity to one who had found flowers and woodlands kind. It
had nothing that I knew. It remained securely aloof and indifferent,
till I thought hostility was implied, as the sea implies its impartial
hostility, in a constant presence which experience could not fathom, nor
interest soften, nor courage intimidate. We sank gradually deeper
inwards towards its central fastnesses.

By noon on our first day on the Madeira we reached the village of
Rozarinho, which is on the left bank, with the tributary of the same
name a little more up stream, but entering from the other side. Here, as
we followed a loop of the stream, the Madeira seemed circumscribed, a
tranquil lake. The yellow water, though swift, had so polished a surface
that the reflections of the forest were hardly disturbed, sinking below
the tops of the inverted trees to the ultimate clouds, giving an
illusion of profundity to the apparent lake. The village was but a
handful of leaf huts grouped about the nucleus of one or two larger
buildings with white walls. There was the usual jetty of a few planks to
which some canoes were tied. The forest was a high background to those
diminished huts; the latter, as we came upon them, suddenly increased
the height of the trees.

In another place the shelter of a family of Indians was at the top of a
bank, secretive within the base of the woods. A row of chocolate babies
stood outside that nest, with four jabiru storks among them. Each bird,
so much taller than the babies, stood resting meditatively on one leg,
as though waiting the order to take up an infant and deliver it
somewhere. None of them, storks or infants, took the least notice of us.
Perhaps the time had not yet come for them to be aware of mundane
things. Certainly I had a feeling myself, so strange was the place, and
quiet and tranquil the day, that we had passed world’s end, and that
what we saw beyond our steamer was the coloured stuff of dreams which,
if a wind blew, would wreathe and clear; vanish, and leave a shining
void. The sunset deepened this apprehension. There came a wonderful sky
of orange and mauve. It was over us and came down and under the ship. We
moved with glowing clouds beneath our keel. There was no river; the
forest girdled the radiant interior of a hollow sphere.

The pilots could not proceed at night. Shortly after sundown we
anchored, in nine fathoms. The trees were not many yards from the
steamer. When the ship was at rest a canoe with two Indians came
alongside, with a basket of guavas. They were shy fellows, and each
carried in his hand a bright machete, for they did not seem quite sure
of our company. After tea we sat about the poop, trying to smoke, and,
in the case of the Doctor and the Purser, wearing at the same time veils
of butterfly nets, as protection from the mosquito swarms. The netting
was put over the helmet, and tucked into the neck of the tunic. Yet,
when I poked the stem of the pipe, which carried the gauze with it, into
my mouth, the veil was drawn tight on the face. A mosquito jumped to the
opportunity, and arrived. Alongside, the frogs were making the deafening
clangour of an iron foundry, and through that sound shrilled the
cicadas. I listened for the first time to the din of a tropical night in
the forest. There is no word strong enough to convey this uproar to ears
which have not listened to it.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Jan. 24._ A bright still sunrise, promising heat; and before breakfast
the ship’s ironwork was too hot to touch. The novelty of this Madeira is
already beginning to merge into the yellow of the river, the blue of the
sky, and the green of the jungle, with but the occasional variation of
low roseous cliffs. The average width of the river may be less than a
quarter of a mile. It is loaded with floating timber, launched upon it
by “terras-cahidas,” landslides, caused by the rains, which carry away
sections of the forest each large enough to furnish an English park with
trees. Sometimes we see a bight in the bank where such a collapse has
only recently occurred, the wreckage of trees being still fresh. Many of
the trees which charge down on the current are of great bulk, with half
their table-like base high out of the water. Occasionally rafts of them
appear, locked with creepers, and bearing flourishing gardens of weeds.
This characteristic gives the river its Portuguese name, “river of
wood.” The Indians know the Madeira as the Cayary, “white river.”

Its course to-day serpentines so freely that at times we steer almost
east, and then again go west. Our general direction is south-west. At
eight this morning, after some anxious moments when the river was
dangerous with reefs, we passed the village of Borba, 140 miles from
Serpa. Here there is a considerable clearing, with kine browsing over a
hummocky sward that is well above the river on an occurrence of the red
clay. This release of the eyes was a smooth and grateful experience
after the enclosing walls. Some steps dug in the face of the low cliff
led to the white houses, all roofed with red tiles. The village faced
the river. From each house ascended the leisurely smoke of early
morning. The church was in the midst of the houses, its bell conspicuous
with verdigris. Two men stood to watch us pass. It was a pleasant
assurance to have, those roofs and the steeple rising actually into the
light of the sky. The dominant forest, in which we were sunk, was here
definitely put down by our fellow-men.

We were beyond Borba, and its parana and island just above it, before
the pilot had finished telling us, where we watched from the “Capella’s”
bridge, that Borba was a settlement which had suffered much from attacks
of the Araras Indians. The river took a sharp turn to the east, and
again went west. Islands were numerous. These islands are lancet-shaped,
and lie along the banks, separated by side channels, their paranas, from
the land. The smaller river craft often take a parana instead of the
main stream, to avoid the rush of the current. The whole region seems
lifeless. There is never a flower to be seen, and rarely a bird.
Sometimes, though, we disturb the snowy heron. On one sandy island,
passed during the afternoon, and called appropriately, Ilho do Jacaré,
we saw two alligators. Otherwise we have the silent river to ourselves;
though I am forgetting the butterflies, and the constant arrival aboard
of new winged shapes which are sometimes so large and grotesque that one
is uncertain about their aggressive qualities. As we idle on the poop we
keep by us two insect nets, and a killing-bottle. The Doctor is making a
collection, and I am supposed to assist.

When I came on deck on the morning of our arrival in the Brazils it was
not the orange sunrise behind a forest which was topped by a black
design of palm fronds, nor the warm odour of the place, nor the height
and intensity of the vegetation, which was most remarkable to me, a
new-comer from the restricted north. It was a butterfly which flickered
across our steamer like a coloured flame. No other experience put
England so remote.

A superb butterfly, too bright and quick to be anything but an escape
from Paradise, will stay its dancing flight, as though with intelligent
surprise at our presence, hover as if puzzled, and swoop to inspect us,
alighting on some such incongruous piece of our furniture as a coil of
rope, or the cook’s refuse pail, pulsing its wings there, plainly
nothing to do with us, the prismatic image of joy. Out always rush some
of our men at it, as though the sight of it had maddened them, as would
a revelation of accessible riches. It moves only at the last moment,
abruptly and insolently. They are left to gape at its mocking retreat.
It goes in erratic flashes to the wall of trees and then soars over the
parapet, hope at large.

Then there are the other things which, so far as most of us know, have
no names, though a sailor, wringing his hands in anguish, is usually
ready with a name. To-day we had such a visitor. He looked a fellow the
Doctor might require, so I marked him down when he settled near a hatch
on the afterdeck. He was a bee the size of a walnut, and habited in dark
blue velvet. In this land it is wise to assume that everything bites or
stings, and that when a creature looks dead it is only carefully
watching you. I clapped the net over that fellow and instantly he
appeared most dead. Knowing he was but shamming, and that he would give
me no assistance, I stood wondering what I could do next; then the cook
came along. The cook saw the situation, laughed at my timidity with
tropical forms, went down on his knees, and caught my prisoner. The cook
raised a piercing cry.

On the bridge I saw them levelling their glasses at us; and some
engineers came to their cabin doors to see us where we stood on the
lonely deck, the cook and the Purser, in a tableau of poignant tragedy.
The cook walked round and round, nursing his suffering member, and I did
not catch all he said, for I know very little Dutch; but the spirit of
it was familiar, and his thumb was bleeding badly. The bee had resumed
death again. The state of the cook’s thumb was a surprise till the
surgeon exhibited the bee’s weapons, when it became clear that thumbs,
especially when Dutch and rosy, like our cook’s, afforded the right
medium for an artist who worked with such mandibles, and a tail that was
a stiletto.

In England the forms of insect life soon become familiar. There is the
housefly, the lesser cabbage white butterfly, and one or two other
little things. In the Brazils, though the great host of forms is
surprising enough, it is the variety in that host which is more
surprising still. Any bright day on the “Capella” you may walk the
length of the ship, carrying a net and a collecting-bottle, and fill the
bottle (butterflies, cockroaches, and bugs not admitted), and perhaps
have not three of a species. The men frequently bring us something
buzzing in a hat; though accidents do happen half-way to where the
Doctor is sitting, and the specimen is mangled in a frenzy. A hornet
came to us that way. He was in violet armour, as hard as a crab, was
still stabbing the air with his long needle, and working on a fragment
of hat he held in his jaws, But such knights in mail are really
harmless, for after all they need not be interfered with. It is the
insignificant little fellows whose object in life it is to interfere
with us which really make the difference.

So far on the river we have not met the famous pium fly. But the motuca
fly is a nuisance during the afternoon sleep. It is nearly of the size
and appearance of a “blue-bottle” fly, but its wings, having black tips,
look as though their ends were cut off. The motucas, while we slept,
would alight on the wrists and ankles, and where each had fed there
would be a wound from which the blood steadily trickled.

The mosquitoes do not trouble us till sundown. But one morning in my
cabin I was interested in the hovering of what I thought was a small,
leggy spider which, because of its colouration of black and grey bands,
was evasive to the sight as it drifted about on its invisible thread. At
last I caught it, and found it was a new mosquito. In pursuing it I
found a number of them in the cabin. When I exhibited the insect to the
surgeon he did not well disguise his concern. “Say nothing about it,” he
said, “but this is the yellow-fever brute,” So our interest in our new
life is kept alert and bright. The solid teak doors of our cabins are
now permanently fixed back. Shutting them would mean suffocation; but as
the cabins must be closed before sundown to keep out the clouds of
gnats, the carpenter has made wooden frames, covered with copper gauze,
to fit the door openings at night, and rounds of gauze to cap the open
ports; and with a damp cloth, and some careful hunting each morning, one
is able to keep down the mosquitoes which have managed to find entry
during the night and have retired at sunrise to rest in dark corners.
For our care notwithstanding the insects do find their way in to assault
our lighted lamps. The Chief, partly because as an old sailor he is a
fatalist, and partly because he thinks his massive body must be
invulnerable, and partly because he has a contempt, anyway, for
protecting himself, each morning has a new collection of curios, alive
and dead, littered about his room. (I do not wonder Bates remained in
this land so long; it is Elysium for the entomologist.) One of the live
creatures found in his room the Chief retains and cherishes, and hopes
to tame, though the object does not yet answer to his name of Edwin.
This creature is a green mantis or praying insect, about four inches
long, which the Chief came upon where it rested on the copper gauze of
his door-cover, holding a fly in its hands, and eating it as one would
an apple. This mantis is an entertaining freak, and can easily keep an
audience watching it for an hour, if the day is dull. Edwin, in colour
and form, is as fresh, fragile, and translucent as a leaf in spring. He
has a long thin neck—the stalk to his wings, as it were—which is quite
a third of his length. He has a calm, human face with a pointed chin at
the end of his neck; he turns his face to gaze at you without moving his
body, just as a man looks backwards over his shoulder. This uncanny
mimicry makes the Chief shake with mirth. Then, if you alarm Edwin, he
springs round to face you, frilling his wings abroad, standing up and
sparring with his long arms, which have hooks at their ends. At other
times he will remain still, with his hands clasped up before his face,
as though in earnest devotion, for a trying period. If a fly alights
near him he turns his face that way and regards it attentively. Then
sluggishly he approaches it for closer scrutiny. Having satisfied
himself it is a good fly, without warning his arms shoot out and that
fly is hopelessly caught in the hooked hands. He eats it, I repeat, as
you do apples, and the authentic mouthfuls of fly can be seen passing
down his glassy neck. Edwin is fragile as a new leaf in form, has the
same delicate colour, and has fascinating ways; but somehow he gives an
observer the uncomfortable thought that the means to existence on this
earth, though intricately and wonderfully devised, might have been
managed differently. Edwin, who seems but a pretty fragment of
vegetation, is what we call a lie. His very existence rests on the fact
that he is a diabolical lie.

Gossamers in the rigging to-day led the captain to prophesy a storm
before night. Clouds of an indigo darkness, of immense bulk, and
motionless, reduced the sunset to mere runnels of opaline light about
the bases of dark mountains inverted in the heavens. There was a rapid
fall of temperature, but no rain. Our world, and we in its centre on the
“Capella,” waited for the storm in an expectant hush. Night fell while
we waited. The smooth river again deepened into the nadir of the last of
day, and the forest about us changed to material ramparts of cobalt. The
pilot made preparations to anchor. The engine bell rang to stand-by, a
summons of familiar urgency, but with a new and alarming note when heard
in a place like that. The forest made no response. A little later the
bell clanged rapidly again, and the pulse of our steamer slowed, ceased.
We could hear the water uncoiling along our plates. The forest itself
approached us, came perilously near. The Skipper’s voice cried abruptly,
“Let go!” and at once the virgin silence was demolished by the uproar of
our cable. The “Capella” throbbed violently; she literally undulated in
the drag of the current. We still drifted slowly down stream. The second
anchor was dropped, and held us. The silence closed in on us instantly.
Far in the forest somewhere, while we were whispering to each other in
the quiet, a tree fell with a deep, significant boom.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Jan. 25._ We had been under way for more than an hour when my eyes
opened on the illuminated panorama of leaves and boles unfolding past
the door of my cabin. The cicadas were grinding their scissors loudly in
the trees alongside. I spent much of this day on the bridge, where I
liked to be, watching the pilot at work. The Skipper was there, and in a
cantankerous mood. The pilot wants us to make a chart of the river. He
has given the captain and me a long list of islands, paranas,
tributaries, villages, and sitios. Every map and reference to the river
we have on board is valueless. A map of the river indicates many
settlements with beautiful names; and at each point, when we arrive,
nothing but the forest shows. How the cartographers arrived at such
results is a mystery. This river, which their generous imaginings have
seen as a tortuous bough of the Amazon, laden with villages which they
indicate on their maps with marks like little round fruits, is almost
barren. Every day we pass small sitios or clearings; maybe the
map-makers mean such places as those. Yet each clearing is but a brief
security, a raft of land—the size of the garden of an English
villa—lonely in an ocean of deep leaves, where a rubber man has built
himself a timber house, and some huts for his serfs. It will have a
jetty and a huddle of canoes, and usually a few children on the bank
watching us. We salute that place with our syren as we pass, and
sometimes the kiddies spring for home then as though we were shooting at
them. Or we see a little embowered shack with a pile of fuel logs beside
it, and a crude name-board, where the river boats replenish when
traversing this stream, during the season, for rubber. Our pilots have
much to say of these stations, and of all the rubber men on the river
and their wealth. But away with their rubber! I am tired of it, and will
keep it out of this book if I can. For it is blasphemous that in such a
potentially opulent land the juice of one of its wild trees should be
dwelt upon—as it is in the states of Amazonas and Para—as though it
were the sole act of Providence. The Brazilians can see nothing here but
rubber. The generative qualities of this land through fierce sun and
warm showers—for rarely a day passes without rain, whatever the
season—a land of constant high summer with a free fecundity which has
buried the earth everywhere under a wild growth nearly two hundred feet
deep, is insignificant to them. They see nothing in it at all but the
damnable commodity which is its ruin. Para is mainly rubber, and Manaos.
The Amazon is rubber, and most of its tributaries. The Madeira
particularly is rubber. The whole system of communication, which covers
34,000 miles of navigable waters, waters nourishing a humus which
literally stirs beneath your feet with the movements of spores and
seeds, that system would collapse but for the rubber. The passengers on
the river boats are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All the talk
is of rubber. There are no manufactures, no agriculture, no fisheries,
and no saw-mills, in a region which could feed, clothe, and shelter the
population of a continent. There was a book by a Brazilian I saw at
Para, recently published, and called the “Green Hell” (Inferno Verde).
On its cover was the picture of a nude Indian woman, symbolical of
Amazonas, and from wounds in her body her blood was draining into the
little tin cups which the rubber collector uses against the incisions on
the rubber tree. From what I heard of the subject, and I heard much,
that picture was little overdrawn. I begin to think the usual commercial
mind is the most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad wonders in
the pageant of humanity.

It is only on the “Capella’s” bridge that you feel the stagnant air
which is upset by the steamer’s progress. There it spills over us, heavy
with the scent of the lairage on the fore deck. The bridge is a narrow,
elevated outlook, full in the sun’s eye, where I can get a view of the
complete ship as she serpentines in her narrow way. On the port side of
it the Skipper has a seat, and there now he sits all day, gazing moodily
ahead. The dapper little pilot stands centrally, throwing brief commands
over his shoulder into the open window of the wheelhouse, where a
sailor, gravely chewing tobacco, his hands on the wheel, is as rapt as
though in a trance. I think the pilot finds his way by divination. The
depth of the river is most variable. In the dry season I hear the stream
becomes but a chain of pools connected by threads which may be no more
than eighteen inches deep, the rest of its bed being dry mud
cross-hatched by sun cracks. The rains in far Bolivia, overflowing the
swamps there, during some months of the year increase the depth of the
Madeira by forty-five feet. The local rainy season would make hardly any
difference to it. The river is fed from reservoirs which stretch beneath
the Andes.

There is rarely anything to show why, for a spell, the pilot should take
us straight ahead in mid-stream, and then again tack to and fro across,
sometimes brushing the foliage with our shrouds. I have plucked a bunch
of leaves in an unexpected swoop in-shore. And the big timber comes down
afloat to meet us in a never-ending procession; there are the propellor
blades to be thought of. I see, now and then, the swirls which betray
rocks in hiding, and when dodging those dangerous places the screw
disturbs the mud and the stinks. But the pilot takes us round and about,
we with our 300 feet of length and 23 feet draught, as a man would steer
a motor car. To aid it our rudder has had fixed to it a false wooden
length. The “Capella” is a very good girl, as responsive to the pilot’s
word as though she knew that he alone can save her. She stems this
powerful current at but four knots, and sometimes we come to places
where, if she hesitated for but two seconds, we should be put athwart
stream to close the channel. And what would happen to us with nothing
but unexplored malarial forest each side of us is not useful to brood
on. Occasionally the pilot, grasping the top of the “dodger,” stares
beyond us fixedly to where the refracted sunshine is blinding between
the green cliffs, and gives quick and numerous orders to the wheelhouse
without turning his head. The Skipper gets up to watch. The “Capella”
makes surprising swerves, the pilot nervously taps the boards with his
foot.... Then he says something quietly, relaxes, and comes to us
blithely, the funny dog with a nonsense story, and the Skipper sinks
couchant again. Once more I watch the front of the jungle for what may
show there. Seldom there is anything new which shows. It is rare, even
when close alongside, that one can trace the shape of a leaf. There are
but the conspicuous grey nests of the ants and wasps. Yet several times
to-day I saw trees in blossom; domes of lilac in the green forest roof.
Again, to-day we put up a flight of hundreds of ducks; and another
incident was a blackwater stream, the Rio Mataua, the line of
demarcation between the Madeira’s yellow flood and its dark tributary
being distinct.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Jan. 26._ The forest is lower and more open, and the pao mulatto is
more numerous. We saw the important village of Manicoré to-day, and
Oncas, a little place within a portico of the woods which was veiled in
grey smoke, for they were coagulating rubber there. For awhile before
sunset the sky was scenic with great clouds, and glowing with the usual
bright colours. The wilderness was transformed. Each evening we seem to
anchor in a region different, in nature and appearance, under these
extraordinary sunset skies, from the country we have been travelling
since daylight. Transfiguration at eventime we know in England. Yet
sunset there but exalts our homeland till it seems more intimately ours
than ever, as though then came a luminous revelation of its rare
intrinsic goodness. We see, for some brief moments, its aura. But this
tropical jungle, at dayfall, is not the earth we know. It is a celestial
vision, beyond physical attaining, beyond knowledge. It is ulterior,
glorious, transient, fading before our surprise and wonder fade. We of
the “Capella” are its only witnesses, except those pale ghosts, the
egrets about the dim aqueous base of the forest.

Darkness comes quickly, the swoop and overspread of black wings. The
stopping of the ship’s heart, because the pulsations of her body have
had unconscious response in yours, as by an incorporeal ligament, is the
cessation of your own life. At a moment there is a strange quiet, in
which you begin to hear the whisper of inanimate things. A log glides
past making faint labial sounds. You are suddenly released from prison,
and float lightly in an ether impalpable to the coarse sounds and
movements of earth, but which is yet sensitive to the most delicate
contact of your thoughts and emotions. The whispering of your fellows is
but the rustling of their thoughts in an illimitable and inviolate
silence.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the frogs begin their nightlong din. The
crickets and cicadas join. Between the varying pitch of their voices
come other nocturnes in monotones from creatures unknown to complete the
gamut. There are notes so profound, but constant, that they are a mere
impression of obscurity to the hearing, as when one peers listening into
an abysm in which no bottom is seen, and others are stridulations so
attenuated that they shrill beyond reach.

A few frogs begin it. There are ululations, wells of mellow sound
bubbling to overflow in the dark, and they multiply and unite till the
quality of the sound, subdued and pleasant at first, is quite changed.
It becomes monstrous. The night trembles in the powerful beat of a
rhythmic clangour. One cannot think of frogs, hearing that metallic din.
At one time, soon after it begins, the chorus seems the far hubbub,
mingled and levelled by distance, of a multitude of people running and
disputing in a place where we who are listening know that no people are.
The noise comes nearer and louder till it is palpitating around us. It
might be the life of the forest, immobile and silent all day, now
released and beating upwards in deafening paroxysms.

Alongside the engine room casing amidships the engineers have fixed an
open-air mess-table, with a hurricane lamp in its midst, having but a
brief halo of light which hardly distinguishes the pickle jar from the
marmalade pot. A haze of mosquitoes quivers round the light. The air is
hot and lazy, and the engineers sit about limply in trousers and shirts,
the latter open and showing bosoms as various as faces. The men cheer
themselves with comical plaints about the heat, the food, the Brazils,
and make sudden dabs at bare flesh when the insects bite them. The Chief
rallies his boys as would a cheery dad—Sandy, though, is nearly his own
age, but still much of a lad, quietly despondent—and the Chief heartily
insists on food, like it or lump it. I go forward to the captain’s tea
table on the poop deck, where we have two hurricane lamps, and where the
figures of us round the table, in that dismal glim, are the thin
phantoms of men. The lamps have been lighted only that moment, and as we
take our seats, the insects come. Just as sharply as though something
derisive and invisible were throwing them at us, big mole crickets
bounce into our plates. A cicada, though I was then unaware of his
identity, a monstrous fly which looked as large as a rat, and with a
head like a lantern, alighted before me on the cloth, and remained
still. Picking it up tentatively it sprang a startling police rattle
between my finger and thumb, and the other chaps shouted their
merriment. The steward places a cup of tea before each of us, and in an
interval of the talk the Skipper announces a smell of paraffin in his
cup. We experiment with ours, and gravely confirm. The surgeon, bending
close to a light with his cup, the deep characteristics of his face
strongly accentuated—he seems but a bodiless head in the dark—says he
detects globules of fat. The Skipper crudely outlines this horror to the
steward, who makes an inaudible reply in German, and disappears down the
companion. We get a new and innocent brew.

There is hash for us. There is our familiar the pickled beef. There are
saucers of brown onions. There are saucers of jam and of butter.
To-night the steward has baked some cakes, and their grateful smell and
crisp brown rugged surface, studded with plums, determine in my mind a
resolution to eat four of them, if I can get them without open shame. I
assert that our Skipper has a counting eye for the special dishes;
though you may eat all the hash you want. Damn his hash! The bread is
sour. I want cakes.

After tea the pilots get into their hammocks and under their curtains,
out of the way of the mosquitoes. We know where they are because of the
red ends of their cigarettes. We sit around anywhere, the Skipper, the
Chief, the Doctor and the Purser. There is little to be said. We talk of
the mosquitoes, in ejaculations, for the little wretches quite easily
penetrate linen, and can manage even worsted socks. Occasionally flying
insects bump into the tin lamp placed above us on the ice chest. (No;
there is no ice.) Thin divergent arrows of light, the fireflies, lace
the gloom, and the trees alongside are gemmed with them. We find still
less to say to each other, but fear to retire to our heated berths, for
as it is just possible to breathe in the open we continue to defy the
mosquitoes. The first mate serenades us on his accordion. At last there
is no help for it. The steward comes to tell the master that his cot is
ready. The “old man” sleeps in a cot draped with netting, and slung from
the awning beams on the starboard side. Nightly he turns in there, and
unfailingly a rain cloud bursts in the very early morning, pounding on
the awning till the cool spray compels him, and he retreats in his
pyjamas for shelter, taking his pillow with him. It is for that reason I
do not use the cot he made for me, which hangs on the port side; though
it is delightful for the afternoon nap.

The Skipper disappears. The Doctor and I go below to the surgery, and
from the settee there he removes books, tobacco tins, fishing tackle,
phials, india rubber tubing, and small leather cases, making room for us
both, and first we have some out of his bottle, and then we try some out
of mine. The stuff is always tepid, for the water in the carafe has a
temperature of 80 degrees. The perspiration begins a steady permeation
as we talk, for now we can talk, and talk, being together, and talking
is better than sleep, which at its best is but a fitful doze in the
tropics. We fall, as it were, on each other’s necks. Though the Doctor’s
breast—I say nothing of mine—is not one which appears to invite the
weak tear of a fellow mortal who is harassed by solitude. You might
judge it too cold, too hard and unresponsive a support, for that; and I
have seen his eye even repellent. He is not elderly, but he is grey, and
pallid through too much of the tropics. The lines descending his face
show he has been observing things for long, and does not think much of
them. When disputing with him, he does not always reply to you; he
smiles to himself; a habit which is an annoyance to some people, whose
simple minds are suspicious, and who are unaware that the surgeon is
sometimes forgetful that his weaker brethren, when they are most heated
and disputative with him, then most lack confidence in their case, and
need the confirmation of the wit they know is superior. That is no time
when one should look at the wall, and smile quietly. The “Capella’s”
company feel that the surgeon stands where he overlooks them, and they
see, where he stands unassumingly superior, that he looks upon them
politely. They do not know he is really sad and forgetful; they think he
is amused, but that he prefers to pretend he is well bred. I must
confess it is known he has prescience having a certain devilish quality
of penetration. There was one of our stokers, and one night he was drunk
on stolen gin, and latitudinous, and so attempted a curious answer to
the second engineer, who sought him out in the forecastle concerning
work. Now the second engineer is a young man who has a number of
photographs of himself which display him, clad but in vanity and shorts,
back, front, and profile, arms folded tightly to swell his very large
muscles. He has really a model figure, and he knows it. The cut over the
stoker’s nose was a bad one.

To the surgeon the stoker went, early next morning, actually for a hair
of the dog, but with a story that he was then to go on duty, and so
would miss his ration of quinine, which is not served till eleven
o’clock. The quinine, as you know, is given in gin. The surgeon
complimented the man on such proper attention to his health, and
willingly gave him the quinine—in water. He also stood at the door of
the alleyway to watch the man retained the quinine as far as the engine
room entrance.

Eight bells! Presently I also must go and pretend to sleep. The
surgeon’s last cheery comment on the cosmic scheme remains but as a wry
smile on our faces. We grope in our minds desperately for a topic to
keep the talk afloat. There goes one bell!

I arrive at my haunt of cockroaches, where the second mate is already
asleep on the upper shelf. The brown light of the oil lamp has its
familiar flavour, and the cabin is like an oven. What a prospect for
sleep! Raising the mosquito curtain carefully I slip through the opening
like an acrobat, hoping to be ahead of the insidious little malaria
carriers. A drove of cockroaches scuttles wildly over my warm mattress
as I arrive. Striking matches within what the sailor overhead calls my
meat safe, I examine my enclosure carefully for mosquitoes, but none
seems to be there, though I know very well I shall find at least a
dozen, gorged with blood, in the morning. The iron bulkhead which
separates my bed from the engine room is, of course, hot to the touch.
The air is a passive weight. The old insect bites begin to irritate and
burn. I kick the miserable sheet to the foot, and lie on my back without
a movement, for I fear I may suffocate in that shut box. My chest seems
in bonds, and for long there is no relief, though the body presently
grows indifferent to the misery, and the anxiety goes. It is remarkable
to what brutality the body will submit, when it knows it must. Yet
nothing but a continuous effort of will kept the panic suppressed, and
me in that box, till the feeling of anxiety had passed. Thenceforward
the sleepless mind, like a petty balloon giddy on a thin but unbreakable
thread of thought, would tug at my consciousness, revolving and dodging
about, in spite of my resolution to keep it still. If I could only break
that thread, I said to myself, turning over again, away it would fly out
of sight, and I should forget all this ... all this.... And presently it
broke loose, and dwindled into oblivion.

Then I knew nothing more till I saw, fixed where I was in hopeless
horror, the baby face of one I dwell much upon, in moments of solitude,
and it had fallen wan and thin, and was full of woe unutterable, and its
appealing eyes were blind. I woke with a cry, sitting up suddenly, the
heart going like a rapid hammer. There was the curtained box about me.
The clothes were on the hooks. I could see the black shape of the cabin
doorway. By my watch it was four o’clock. The air had cooled, and as I
sat waiting for the next thing in the silence the mate snored profoundly
overhead. Ah! So that was all right.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Jan. 27._ This has been a day of anxious navigation, for the river has
had frequent reefs. We remain in a stagnant chasm of trees. The surgeon
and I, accompanied by a swarm of flies, went forward into the cattle
stew this morning to see how the beasts fared. The patient brutes were
suffering badly, and some, quite plainly, were dying. The change from
the lush green stuff of the Itacoatiara swamps to compressed American
hay put under their noses on an iron deck, and the stifling heat under
partial awnings, had ruined them. Some stood, heads down, legs
straddled, too indifferent to disperse the loathly clouds of parasites.
Most were plagued by ticks, which had the tenacity and appearance of
iron bolt heads. But the little black cow, the rebel, blared at us,
bound and suffering as she was. Vive la revolution! We drove the flies
from her hide, and she tried to kick us, the darling. We found a steer
with his shoulder out of joint, lying inert in the sun, indifferent to
further outrage. That had to be seen to, and we told the Skipper, who
ordered it to be killed. We wanted some fresh meat badly, he added. The
boatswain explained that he knew the business, and he brought a long
knife, and quite calmly thrust it into the front of the prone creature,
and seemed to be trying to find its heart. Nothing happened, except a
little blood and some convulsive movements. Another sailor produced a
short knife and a hammer, and tapped away behind the horns as though he
were a mason and this were stone. The frowning surgeon supposed the
fellow was trying to sever the vertebrae. I don’t know. Yet another
fellow jumped on its abdomen. At last it died. I put down merely what
happened. No two voyages are alike, and as this episode came into mine,
here it is, to be worked in with the sunsets and things. There was some
cheerful talk at the prospect of the first fresh meat since England, and
later, passing the cook’s galley, I saw an iron bin, and lifted its
cover to see what was there. And there was, as I judged there would be,
liver for tea that evening. But I learned that though I am a carnivore
yet I have not the pluck to be a vulture.

The next day we passed the Cidada de Humayta, the chief town on the
Madeira. Actually it was of the size of an unimportant home village.
There was nothing there to support the pilot’s sonorous title of cidada.
For some reason we were visited to-day by an extraordinary number of
butterflies. One large specimen was of an olive green, barred with
black. Another had wings of a bluish grey, striped with vermilion.
Helicons came, and once a morpho, the latter a great rarity away from
the interior of the woods. At four in the afternoon the sky grew
ominous. We had just time to notice the trees astern suddenly convulsed,
writhing where they stood, and the storm sprang at us, roaring, ripping
away awnings and loose gear. The noise in the forest round us was that
of cataclysm. The rain was an obscurity of falling water, and the trees
turned to shadows in a grey fog. The ship became full of waterspouts,
large streams and jets curving away from every prominence. This lasted
for but twenty minutes; but the impending clouds remained to hasten
night when we were in a place which, more than anything I have seen, was
the world before the coming of man. The river had broadened and
shallowed. The forest enclosed us. There were islands, and the rank
growth of swamps. We could see, through breaks in the igapo, extensive
lagoons beyond, with the high jungle brooding over empty silver areas.
Herons, storks, and egrets were white and still about the tangle of
aqueous roots. It was all as silent and other world as a picture.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Jan. 29._ When shouting awakened me this morning I saw the Chief hurry
by my cabin, half-dressed, and looking very anxious. By the almost
stationary foliage I could see the ship had merely way on her. Out I
jumped. On the forecastle head a crowd was gathered, peering overside. A
large tree was balanced accurately athwart our stem, and refused to
move. What worried the staff was that it would, when free, sidle along
our plates till it fouled the propeller. The propeller had to be kept
moving, for the river was narrow and its current unusually rapid. There
the log obstinately remained for the most of an hour, but suddenly made
up its mind, and went, clearing the stern by inches. After that the
engines were driven full, for the pilot hoped to get us to Porto Velho
by nightfall. In the late afternoon, when passing the Rio Jamary, the
clouds again banked astern, bringing night before its time, and another
violent storm compelled an early anchorage. The forest was remarkably
quiet after the tumult of the squall, and the “Capella” had been put
over to the left bank, when close to us on the opposite shore there was
a landslip. We saw a section of the jungle wall sway, as though that
part was taken by a local tempest, and then the green cliff and its
supports fell bodily into the river, raising thunderous submarine
explosions. Such landslides, terras cahidas, can be rarely foreseen, and
are a grave danger to craft when they come close in to rest at night.
To-day we passed a small raft drifting down. A hut was erected in its
middle, and we saw two men within.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Jan. 30._ Talk enough there has been of a place called Porto Velho, a
name I heard first when I signed the articles of the “Capella” at
Swansea, and of what would happen to us when we arrived. But I am
looking upon it all as a strange myth. There has been time to prove
those superstitions of Porto Velho. And what has happened? There was a
month we had of the vacant sea, and one day we came upon a low coast
where palms grew. There has been a month which has striped the vacant
mind in three colours, constant in relative position, but without form,
yellow floor, green walls, and a blue ceiling. Plainly we have got
beyond all the works of man now. We have intrigued an ocean steamer
thousands of miles along the devious waterways of an uninhabited
continental jungle, and now she must be near the middle of the puzzle,
with voiceless regions of unexplored forest reeking under the equatorial
sun at every point of the compass. The more we advance up the Amazon and
Madeira rivers the less the likelihood, it seems to me, of getting to
any place where our ship and cargo could be required. We shall steam and
steam till the river shallows, the forest closes in, and we are trapped.
Yet the Madeira looks now much the same as when we entered it, still as
broad and deep. I was thinking this morning we might go on so for ever;
that this adventure was all of the casual improbabilities of a dream was
in my mind when, smoking the after breakfast pipe on the bridge, we
turned a corner sharply, and there was the end of the passage within a
mile of us, Porto Velho at last.

The forest on the port side ahead was uplifted on an unusually high
cliff of the red rock. Beyond that cliff was a considerable clearing,
with many buildings of a character different from any we had seen in the
country. At the end of the clearing the forest began again, unconquered
still, standing across our course as a high barrier; for, leaving Porto
Velho, the river turned west almost at a right angle, and vanished; as
though now it were done with us. We had arrived. A rough pier was being
thrown out on palm boles to receive us, but it was not ready. We
anchored in five fathoms, about thirty yards from the shore, and in the
quiet which came with the stop of the ship’s life we waited for the next
thing, all hands lining the “Capella’s” side surveying this place of
which we had heard so much.

Plainly this was not the usual village. Many acres of trees had been
newly cleared, leaving a great bay in the woods. The earth was still raw
from a recent attack on what had been inviolate from time’s beginning.
Trenches, new red gashes, scored it, and holes were gouged in the hill
side. You could think man had attacked the forest here in a fury, but
had spent his force on one small spot, as though he had struck one wound
again and again. The fight was over. The footing had been won, a base
perhaps for further campaigns because wooden emergency houses, sheds and
barracks, had been built. The assailant evidently had made up his mind
to settle on his advantage, though he was tolerating a little quickly
rebellious scrub. Just then he was resting, as if the whole affair had
been over but five minutes before we came, and now the conqueror was
sleeping on his first success. Completely round the conquered space the
jungle stood indifferently regarding the trifle of ground it had lost.
The jungle on the near opposite shore rose straight and uninterrupted
from the river, the front rank, lost each way in distance, of an
innumerable army. At the upper end of the clearing the jungle began
again on our side, and turned to run across our bows, the complement of
the host across the water, and both ranks continued up stream, dark and
indeterminate lines converging, till, three miles away, a delicate
flickering of light, a mere dimmer, faint but constant, bridged the two
walls. No doubt that delicate light would be the San Antonio cataracts,
the first of the nineteen rapids of the Madeira.

Porto Velho behaved as though we were not there. A pitiless sun flamed
over that deep red wound in the forest, and they who had made it were in
their shelters, resting out of sight after such a recent riot of
exertion. Nothing was being done then. Two or three white men stood on
the dismantled foreshore, placidly regarding us. We might have been
something they were not quite sure was there, a possibility not
sufficiently interesting for them to verify. There was a hint of
mockery, after all our anxiety and travail, in this quiet disregard. Had
we arrived too late to help, and so were not wanted? I confess I should
not have been surprised to have heard suppressed laughter, some light
hilarity from the unseen, at us innocently puzzling as to what was to
happen next. There was a violent scream in the forest near our bows, and
we turned wondering to that green wall. A locomotive ran out from the
base of the trees, still screaming.

In a little while a man left a house, striding down over the debris to
the foreshore, and some half-breeds brought him in a canoe to the
“Capella.” He was a tall youngster, an American, and his slow body
itself was but a thin sallow drawl; only his eyes were alert, and they
darted at ours in quick scrutiny. His solemn occupying assurance and
accent precipitated reality. He was a doctor and he ordered us to be
mustered on the after deck for inspection for yellow fever. We were
passed; and then this doctor went below to the saloon, distributing his
long limbs and body over several chairs and part of the table, and began
with lazy words and gestures to give us a place in the scene. We learned
we should stay as we were till the pier was finished and that the
railway was actually in being for a short distance. He said something
about Porto Velho being hell.

He left us. We sat about on deck furniture, and waited on the unknown
gods of the land to see what they would send us. All day in the clearing
figures moved about on some mysterious business, but seldom looked at
us. We had nothing to do but to watch the raft of timber and flotsam
expand about our hawsers, a matter of some concern to us, for the
current ran at six knots. Our brief sense of contact got from the
medical inspection had gone by night. Reality contracted, closing in
upon the “Capella” with rapidly diminishing radii as the light went,
till we had lost everything but our steamer.

Into the saloon, where some of us sat listening in sympathy to the
Skipper’s growls that night, burst our cook, disrespectful and tousled,
saying he had seen a canoe, which bore a light, overturn in the river.
There was a stampede. We each seized a lantern and leaned overside with
it, with that fatuous eagerness to help which makes a man strike matches
when looking for one who is lost on a moor. Ghostly logs came floating
noiselessly out of darkness into the brief domain of our lanterns, and
faded into night again. From somewhere in the collection of driftwood
beyond our bows we thought we heard an occasional cry, though that might
have been the noise of water sucking through the rubbish, or the
creaking of timbers. Our chief mate got out a small boat, and vanished;
and we were already growing anxious for him when his luminous grin
appeared below in the range of my lantern, and with him came the
ponderous figure of a man. The latter, deft and agile, came up the rope
ladder, and stepped aboard with innocent inconsequence, shocking my
sense of the gravity of the affair; for this streaming object, lifted
from the grip of the boney one just in time, was chuckling. “Say,” said
this big ruddy man to our gaping crowd, “I met a nigger ashore with a
letter for the captain of this packet. Said he didn’t know how to get.
So I brought it, but a tree overturned the canoe. I came up under the
timber jam all right, all right, but it took me quite a piece to get my
head through.” In the saloon, with a pool of water spreading round him,
while we got him some dry clothes, he produced this pulpy letter. “Dear
Captain” (it ran), “I’m as dry as hell, have you brought drinks in the
ship?”

The bland indifference of Porto Velho to the “Capella,” which had done
so much to get there; the locomotive which ran screaming out of those
woods where, till then, was the same unbroken front which from Para
inwards had surrendered nothing; the inconsequential doctor who
carefully examined us for what we had not got; the ruddy man who rose to
us streaming out of the deeps, as though that were his usual approach,
bearing another stranger’s unreasonable letter complaining of thirst,
were most puzzling. I even felt some anxiety and suspicion. What, then,
were all the other incidents of our difficult six thousand mile voyage?
What was this place to which we had come on urgent business long and
carefully deliberated, where men merely looked at the whites of our
eyes, or changed wet clothes in the saloon, or lightly referred to
hell—they all did that—as if hell were an unremarkable feature of
their day? Were all these unrelated shadows and movements but part of a
long and witless jest? The point of it I could not see. Was there any
point to it or did casual episodes appear at unexpected places till they
came, just as unexpectedly, to an empty end? The man the mate had
rescued sat at the saloon table opposite me, leaning a yard wide chest,
which was almost bare, on the red baize, his bulging arms resting before
him, and his hairy paws easily clasped. I thought that perhaps this
imperturbable being, who could come with easy assurance, his bright
friendly eyes merely amused, his large firm mouth merely mocking, and
his face heated, from a desperate affair in which his life nearly went,
to announce to strangers, “Boys, I’m old man Jim,” must have had the
point of the joke revealed to him long since, and so now had no respect
for its setting, and could have no care and understanding of my anxious
innocence. He sat there for hours in quiet discourse. I listened to him
with my ears only, his words jostling my thoughts, as one would puzzle
over and listen to a superior being which had unbent to be intimate, but
was outside our experience. I heard he had been at this place since
1907. He began the work here. Porto Velho did not then exist. Off where
we were anchored, the jungle rose. He had his young son with him, a
cousin, and two negroes, and he began the railway. Inside the trees, he
said, they could not see three yards, but down it all had to come. There
is a small stingless bee here, which “old man Jim” called the sweat bee.
It alights in swarms on the face and hands, and prefers death to being
dislodged from its enjoyment. The heat, these bees, the ants, the pium
flies, the mosquitoes, made the existence of Jim and his mates a misery.
Jim merely drawled about in a comic way. Fever came, and mistrust of
natives compelled him to dress a dummy, put that in his hammock at
night, while he slept in a corner of the hut, one eye open, nursing a
gun. I could not see “old man Jim” ever having faith that trains would
run, or needed to run, where Indians lurked in the bush, and jaguars
nosed round the hut at night. Why these sufferings then? But we learned
the line now penetrated into the forest for sixty miles, and that beyond
it there were camps, where surveyors were seeing that further way was
made, and beyond them again, among the trees of the interior, the
surveyors were still, planning the way the line should run when it had
got so far.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Though we could not get ashore, there was enough to watch, if it were
only the men leisurely driving palm boles into the river, making a pier
for us. While at breakfast to-day a canoe of half-breeds came flying
towards us in pursuit of an object which kept a little ahead of them in
the river. It passed close under our stern, and we saw it was a peccary.
The canoe ran level with it then, and a man leaned over, catching the
wild pig by a hind leg, keeping its snout under water while another
secured its feet with rope. It was brought aboard in bonds as a present
for the Skipper, who begged the natives to convey it below to the
bunkers and there release it. He said he would tame it. I saw the eye of
the beast as it lay on the deck champing its tusks viciously, and
guessed we should have some interesting moments while kindness tried to
reduce that light in its eye. The peccary disappeared for a few days.

There being nothing to do this fine morning, we watched the cattle put
ashore. This was not so difficult a business as shipping them, for the
beasts now submitted quietly to the noose which was put on their horns.
The steam tackle hoisted them, they were pushed overside, and dropped
into the river. Some natives in a canoe cleared the horns, and the
brute, swimming desperately in the strong current, was guided to the
bank. Some of the beasts being already near death they were merely
jettisoned. The current bore them down stream, making feeble efforts to
swim—food for the alligators. We waited for the turn of the black
heifer. She was one of the last. She was not led to the ship’s side. The
tackle was attached to her horns, and made taut before her head was
loosed. She made a furious lunge at the men when her nose was free, but
the winch rattled, and she was brought up on her hind legs, blaring at
us all. In that ugly manner she was walked on two legs across the deck,
a heroine in shameful guise, while the men laughed. She was hoisted, and
lowered into the river. She fought at the waiting canoe with her feet,
but at last the men released her horns from the tackle. With only her
face above water she heaved herself, open mouthed, at the canoe, trying
to bite it, and then made some almost successful efforts to climb into
it. The canoe men were so panic-stricken that they did nothing but
muddle one another’s efforts. The canoe rocked dangerously. This wicked
animal had no care for its own safety like other cattle. It surprised
its tormentors because it showed its only wish was to kill them. Just in
time the men paddled off for their lives, the cow after them. Seeing she
could not catch them, she swam ashore, climbed the bank, looking round
then for a sight of the enemy—but they were all in hiding—and then
began browsing in the scrub.

As leisurely as though life were without end, the work on the pier
proceeded; and we on the “Capella,” who could not get ashore, with each
of our days a week long, looked round upon this remote place of the
American tropics till it seemed we had never looked upon anything else.
The days were candent and vaporous, the heat by breakfast-time being
such as we know at home in an early afternoon of the dog-days. The
forest across the river, about three hundred yards away, from sunrise
till eight o’clock, often was veiled in a white fog. There would be a
clear river, and a sky that was full day, but not the least suspicion of
a forest. We saw what seemed a limitless expanse of bright water, which
merged into the opalescent sky walls. Such an invisible fog melted from
below, and then the revelation of the dark base of the forest, in
mid-distance, was as if our eyes were playing tricks. The forest
appeared in the way one magic-lantern picture grows through another. The
last of the vapour would roll upwards from the tree-tops for some time,
and you could believe the woods were smouldering heavily. Thenceforward
the quiet day would be uninterrupted, except for the plunge of a heavy
fish, the passing of a canoe, a visit from an adventurous visitor from
the shore, or the growing of a cloud in the sky. We tried fishing,
though never got anything but some grey scaleless creatures with feelers
hanging about their gills. It was not till the evening when the visitors
usually came that the day began really to move. The new voices gave our
saloon and cabins vivacity, and the stories we heard carried us far and
swiftly towards the next breakfast-time. They were strange characters,
those visitors, usually Americans, but sometimes we got an Englishman or
a Frenchman. They took possession of the ship.

There was an elderly man, Neil O’Brien, who was often with us. At first
I thought he was a very exceptional character. He was one of the first
to visit our ship. I even felt a little timidity when alone with him,
for he had a habit of sitting limply, looking at nothing in particular,
and dumb, and plainly he was a man whose thoughts ran in ways I could
not even surmise. His pale blue eyes would turn upon me with that
searching openness which may mean childish innocence or madness, and I
could not forget the whispers I had heard of his dangerously inflammable
nature. I could not find common footing with him for some time. My
trouble was that I had come out direct from a country where few men are
free, and so most of us live in doubt of what would happen to us if we
were to act as though we were free men. Where, if a self-reliant man
contemptuously dares to a bleak and perilous extremity, he makes all his
lawful fellows in-draw their timid breaths; that land where even a
reward has been instituted, as for merit, for uncomplaining endurance
under life-long hardships, and called an old-age pension. You cannot
live much of your life with natural servants, the judicious and
impartial, the light shy, and those who look twice carefully, but never
leap, without betraying some reflected pallor of their anæmia. O’Brien,
the quiet master of his own time, with his eyes I could not read, and
his gun, betrayed obliquely in our casual talks together such an
ingenuous indifference to accepted things and authority, that I had
nothing to work with when gauging him. He was his own standard of
conduct. I judged his bearing towards the authority of officials would
be tolerant, and even tender, as men use with wilful children. He was
not a rebel, as we understand it, one who at last grows impatient and
angry, and so votes for the other party. I suppose he was not opposed to
authority, unless it were opposed to him. He was outside any authority
but his own. He lived without State aid. He himself carried the gun,
always the symbol of authority, whether of a man or of a State, and if
any man had attempted to rob him of his substance, certainly O’Brien
would have shot that man according to his own law and his own prophecy,
and would then have cooked his supper. He surprised me for a day or two.
I puzzled much over this phenomenon of a free man, who took his freedom
so quietly and naturally that he never even discussed the subject, as we
do, with enthusiasm, in England. What else? It was long since he was
separated from his mother. Soon I found he was but a type. I met others
like him in this country. Their innocence of the limitations of a
careful man like myself was disconcerting. Once O’Brien casually
proposed that I should “beat it,” cut the ship, and make a traverse of
that wild place to distant Colombia, to some unknown spot by the
approximate source of a certain Amazon tributary, where he knew there
was gold. First I laughed, and then found, from his glance of resentful
candour, that he was quite serious. He generously meant this honour for
me; and I think it was an honour for an elderly, quiet, and seasoned
privateer like O’Brien, to invite me to be his only companion in a
region where you must travel with alert courage and wide experience, or
perish. I have learned since he has gone to that far place alone. But
what a time he will have. He will have all of it to himself. Well—I was
thinking, when I refused him, of my old age pension. I should like to
get it.

Men like O’Brien are called here, quite respectfully, “bad men,” and
“land sailors.” The lawless lands of the South American
republics—lawless in this sense, that their laws need be little
reckoned by the daring, the strong, and the unscrupulous—seem
particularly attractive to men of the O’Brien type. I got to like them.
I found them, when once used to their feral minds, always entertaining,
and often instructive, for their naïve opinions cut our conventions
across the middle, showing the surprising insides. They dwell without
bounds. As I have read somewhere, we do not think of the buffalo, which
treats a continent as pasturage, as we do of the cow which kicks over
the pail at milking time and jumps the yard fence. These men regard
priest, magistrate and soldier with an indifference which is not even
contemptible indifference. They are merely callous to the calculated
effect of uniforms. When in luck, they are to be found in the cities,
shy and a little miserable, having a good time. Their money gone, they
set out on lonely journeys across this continent which show our fuss
over authentic explorers to be a little overdone. O’Brien was such a
man. He told me he had not slept under a roof for years. He had no home,
he confessed to me once. Any place on the map was the same to him. He
had spent his life drifting alone between Patagonia and Canada, looking
for what he never found, if he knew what he was looking for. His travels
were insignificant to him. He might have been a tramp talking of English
highways. As he droned on one evening I began to doubt he was unaware
that his was an extraordinary narrative. I guessed his unconcern must be
an air. It would have been, in my case. I looked straight over at him,
and he hesitated nervously, and stopped. Was he wasting my time, he
asked? Prospecting for his illusion, his last journey was over the
Peruvian Andes into Colombia. He broke an arm in a fall on the
mountains, set it himself, and continued. On the Rio Japura an Indian
shot an arrow through his leg, and O’Brien dropped in the long grass,
breaking the arrow short each side of the limb, and in an ensuing long
watchful duel presently shot the Indian through the throat. And then,
coming out on the Amazon, his canoe overturned, and the pickle jar full
of gold dust was lost. He put no emphasis on any particular, not even on
the loss of his gold.

He was pointed out to me first as a singular fellow who kept doves; a
tall, gaunt man, with a deliberate gait, perhaps fifty years of age, in
old garments, long boots laced to the knees, and a battered pith helmet.
He strolled along with his eyes cast down. If you met him abroad, and
stopped him, he answered you with a few mumbles while looking away over
your shoulder. His big mouth drew down a grizzled moustache cynically,
and one of his front teeth was gold plated. Before he passed on he
looked at you with the haughty but doubtful stare of an animal. He
seemed too slow and dull to be combustible. I ceased to credit those
tales of his berserker rage. He always moved in that deliberate way, as
if he were careful, but bored. Or he stood before his doves, and made
bubbling noises in his loose, stringy throat. He embarrassed me with a
present of many of the trophies he had secured in years of travel in the
wilds. One day a negro and O’Brien were in mild dispute on the jetty,
and the negro called the white a Yankee. The river was twenty feet below
swiftly carrying its logs. O’Brien took the big black, and with vicious
ease threw him into the water. The negro missed the floating rubbish,
and struck out for the bank. No one could help him. By good luck he
managed to get to the waterside; yet O’Brien meanwhile had hurried his
long legs over the ties of the skeleton structure, his face
transfigured, and was waiting for the negro to emerge, a spade in his
hand. But under other circumstances I have not the least doubt he would
have fought the Brazilian army single-handed, and so finished, in
defence of that same negro.




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 antennæ,
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 nebulæ.
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 Colœnis, 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 Mamoré, 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 depôt 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 anæmic 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 speculæ. 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 tapéré.

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.”




VI


When in the neighbourhood of the Girau Falls we returned to a camp known
as 22, which was merely a couple of huts, the station of two English
surveyors, who had with them a small party of Bolivians. The Bolivian
frontier was then but a little distance to the south-west. We rested for
a day there, and planned to make a journey of ten miles across country,
to the falls of the Caldeirao do Inferno. By doing so we should save the
wearying return ride along the track to the Rio Jaci-Parana, for at the
Caldeirao a launch was kept, and in that we could shoot the rapids and
reach the camp on the Jaci two days earlier. Some haste was necessary
now, for my steamer must be nearing her sailing time. And again, I
agreed the more readily to the plan of making a traverse of the forest
because it would give me the opportunity of seeing the interior of the
virgin jungle away from any track. Though I had been so long in a land
which all was forest I had not been within the universal growth except
for little journeys on used trails. A journey across country in the
Amazon country is never made by the Brazilians. The only roads are the
rivers. It is a rare traveller who goes through those forests, guided
only, by a compass and his lore of the wilderness. That for months I had
never been out of sight of the jungle, and yet had rarely ventured to
turn aside from a path for more than a few paces, is some indication of
its character. At the camp where we were staying I was told that once a
man had gone merely within the screen of leaves, and then no doubt had
lost, for a few moments, his sense of direction of the camp, for he was
never seen again.

The equatorial forest is popularly pictured as a place of bright and
varied colours, with extravagant flowers, an abundance of fruits, and
huge trees hung with creepers where lurk many venomous but beautiful
snakes with gem-like eyes, and a multitude of birds as bright as the
flowers; paradise indeed, though haunted by a peril. Those details are
right, but the picture is wrong. It is true that some of the birds are
decorated in a way which makes the most beautiful of our temperate birds
seem dull; but the toucans and macaws of the Madeira forest, though
common, are not often seen, and when they are seen they are likely to be
but obscure atoms drifting high in a white light. About the villages and
in the clearings there are usually many superb butterflies and moths,
and a varied wealth of vegetation not to be matched outside the tropics,
and there will be the fireflies and odours in evening pathways. But the
virgin forest itself soon becomes but a green monotony which, through
extent and mystery, dominates and compels to awe and some dread. You
will see it daily, but will not often approach it. It has no splendid
blossoms; none, that is, which you will see, except by chance, as by
luck one day I saw from the steamer’s bridge some trees in blossom,
domes of lilac surmounting the forest levels. Trees are always in
blossom there, for it is a land of continuous high summer, and there are
orchids always in flower, and palms and vines that fill acres of forest
with fragrance, palms and other trees which give wine and delicious
fruits, and somewhere hidden there are the birds of the tropical
picture, and dappled jaguars perfect in colouring and form, and brown
men and women who have strange gods. But they are lost in the ocean of
leaves as are the pearls and wonders in the deep. You will remember the
equatorial forest but as a gloom of foliage in which all else that
showed was rare and momentary, was foundered and lost to sight
instantly, as an unusual ray of coloured light in one mid-ocean wave
gleams, and at once goes, and your surprise at its apparition fades too,
and again there is but the empty desolation which is for ever but
vastness sombrely bright.

One morning, wondering greatly what we should see in the place where we
should be the first men to go, Hill and I left camp 22 and returned a
little along the track. It was a hot still morning. A vanilla vine was
in fragrant flower somewhere, unseen, but unescapable. My little unknown
friend in the woods, who calls me at odd times—but I think chiefly when
I am near a stream—by whistling thrice, let me know he was about. Hill
said he thinks he has seen him, and that my little friend looks like a
blackbird. On the track in many places were objects which appeared to be
long cups inverted, of unglazed ware. Picking up one I found it was the
cap to a mine of ants, the inside of the clay cup being hollowed in a
perfect circle, and remarkably smooth. A paca dived into the scrub near
us. It was early morning, scented with vanilla, and the intricacy of
leaves was radiant. Nowhere in the screen could I see a place through
which it was possible to crawl to whatever was behind it. The front of
leaves was unbroken. Hill presently bent double and disappeared, and I
followed in the break he made. So we went for about ten minutes, my
leader cutting obstructions with his machete, and mostly we had to go
almost on hands and knees. The undergrowth was green, but in the
etiolated way of plants which have little light, though that may have
been my fancy. One plant was very common, making light-green feathery
barriers. I think it was a climbing bamboo. Its stem was vapid and of no
diameter, and its grasslike leaves grew in whorls at the joints. It
extended to incredible distances. We got out of that margin of
undergrowth, which springs up quickly when light is let into the woods,
as it was there through the cutting of the track, and found ourselves on
a bare floor where the trunks of arborescent laurels grew so thickly
together that our view ahead was restricted to a few yards. We were in
the forest. There was a pale tinge of day, but its origin was uncertain,
for overhead no foliage could be seen, but only deep shadows from which
long ropes were hanging without life. In that obscurity were points of
light, as if a high roof had lost some tiles. Hill set a course almost
due south, and we went on, presently descending to a deep clear stream
over which a tree had fallen. Shafts of daylight came down to us there,
making the sandy bottom of the stream luminous, as by a lantern, and
betraying crowds of small fishes. As we climbed the tree, to cross upon
it, we disturbed several morphos. We had difficulties beyond in a
hollow, where the bottom of the forest was lumbered with fallen trees,
dry rubbish, and thorns, and once, stepping on what looked timber solid
enough, its treacherous shell collapsed, and I went down into a cloud of
dust and ants. In clearing this wreckage, which was usually as high as
our faces, and doubly confused by the darkness, the involutions of dead
thorny creepers, and clouds of dried foliage, Hills got at fault with
our direction, but reassured himself, though I don’t know how—but I
think with the certain knowledge that if we went south long enough we
should strike the Madeira somewhere—and on we went. For hours we
continued among the trees, seldom knowing what was ahead of us for any
distance, surviving points of noise intruding again after long in the
dusk of limbo. So still and nocturnal was the forest that it was real
only when its forms were close. All else was phantom and of the shades.
There was not a green sign of life, and not a sound. Resting once under
a tree I began to think there was a conspiracy implied in that murk and
awful stillness, and that we should never come out again into the day
and see a living earth. Hills sat looking out, and said, as if in answer
to an unspoken thought of mine which had been heard because there was
less than no sound there, that men who were lost in those woods soon
went mad.

Then he led on again. This forest was nothing like the paradise a
tropical wild is supposed to be. It was as uniformly dingy as the old
stones of a London street on a November evening. We did not see a
movement, except when the morphos started from the uprooted tree. Once I
heard the whistle call us from the depths of the forest, urgent and
startling; and now when in a London by-way I hear a boy call his mate in
a shrill whistle, it puts about me again the spectral aisles, and that
unexpectant quiet of the sepulchre which is more than mere absence of
sound, for the dead who should have no voice. This central forest was
really the vault of the long-forgotten, dank, mouldering, dark,
abandoned to the accumulations of eld and decay. The tall pillars rose,
upholding night, and they might have been bastions of weathered
limestone and basalt, for they were as grim as ancient and ruinous
masonry. There was no undergrowth. The ground was hidden in a ruin of
perished stuff, uprooted trees, parchments of leaves, broken boughs, and
mummied husks, the iron globes of nuts, and pods. There was no day, but
some breaks in the roof were points of remote starlight. The crowded
columns mounted straight and far, almost branchless, fading into
indistinction. Out of that overhead obscurity hung a wreckage of
distorted cables, binding the trees, and often reaching the ground. The
trees were seldom of great girth, though occasionally there was a
dominant basaltic pillar, its roots meandering over the floor like
streams of old lava. The smooth ridges of such a fantastic complexity of
roots were sometimes breast high. The walls ran up the trunk, projecting
from it as flat buttresses, for great heights. We would crawl round such
an occupying structure, diminished groundlings, as one would move about
the base of a foreboding, plutonic building whose limits and meaning
were ominous and baffling. There were other great trees with compound
boles, built literally of bundles of round stems, intricate gothic
pillars, some of the props having fused in places. Every tree was the
support of a parasitic community, lianas swathing it and binding it. One
vine moulded itself to its host, a flat and wide compress, as though it
were plastic. We might have been witnessing what had been a riot of
manifold and insurgent life. It had been turned to stone when in the
extreme pose of striving violence. It was all dead now.

But what if these combatants had only paused as we appeared? It was a
thought which came to me. The pause might be but an appearance for our
deception. Indeed, they were all fighting as we passed through, those
still and fantastic shapes, a war ruthless but slow, in which the battle
day was ages long. They seemed but still. We were deceived. If time had
been accelerated, if the movements in that war of phantoms had been
speeded, we should have seen what really was there, the greater trees
running upwards to starve the weak of light and food, and heard the
continuous collapse of the failures, and have seen the lianas writhing
and constricting, manifestly like serpents, throttling and eating their
hosts. We did see the dead everywhere, shells with the worms at them.
Yet it was not easy to be sure that we saw anything at all, for these
were not trees, but shapes in a region below the day, a world sunk
abysmally from the land of living things, to which light but thinly
percolated down to two travellers moving over its floor, trying to get
out to their own place.

Late in the afternoon we were surprised by a steep hill in our way,
where the forest was more open. Palms became conspicuous on the slopes,
and the interior of the sombre woods was lighted with bright and
graceful foliage. The wild banana was frequent, its long rippling
pennants showing everywhere. The hill rose sharply, perhaps for six
hundred feet, and over its surface were scattered large stones, and
stones are rare indeed in this land of vegetable humus. They were often
six inches in diameter, and I should have said they were waterworn but
that I had seen them _in situ_ at one camp, where they occurred but
little below the surface in a friable sandstone, the largest of them
easily broken in the hand, for they were but ferrous concretions of
quartz grains. After exposure to the air they so hardened that they
could be fractured only with difficulty. We kept along the ridge of the
hill, finding breaks in the forest through which, as through unexpected
windows, we could see, for a wonder, over the roof of the forest,
looking out of our prison to a wide world where the sun was declining.
In the south-west we caught the gleam of the Madeira, and beyond it saw
a continuation of the range of hills on which we stood.

In the low ground between the hill range and the river the forest was
lower, and was so tangled a mass that I doubted whether we could make a
way through it. We happened upon a deserted Caripuna village, three
large sheds, without sides, each but a ragged thatch propped on four
legs. The clearing was just large enough to hold them. I could find no
relics of the forest folk about. Damp leaves were thick on the floor of
each shelter. But it was lucky we found the huts, for thence a trail led
us to the river. We emerged suddenly from the forest, just as one goes
through a little door into the open street. We were on the bank of the
Madeira by the upper falls of the Caldeirao. It was still a great river,
with the wall of the forest opposite, just above which the sunset was
flaming, so far away that its tree trunks were but vertical lines of
silver in dark cliffs. A track used by the Bolivian rubber boatmen led
us down stream to the camp by the lower falls.

It was night when we got to the three huts of the camp, and the river
could not be seen, but it was heard, a continuous low thundering.
Sometimes a greater shock of deep waters falling, an orgasm of the flood
pouring unseen, more violent than the rest, made the earth tremulous.
Men held up lanterns to our faces, and led us to a hut. It was but the
usual roof of leaves. We rested in hammocks slung between the posts, and
I ached in every limb. But here we were at last; and there is no more
luxurious bed than a hammock, yielding and resilient, as though you were
cradled on air; and there is no pipe like that smoked in a hammock at
night in the tropics after a day of toil and anxiety in a dissolving
heat, for the heat makes a pipe bitter and impossible; but if a tropic
night is cool and cloudless it comes like a benediction, and the silence
is a peace that is below you and around, and as high as the stars
towards which your face is turned. The ropes of the hammock creaked.
Sometimes a man spoke quietly, as though he were at a great distance.
The sound of the water receded, was heard only as in a sleep, and it
might have been the loud murmur of the spinning globe, heard because we
had left this world and had leisure for trifles in a securer world
apart.

In the morning, while they prepared the little steam launch for its
journey down the rapids, I had time to climb about the smooth granite
boulders of the foreshore below the hut. A rock is so unusual in this
country that it is a luxury when found. The granite was bare, but in its
crevices grew cacti and other plants with fleshy leaves and swollen
stems. Shadowing the hut was a tree bearing trumpet-shaped flowers, and
before the blossoms humming birds were hovering, glowing and evanescent
morsels, remaining miraculously suspended when inserting their long
bills into the flowers, their little wings beating so rapidly that the
air seemed visible and radiant about them. Another tree here interested
me, for it was Bates Assacu, the only one I saw. It was a large tree,
with palmate leaves having seven fingers. Ugly spines studded even its
brown trunk.

I looked out on the river dubiously. A rocky island was just off shore,
crowned with trees. Between us and the island, and beyond, the waters
heaved and circled, evidently of great depth, and fearfully disturbed
and swift. It looked all its name, the Caldeirao do Inferno—hell’s
cauldron. There was not much white and broken water. But its surface was
always changing, whirlpools forming and revolving, then disappearing in
long wrenched strands of water. Sometimes a big tree would leap out of
the water, as though it had travelled upwards from the bottom, and then
would vanish again.

We set out upon it, with an engineman and two half-breeds, and went off
obliquely for mid-stream. The engineman and navigator was a fair-haired
German. If the river had been sane and usual I should have had my eyes
on the forest which stood along each shore, for few white men had ever
looked upon it. But the river took our minds, and never in bad weather
in the western ocean have I seen water so full of menace. Yet below the
falls it was silent and unbroken. It was its smooth swiftness, its
strange checks and mysterious and deep convulsions, as though the river
bed itself was insecure, the startling whirlpools which appeared without
warning, circling depressions on the surface in which our launch would
have been but a straw, which shocked the mind. It was stealthy and
noiseless. The water was but an inch or two below our gunwale. We saw
trees afloat, greater and heavier than our midget of a craft, shooting
down the gently inclined shining expanse just as we were, and express;
and then, as if an awful hand had grasped them from below, they were
pulled under, and we saw them no more; or, again, and near to us and
ahead, a tree bole would shoot from below like an arrow, though no tree
had been drifting there. The shores were far away.

The water ahead grew worse. The German crouched by his little throbbing
engine, looking anxiously—I could see his fixed stare—over the bows.
We were travelling indeed now. The boat, in a rapid tremor, and
oscillating violently, was clutched at the keel by something which
coiled strongly about us, gripped us, and held us; and the boat, mad and
terrified, in an effort to escape, made a circuit, the water lipping at
her gunwale and coming over the bows. The river seemed poised a foot
above the bows, ready to pour in and swamp us. The German tried to get
her head down stream. Hills began tearing at his ammunition belt, and I
stooped and tugged at my boot laces....

The boat jumped, as if released. The German turned round on us grinning.
“It ees all right,” he said. He began to roll a cigarette nervously. “We
pull it off all right,” said the German, wetting his cigarette paper.
The boat was free, dancing lightly along. The little engine was singing
quickly and freely.

The Madeira here was as wide as in its lower reaches, with many islands.
There were hosts of waterfowl. We landed once at a rubber hunter’s sitio
on the right bank. Its owner, a Bolivian, and his pretty Indian wife,
who had tattoo marks on her forehead, made much of us, and gave us
coffee. They had an orchard of guavas, and there, for it was long since
I had tasted fruit, I was an immoderate thief, in spite of a pet
curassow which followed me through the garden with distracting pecks.
The Rio Jaci-Parana, a blackwater stream, opened up soon after we left
the sitio. The boundary between the clay-coloured flood of the Madeira
and the dark water of the tributary was straight and distinct. From a
distance the black water seemed like ink, but we found it quite clear
and bright. The Jaci is not an important branch river, but it was, at
this period of the rains, wider than the Thames at Richmond, and without
doubt very much deeper. The appearance of the forest on the Jaci was
quite different from the palisades of the parent stream. On the Madeira
there is commonly a narrow shelf of bank, above which the jungle rises
as would a sheer cliff. The Jaci had no banks. The forest was deeply
submerged on either side, and whenever an opening showed in the woods we
could see the waters within, but could not see their extent because of
the interior gloom. The outer foliage was awash, and mounted, not
straight, but in rounded clouds. For the first time I saw many vines and
trees in flower, presumably because we were nearer the roof of the
woods. One tree was loaded with the pendent pear-shaped nests of those
birds called “hang nests,” and scores of the beauties in their black and
gold plumage were busy about their homes, which resembled monstrous
fruits. Another tree was weighted with large racemes of orange-coloured
blossoms, but as the launch passed close to it we discovered the blooms
were really bundles of caterpillars. The Jaci appeared to be a haunt of
the alligators, but all we saw of them was their snouts, which moved
over the surface of the water out of our way like rubber balls afloat
and mysteriously propelled. I had a sight, too, of that most regal of
the eagles, the harpy, for one, well within view, lifted from a tree
ahead, and sailed finely over the river and away.

That night I slept again in my old hut at the Jaci camp, and with Hill
and another official set off early next morning for the construction
camp on Rio Caracoles, which we hoped to reach before the commissary
train left for Porto Velho. At Porto Velho the “Capella” was, and I
wished, perhaps as much as I have ever wished for anything, that I
should not be left behind when she departed. I knew she must be on the
point of sailing.

My two companions had reasons of their own for thinking the catching of
that train was urgently necessary. In our minds we were already settled
and safe in a waggon, comfortable among the empty boxes, going back to
the place where the crowd was. But still we had some way to ride; and, I
must tell you, I was now possessed of all I desired of the tropical
forest, and had but one fixed idea in my dark mind, but one bright star
shining there; I had turned about, and was going home, and now must
follow hard and unswervingly that star in the east of my mind. The
rhythmic movements of the mule under me—only my legs knew he was
there—formed in my darkened mind a refrain: get out of it, get out of
it.

And at last there were the huts and tents of the Caracoles, still and
quiet under the vertical sun. No train was there, nor did it look a
place for trains. My steamer was sixty miles away, beyond a track along
which further riding was impossible, and where walking, for more than
two miles, could not be even considered. The train, the boys told us
blithely, went back half an hour before. The audience of trees regarded
my consternation with the indifference which I had begun to hate with
some passion. The boys naturally expected that we should take it in the
right way for hot climates, without fuss, and that now they had some new
gossip for the night. But they should have understood Hill better. My
tall gaunt leader waved them aside, for he was a man who could do
things, when there seemed nothing that one could do. “The terminus or
bust!” he cried. “Where’s the boss?” He demanded a handcart and a crew.
I thought he spoke in jest. A handcart is a contrivance propelled along
railway metals by pumping at a handle. The handle connects with the
wheels by a crank and cogs through a slot in the centre of the platform,
and you get five miles an hour out of it, while the crew continues. For
sixty miles, in that heat, it was impossible. Yet Hill persisted; the
cart was put on the metals, five half-breeds manned the pump handle,
three facing the track ahead, two with their backs to it. We three
passengers sat on the sides and front of the trolley. Away we went.

The boys cheered and laughed, calling out to us the probabilities of our
journey. We trundled round a corner, and already I had to change my
cramped position; fifty-eight miles to go. We sat with our legs held up
out of the way of the vines and rocks by the track, and careful to
remember that our craniums must be kept clear of the pump handle. The
crew went up and down, with fixed looks. The sun was the eye of the last
judgment, and my lips were cracked. The trees made no sign. The natives
went up and down; and the forest went by, tree by tree.

My tired and thoughtless legs dropped, and a thorn fastened its teeth
instantly in my boots, and nearly had me down. The trees went by, one by
one. There was a large black and yellow butterfly on a stone near us. I
was surprised when no sound came as it made a grand movement upwards.
Then, in the heart of nowhere, the trolley slackened, and came to a
stand. We had lost a pin. Half a mile back we could hardly credit we
really had found that pin, but there it was; and the men began to go up
and down again. Hill got a touch of fever, and the natives had changed
to the colour of impure tallow, and flung their perspiration on my face
and hands as they swung mechanically. The poor wretches! We were done.
The sun weighed untold tons.

But the sun declined, some monkeys began to howl, and the sunset tempest
sprang down on us its assault, shaking the high screens on either hand,
and the rain beat with the roll of kettle-drums. Then we got on an up
grade, and two of the spent natives collapsed, their chests heaving. So
I and the other chap stood up in the night, looked to the stars, from
which no help could be got, took hold of the pump handle like gallant
gentlemen, and tried to forget there were twenty miles to go. Away we
went, jog, jog, uphill. I thought that gradient would not end till my
heart and head had burst; but it did, just in time.

We gathered speed on a down grade. We flew. Presently the man with the
fever yelled, “The brake, the brake!” But the brake was broken. The
trolley was not running, but leaping in the dark. Every time it came
down it found the metals. A light was coming towards us on the line; and
the others prepared to jump. I could not even see that light, for my
back was turned to our direction, and I could not let go the flying
handle, else would all control have gone, and also I should have been
smashed. I shut my eyes, pumped swiftly and involuntarily, and waited
for doom to hit me in the back. The blow was a long time coming. Then
Hill’s gentle voice remarked, “All right, boys, it’s a firefly.”

... I became only a piece of machinery, and pumped, and pumped, with no
more feeling than a bolster. Shadows undulated by us everlastingly. I
think my tongue was hanging out....

Lights were really seen at last. Kind hands lifted us from the engine of
torture; and I heard the remembered voice of the Skipper, “Is he there?
I thought it was a case.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

That night of my return a full moon and a placid river showed me the
“Capella” doubled, as in a mirror, and admiring the steamer’s deep
inverted shape I saw a heartening portent—I saw steam escaping from the
funnel which was upside down. A great joy filled me at that, and I
turned to the Skipper, as we strode over the ties of the jetty. “Yes. We
go home to-morrow,” he said. The bunk was super-heated again by the
engine room, but knowing the glad reason, I endured it with pleasure.
To-morrow we turned about.

Yet on the morrow there was still the persistence of the spacious
idleness which encompassed us impregnably, beyond which we could not go.
The little that was left of the fuel in the holds went out of us with
dismal unhaste. The Skipper and the mates fumed, and the Doctor took me
round to see the “Capella’s” pets, so that we might fill up time. A
monkey, an entirely secular creature once with us, had died while I was
away. It was well. He had no name; Vice was his name. There were no
tears at his death, and Tinker the terrier began to get back some of his
full and lively form again after that day when, in a sudden righteous
revolution, he slew, and barbarously mangled, the insolent tyrant of the
ship. The monkey had feared none but Mack, our red, blue and yellow
macaw, a monstrous and resplendent fowl in whose iron bill even Brazil
nuts were soft.

But we all respected Mack. He was the wisest thing on the ship. If an
idle man felt high-spirited and approached Mack to demonstrate his
humour, that great bird gave an inquiring turn to its head, and its
deliberate and unwinking eyes hid the rapid play of its prescient mind.
The man stopped, and would speak but playfully. Nobody ever dared.

When Mack first boarded the ship, a group of us, gloved, smothered him
with a heavy blanket and fastened a chain to his leg. He knew he was
overpowered, and did not struggle, but inside the blanket we heard some
horrible chuckles. We took off the blanket and stood back expectantly
from that dishevelled and puzzling giant of a parrot. He shook his
feathers flat again, quite self-contained, looked at us sardonically and
murmured “Gur-r-r” very distinctly; then glanced at his foot. There was
a little surprise in his eye when he saw the chain there. He lifted up
the chain to examine it, tried it, and then quietly and easily bit it
through. “Gur-r-r!” he said again, straightening his vest, still
regarding us solemnly. Then he moved off to a davit, and climbed the
mizzen shrouds to the top-mast.

When he saw us at food he came down with nonchalance, and overlooked our
table from the cross beam of an awning. Apparently satisfied, he came
directly to the mess table, sitting beside me, and took his share with
all the assurance of a member, allowing me to idle with his beautiful
wings and his tail. He was a beauty. He took my finger in his awful bill
and rolled it round like a cigarette. I wondered what he would do to it
before he let it go; but he merely let it go. He was a great character,
magnanimously minded. I never knew a tamer creature than Mack. That
evening he rejoined a flock of his wild brothers in the distant
tree-tops. But he was back next morning, and put everlasting fear into
the terrier, who was at breakfast, by suddenly appearing before him with
wings outspread on the deck, looking like a disrupted and angry rainbow,
and making raucous threats. The dog gave one yell and fell over
backwards.

We had added a bull-frog to our pets, and he must have weighed at least
three pounds. He had neither vice nor virtue, but was merely a squab in
a shady corner. Whenever the dog approached him he would rise on his
legs, however, and inflate himself till he was globular. This was
incomprehensible to Tinker, who was contemptuous, but being a little
uncertain, would make a circuit of the frog. Sitting one day in the
shadow of the box which enclosed the rudder chain was the frog, and we
were near, and up came Tinker a-trot all unthinking, his nose to the
deck. The frog hurriedly furnished his pneumatic act when Tinker, who
did not know froggie was there, was close beside him, and Tinker snapped
sideways in a panic. Poor punctured froggie dwindled instantly, and
died.

I could add to the list of our creatures the anaconda which was found
coming aboard by the gangway but that a stoker saw him first, became
hysterical, and slew the reptile with a shovel; there were the coral
snakes which came inboard over the cables and through the hawse pipes,
and the vampire bats which frequented the forecastle. But they are
insignificant beside our peccary. I forgot to tell you the Skipper never
made a tame creature of her. She refused us. We brought her up from the
bunkers where first she was placed, because the stokers flatly refused
her society in the dark. She was brought up on deck in bonds, snapping
her tushes in a direful way, and when released did most indomitably
charge all our ship’s company, bristles up, and her automatic teeth
louder and more rapid than ever. How we fled! When I turned on my
vantage, the manner of my getting there all unknown, to see who was my
neighbour, it was my abashed and elderly captain, who can look upon sea
weather at its worst with an easy eye, but who then was striving
desperately to get his legs (which were in pyjamas) ten feet above the
deck, in case the very wild pig below had wings.

After the peccary was released we could not call the ship ours. We crept
about as thieves. It was fortunate that she always gave warning of her
proximity by making the noise of castanets with her tusks, so that we
had time to get elevated before she arrived. But I never really knew how
fast she could move till I saw her chase the dog, whom she despised and
ignored. One morning his valiant barking at her, from a distance he
judged to be adequate, annoyed her, and she shot at him like a
projectile. Her slender limbs and diminutive hooves were those of a
deer, and they became merely a haze beneath her body, which was a flying
passion. The terrified dog had no chance, but just as she closed with
him her feet slipped, and so Tinker’s life was saved.

Her end was pitiful. One day she got into the saloon. The Doctor and I
were there, and saw her trot in at one door, and we trotted out at
another door. Now, the saloon was the pride of the Skipper; and when the
old man tried to bribe her out of it—he talked to her from the open
skylight above—and she insulted him with her mouth, he sent for his
men. From behind a shut door of the saloon alley way we heard a fusilade
of tusks in the saloon, shrieks from the maddened dog, uproar from the
parrots, and the hoarse shouts of the crew. The pig was charging ten
ways at once. Stealing a look from the cabin we saw the boatswain appear
with a bunch of cotton waste, soaked in kerosene, blazing at the end of
a bamboo, and the mate with a knife lashed to another pole. The peccary
charged the lot. There broke out the cries of Tophet, and through chaos
champed insistently the high note of the tusks. She was noosed and
caged; but nothing could be done with the little fury, and when I peeped
in at her a few days later she was full length, and dying. She opened
one glazing eye at me, and snapped her teeth slowly, game to the end.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_March 6._—It was reported at breakfast that we sail to-morrow. The
bread was sour, the butter was oil, the sugar was black with flies, the
sausages were tinned and very white and dead, and the bacon was all fat.
And even the awning could not keep the sun away.

_March 7._—We got the hatches on number four hold. It is reported we
sail to-morrow.

_March 8._—The ship was crowded this night with the boys, for a last
jollification. We fired rockets, and swore enduring friendships with
anybody, and many sang different songs together. It is reported that we
sail to-morrow.

_March 9._—It is reported that we sail to-morrow.

_March 10._—The “Capella” has come to life. The master is on the
bridge, the first mate is on the forecastle head, the second mate is on
the poop, and the engineers are below. There are stern and minatory
cries, and men who run. At the first slow clanking of the cable we
raised wild cheers. The ship’s body began to tremble, and there was
thunder under her counter. We actually came away from the jetty, where
long we had seemed a fixture. We got into mid-stream—stopped; slowly
turned tail on Porto Velho. There was old man Jim, diminished on the
distant jetty, waving his hat. Porto Velho looked strange again. Away we
went. We reached the bend of the river, and turned the corner. There was
the last we shall ever see of Porto Velho. Gone!

The forest unfolding in reverse order seemed brighter, and all would
have been quite well, but the fourth engineer came up from his duty, and
fell insensible. He was very yellow, and the Doctor had work to do. Here
was the first of our company to succumb to the country.

                   *       *       *       *       *

There were but six more days of forest; for the old “Capella,” empty and
light as a balloon, the collisions with the floating timber causing
muffled thunder in her hollow body, came down the swift floods of the
Madeira and the Amazon rivers “like a Cunarder, at sixteen knots,” as
the Skipper said. And there on the sixth day was Para again, and the sea
near. Our spirits mounted, released from the dead weight of heat and
silence. But I was to lose the Doctor at Para, for he was then to return
to Porto Velho, having discharged his duty to the “Capella’s” company.
The Skipper took his wallet, and we went ashore with him, he to his
day-long task of clearing his vessel, and we for a final sad excursion.
Much later in the day, suspecting an unnameable evil was gathering to my
undoing, I called at the agent’s office, and found the Skipper had
returned to the ship, that she was sailing that night, and, the
regulations of Para being what they were, it being after six in the
evening I could not leave the city till next morning. My haggard and
dismayed array of thoughts broke in confusion and left me gibbering,
with not one idea for use. Without saying even good-bye to my old
comrade I took to my heels, and left him; and that was the last I saw of
the Doctor. (Aha! my staunch support in the long, hot and empty time at
the back of things, where were but trees, bad food, and a jest to brace
our souls, if ever you should see this—How!—and know, dear lad, I
carried the damnable regulations and a whole row of officials, the Union
Jack at the main, firing every gun as I bore down on them. I broke
through. Only death could have barred me from my ship and the way home.)

Next morning we were at sea. We dropped the pilot early and changed our
course to the north, bound for Barbados. Though on the line, the
difference in the air at sea, after our long enclosure in the rivers of
the forest, was keenly felt. And the ship too had been so level and
quiet; but here she was lively again, full of movements and noises. The
bows were at their old difference with the skyline, and the steady wind
of the outer was driving over us. Before noon, when I went in to the
Chief, my crony was flat and moribund with a temperature at 105°, and he
had no interest in this life whatever. I had added the apothecary’s
duties to those of the Purser, and here found my first job. (Doctor, I
gave him lots of grains of quinine, and lots more afterwards; and plenty
of calomel when he was at 98 again. Was that all right?)

The sight of the big and hearty Chief, when he was about once more,
yellow, insecure, and somewhat shrunken, made us dubious. Yet now were
we rolling home. She was breasting down into a creaming smother, the
seas were blue, and the world was fresh and wide all the way back. There
was one fine night, as we were climbing slowly up the slope of the
globe, when we lifted the whole constellation of the Great Bear, the
last star of the tail just dipping below the seas, straight over the
“Capella’s” bows, as she pitched. Then were we assured affairs were
rightly ordered, and slept well and contented.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Late one afternoon we sighted Barbados. The sea was dark and the light
was golden. The island did not look like land. It was a faint but
constant pearl-coloured cloud. The empty sky came down to the dark sea
in bright walls which had but a bloom of azure. Overhead it was day, but
the sea was fluid night. Above the island was a group of cirrus, turned
to the setting sun like an audience of intent faces. Near to starboard
was a white ship, fully rigged, standing towards the island with royals
set, and even a towering main skysail. Tall as she was, she looked but a
multiple cloud which had dropped from the sky, and had settled on the
dark sea, and over it was drifting in a faint air, buoyant, but unable
to lift. We overhauled that stately ship. She was reflecting the dayfall
from the white rounds of her many sails. She was regal, she was
paramount in her world, and the sun seemed to be watching her, and
shining solely for her illustrious progress. The clarity and the peace
of it was in us as we leaned against the rail, watching Barbados grow,
and watching that exalted ship. “This is all right,” said the Chief.

We were coming to the things we knew and understood. In the island near
us were men, quays, and shops. This evening had a familiar and friendly
look. Barbados at last! There would be something to eat, too, and we
kept talking of that. Do you know what good bread and butter tastes
like? Or mealy baked potatoes? Or fruit from which the juice runs when
you bite? Or crisp salads? Not you; not if you haven’t lived for long on
tinned stuffs, bread which smelt like vinegar, and butter to which a
spoon had to be used.

To the door of the saloon alley way we saw the steward come, and begin
to swing his bell. “Tea ho!” said the mate. “Keep it,” said the Chief.
“I know it. Sardines and hash. Not for me. We shall get some grub in the
morning. Oranges and bananas, boys. I’m tired of oil. My belt is in by
three holes.”

When the sun once touched the sea it sank visibly, like a weight. Night
came at once. We passed a winking light, and soon ahead of us in the
dark was grouped a multitude of lower stars. That was Bridgetown. Those
stars opened and spread round us, showing nothing of the wall of night
in which they were fixed. Well, there it was. We could smell the good
land. We should see it in the morning. We had really got there.

The engines stopped. There was a shout from the steamer’s bridge and a
thunderous rumbling as the cable ran out, and then a remarkable quiet.
The old man came sideways down the bridge ladder with a hurricane lamp,
and stood with us, striking a light for his cigar. “Here we are, Chief,”
he said. “What about coals in the morning?” The night was hot, there was
no wind, and as we sat yarning on the bunker hatch another cluster of
stars moved in swiftly together, came to a stand near us, and a
peremptory gun was fired. That was the British mail steamer.

We looked at her with awe. We could see the toffs in evening dress
idling in the glow of her electric lights. What a feed they had just
finished! But the greatest wonder of her deck was the women in white
gowns. We could hear the strange laughter of the women, and listened for
it. That was music worth listening to. Our little mob of toughs in turns
used the night glasses on those women, and in a dead silence. There were
some kiddies, too.

We were looking at the benign lights of the island and trying to make
out what they meant. The sense of our repose, and the touch of those
warm and velvet airs, and the scent of land, were like the kindness and
security of home. “I know this place,” drawled Sandy. “I was here once.
Before I went into steam I used to come out to the islands, when I was a
young ’un. I made two voyages in the ‘Chocolate Girl.’ She was my first
ship. She was a daisy, too. Once we lifted St. Vincent twenty-five days
out of Liverpool. That was going, if you like. If old Wager—he was the
old man of the ‘Chocolate Girl’—if he could only get a trip in a ship
like this, like an iron street with a factory stack in the middle! But
he can’t. He’s dead. He had the ‘Mignonette,’ and she went missing among
the Bahamas. There’s millions of islands in the Bahamas. They’re north
of this place. You couldn’t visit all those islands in a lifetime.

“If you ask me, some of the islands in these seas are very funny.
There’s something wrong about a few of them. They’re not down in the
chart, so I’ve heard. One day you lift one, and you never knew it was
there. ‘What’s that?’ says the old man. ‘Can’t make that place out.’
Then he reckons he’s found new land, and takes his position. He calls it
after his wife, and cables home what he’s done. The next thing is a
gunboat goes there and beats about and lays over the spot, but she
doesn’t find no island. The gunboat cables home that the merchant chap
was drunk or something, and that he steamed over the spot and got
hundreds of fathoms. They’re always so clever, in the navy. But I’ve
heard some of these islands are not right. You see one once, and nobody
ever sees it again.

“I knew a man, and he was marooned on one of those islands. He sailed
with me afterwards on one of the Blue Anchor steamers to Sydney. One
time he was on a craft out of Martinique for Cuba. She was a schooner of
the islands, and fine vessels they are. You’ll see a lot about us in the
morning. This man’s name was Moffat—Bill Moffat. His schooner had a
mulatto for a master, and that nigger was a fool and very superstitious,
by all accounts. They ran short of water, and it’s pretty bad if you
fall short of water in these seas. Off the regular routes there’s
nothing. You might drift for weeks, and see nothing, off the track.

“Then they sighted an island. The mulatto chap pretended he knew all
about that island. He said he had been there before. But he was a liar.
It was only a little island, like some trees afloat. They came down on
it, and anchored in ten fathoms and waited for daylight.

“Next morning some wind freshened off shore, and Moffat takes a nigger
and rows to the beach. There was only a light swell breaking on the
coral, and landing was easy. Moffat told the nigger to stay by the boat
while he took a look round. There was a bit of a coral beach with a pile
of high rocks at the ends of it, like pillars each side of a doorstep.
What was inside the island Moffat couldn’t see, because at the back of
the beach was a wood. He said he heard a sound like a bird calling, but
he reckoned there wasn’t a soul in that place. The schooner was riding
just off. He turned and was crunching his way up the coral with the idea
of looking for a way inside. He got to the trees, and then heard the
nigger shout in a fright. The black beggar was pushing out the boat. He
got in it too, and began rowing back to the schooner as if somebody was
coming after him.

“Moffat yelled, and ran down to the surf, but the nigger kept right on.
There was Moffat up to his knees in the water, and in a fine state. The
boat reached the schooner—and now, thinks Moffat, there’ll be trouble.
Do you know what happened though? For a little while nothing happened.
Then they began to haul in her cable. She upanchored and stood out.
That’s a fact. Bill told me he felt pretty sick when he saw it. He
didn’t like the look of it. He watched the schooner turn tail, and soon
she found more wind and got out of sight past the island, close-hauled.
He watched her dance past one of the piles of rocks till there was
nothing but empty sea behind the rock. Then his eye caught something
moving on the rock. Something moved round it out of his sight. He never
saw what it was. He wished he had.

“Well, he had a pretty bad time. He couldn’t find anyone on the island,
in a manner of speaking. But somebody was always going round a corner,
or behind a tree. He caught them out of the tail of his eye. He said it
was enough to get on a man’s nerves the way that thing always just
wasn’t there, whatever it was. ‘Curse the goats,’ Bill used to say to
himself.

“One day Bill was strolling round figuring out what he could do to that
mulatto when he met him again, and then he found a sea cave. He went in.
It was a silly thing to do, because the way in was so low that he had to
crawl. But the cave was big enough inside for a music-hall. The walls
ran up into a vault, and the water came up to the bottom of the walls
nearly all round. The water was like a green light. A bright light came
up through the water, and the reflections were wriggling all over the
rocks, making them seem to shake. The water was like thick glass full of
light. He could see a long way down, but not to the bottom. While he was
looking at it the water heaved up quietly full three feet, and the
reflections on the walls faded. Then he saw the hole through which he
had crawled was gone. ‘Now, Bill Moffat, you’re in a regular mess,’ he
says to himself.

“He dived for the hole. But he never found that way out, and the funny
thing was he couldn’t come to the top again. Bill saw it was a proper
case that time, and no more Sundays in Poplar. He was surprised to find
that the deeper he went the thinner the water was. It was thin and
clear, like electric light. He could see miles there, and down he kept
falling till he hit the bottom with a bang. It scared a lot of fishes,
and they flew up like birds. He looked up to see them go, and there was
the sun overhead, only it was like a bright round of green jelly, all
shaking. Bill found it was dead easy to breathe in water that was no
thicker than air, so he got up, brushed the sand off, and looked round.
A flock of fishes flew about him quite friendly, and as beautiful as
Amazon parrots. A big crab walked ahead, and Bill thought he had better
follow the crab.

“He came to a path which was marked with shells, and at the end of the
path he saw the fore half of a ship up-ended. While he was looking at
it, somebody pushed the curtains from the hatchway, and came out, and
looked at him. ‘Good lord, it’s Davy Jones,’ said Bill to himself.

“‘Hullo, Bill,’ said Davy. ‘Come in. Glad to see you, Bill. What a time
you’ve been.’

“Moffat said that Davy wasn’t a decent sight, having barnacles all over
his face. But he shook hands. ‘You’re hand is quite cold, Bill,’ said
Davy. ‘Did you lose your soul coming along? You nearly did that before,
Bill Moffat. You nearly did it that Christmas night off Ushant. I
thought you were coming then. But not you. But here you are at last all
right. Come in! Come in!’

“Bill went inside with Davy. There was sea junk all over the place. ‘I
find these things very handy, old chap,’ said Davy to Bill, seeing he
was looking at them. ‘It’s good of you to send them down, though I don’t
like the iron, for it won’t stand the climate. See that old hat? It’s a
Spanish admiral’s. I clap it on, backwards, whenever I want to go
ashore.’

“So they sat down, and yarned about old times, though Bill told me that
Davy seemed to remember people after everybody else had forgotten them,
which was confusing. ‘Oh, yes,’ Davy would say, ‘old Johnson. Yes. He
used to talk of me in a rare way. He was a dog, was Johnson. I’ve heard
him, many a time. But he’s changed since his ship came downstairs. He’s
a better man. He’s not so funny as he was.’

“Then they had a pipe, and after a bit things began to drag. ‘Come into
the garden, Bill,’ said Davy. ‘Come and have a look round.’

“All round the garden Bill noticed the name-boards of ships nailed up.
Some of the names Bill knew, and some he didn’t, being Spanish. ‘What do
you think of my collection?’ said Davy. ‘Ever seen as fine a one? I lay
you never have!’

“Then they came to a door. ‘Come in,’ said Davy. ‘This is my locker.
Ever heard of my locker?’

“Bill said it was pretty dark inside. Just light enough to see. But
there was only miles and miles of crab-pots, all set out in rows, with a
label on each. ‘What do you think of that lot, Bill?’ asked Davy. ‘I
shall have to get larger premises soon.’ Bill choked a bit, for the
place smelt stale and seaweedy. ‘What’s in the crab-pots, Davy?’ said
Bill.

“‘Souls!’ said Davy. ‘But there’s a lot of trash, though now and then I
get a good one. Here, now. See this? This is a fine one, though I
mustn’t tell you where I got it. And people said he hadn’t got one. But
I knew better, and there it is.’

“But Bill couldn’t see anything in the pots. He could only hear a
rustling, as if something was rubbing on the wicker, or a twittering. At
last Davy came to a new pot. ‘Do you know who’s in this one, Bill,’ he
said. But Bill couldn’t guess. ‘Well, Bill, it’s your soul, and a poorer
one I never see. It was hardly worth setting the pot for a soul like
that.’ Then Davy began to shake the pot, and soon got wild. ‘Here, where
the deuce has that soul gone,’ he said, and put his ear to the bars.
Then he put the pot down and made a rush at Bill, to get it back; but
Bill jumped backwards, got through the door, ran through the house,
grabbed the admiral’s cocked hat, and clapped it on backwards. Then he
shot out of the water at once, and found himself on the rocks outside
the cave, with the cocked hat still on his head. He’s kept that hat ever
since, and money wouldn’t buy it.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

When I woke next morning it was like waking to a great occasion. The
tropic sun was blazing outside. The day seemed of a superior quality. An
old negress shuffled by my cabin door, through which was a peep of the
town across the harbour, and she had some necklaces of shells strung on
one skinny black arm and carried a basket of oranges on the other. I
jumped up, and bought all the oranges. A boat came to our gangway and
some of us went ashore. I don’t know what a man feels like who is
released one fine day from imprisonment into the stream of his fellows,
but I should think he is first a little stunned, and afterwards becomes
like a child’s balloon in a breeze. The people we had met in the Brazils
never laughed; and I myself had always felt that there we had been
watched and followed unseen, that something was there, watching us,
waiting its time, knowing well it could get us before we escaped.

We were at last outside it and free. The anchorage of Bridgetown seemed
anarchic, after our level sombre experience, for the sea was a green
light, flashing and volatile, with white schooners driving upon it,
negroes shouting and laughing over the bulwarks, or frantically hauling
on the sheets. The rushing water was crowded with leaping boats, all
gaudily painted; and even the sunshine, moving rapidly on quivering
white sails and the white hulls buoyantly swinging, was a kind of
shaking laughter. Our negro boatmen sang as they rowed, when they were
not swearing at other boatmen. The world had got wine in its head.

We went to the Ice House, and bought English beer. (Oh, the taste of
beer!) In the brisk and sunny streets there were English women, cool,
dainty, a little haughty, their dresses smelling of new linen, and they
were looking in at shop windows. We had got our feet down on home
pavements, and the streets had the newness and sparkle of holiday. “Hi,
cabby!”

He drove us along coral roads, under cocoanut palms, and there were
golden hills (hills once more!) one way, and on the other hand was a
beach glowing like white fire, with a sea beyond of a blue that was
ultimate, profound, and as tense and as still as rapture. We came to a
hotel where there was stiff napery, with creases in it, on a breakfast
table. There was a silver coffee-pot. There was sweet-smelling and
crusty bread, butter in ice, and new milk. There was a heaped plate of
fruit. There was a crystal jug filled with cold water and sunshine, and
it threw a wavering light on the damask.

We had some of everything. We ate for more than an hour, steadily. A man
could not have done it alone, and without shame. There was one superior
lady tourist, with grey curls on her cheeks and a face like doom, and
she sent for the manager, and asked if we were to breakfast there again.
She wanted to know. The Chief begged me, as the youngest of the party,
to go over and kiss her. But I pointed out that, seeing where we had
come from, and what we had suffered, it was the plain duty of any really
dear old soul to come over and kiss us on a morning like that.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In the afternoon we were aboard again, waiting for the Skipper to return
with the new orders. To what part of the world would the power in
Leadenhall Street now consign us? Sandy thought New Orleans; but we
could rule that out, for there was no cotton just then. Pensacola was
more likely, the Chief said, with a deck cargo of lumber for Hamburg.
That guess made the crowd glum. Winter in the Atlantic, she rolling her
heart out, and the timber that was level with the engine-room casing
groaning and straining at every roll—to dwell on that prospect was to
feel a cold draught out of the Valley of Shadows.

Two nigger boys were overside, diving for coins. You threw a
coin—Brazil’s nickel muck, a handful worth nothing—and it went below
oscillating, as though sentiently dodging the contorted and convulsive
figure of the boy diving after it. The transparency of the fathoms was
that of a denser air. When the sea was still, at the slack of the tides,
this tropic anchorage was not like water. You did not look upon it, but
into it, being hardly aware of its surface. It was surprising to see our
massive iron plates stand upright in it. We were still an ugly black
bulk, as we were on the ditch water of Swansea, but our sea wagon had
lost its look of squat heaviness. Even our iron ship was transmuted,
such was the lift and radiance of Barbados and its sea, into the
buoyancy of the unsubstantial stuff of that scene about us, the low
hills of greenish gold so delicate under the sky of malachite blue that
you doubted whether mortals could walk there. Bridgetown was between
those hills and the sea, a cluster of white cubes, with inconsequential
touches of scarlet, orange, and emerald. Beneath our keel was a boy who
might have been flying there.

On one side of the town was a belt of coral beach. It was a-fire, and
the palms above the beach, with their secretive villas, and the
green-gold hills beyond, floated on that white glow. The sea below the
beach was an incandescent green; it might have been burning through
contact with the island. Then the sea spread down to us in areas of
opaque violet and blue, till in the neighbourhood of the ship it became
transparent and was but a denser atmosphere. You, in the hard and bitter
north, on the exposed summit of the world where Polaris glitters in the
forehead of a frozen god, hardly know what young and luscious stuff this
earth is, where the constant sun and tepid rains and salt air have
preserved its bloom and flush of abounding life.

There came the Skipper’s boat, he in his shore-going white ducks and
Panama hat in the stern sheets, his wallet in his hand. He knew that we
all looked at him with assumed indifference, when he stepped among us on
deck. That was his time to show he was the ship’s master. He feigned
that we were not there. He turned to the chief mate: “All ready, Mr.
Brown?” “All ready, sir.” Then the master walked slowly, knowing our
eyes were on his back, to his place aft, first going in to speak to the
Chief. The Chief came out some minutes after. “Tampa, boys,” said he.
“Florida for phosphate, then home.”

That evening we were on our way, and turned inwards through the line of
the Caribbees, passing between the islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent,
high purple masses of rock, St. Lucia’s mass ascending into cones. The
Skipper had been to most of the West Indian islands, and remembered
them, while I listened. We stood at the chart-room door, watching the
islands across the evening seas. The sun, just above the sharply dark
rim of ocean, touched the sea, and sank. A thin paring of silver moon
had the sky to itself. I went into the chart-room; and the old man who,
grim and sour as you might think him, mellows into confidential
friendliness when he has you to himself, spread his charts of the
Spanish Main under the yellow lamp, which was a slow pendulum as she
rolled, and he put his spectacles on his lean brown face, talked of
unfrequented cays, and of the negro islands, and debated which route we
should take.

The fourth morning at breakfast-time, was a burning day, with a sky
almost cloudless, and a slow sea which had the surface of its rich blue
deeps shot with turquoise lights, while fields of saffron gulfweed
stained it; and we had, close over our port bow, the most beautiful
island in the world. It is useless to deny it, and to declare you know a
better island. Can’t I see Jamaica now? I see it most plain. It descends
abruptly from the meridian, pinnacles and escarpments trembling in the
upper air with distance and delicate poise, and comes down in rolling
forests and steep verdant slopes, where facets of bare rock glitter, to
more leisurely open glades and knolls; and then, being not far from the
sea, drops in sheer cliffs to where the white combers pulse. It is a
jewel which smells like a flower. The “Capella” went close in till Port
Antonio under the Blue Mountains was plain, and though I could see the
few scattered houses, I could not see the narrow ledges where men could
stand in such a steep land. We crawled over the blue floor in which that
sea mountain is set, and cruised along, feeling very small, under the
various and towering shape. For long I watched it, declaring continually
that some day I must return. (And that is the greatest compliment a
traveller on his way home can pay to any spot on earth.)

It faded as we drew northwards. Over seas to the north was a long low
stratum of permanent cloud, and beneath it was the faint presentiment of
Cuba. Still we were in the spell of the very halcyon weather of old
tales, with the world our own, though once this day there was a great
rain burst, and the “Capella” was lost in falling water, her syren
blaring. We neared the Cuban coast by the Isle of Pines, a pallid desert
shore, apparently treeless and parched. The next morning we came to the
western cape of the island, rounding it in company with a white island
schooner, its crew of toughs watching us from her shadeless deck; and
changed our course almost due north.

Now we were in the Gulf of Mexico, and soon upset its notoriously
uncertain temper, for a “norther” met us and piped till it was a full
gale, end-on, and it kicked up a nasty sea which flung about the empty
“Capella” like a band-box. There was a night of it. Towards morning it
eased up, and I woke to a serene sunrise, and found we were in the pale
green water of coral soundings, with the Floridan pilot even then
standing in to us, his tug bearing centrally on its bridge a gilded
eagle with rampant wings. In a little while we were fast to the
quarantine quay at Mullet Island, detained as a yellow fever suspect.
The medical officers boarded us, ranged amidships the “Capella’s” crowd
from the master down, and put in the mouth of each of us a thermometer;
and so for a time we stood ridiculously smoking glass cigarettes. One
stoker was put aside, for he had a temperature. Then into the cabins,
and the saloon, the forecastle, and into the holds, were put gallipots
of burning sulphur, and the doors were closed. We became a great and
dreadful stench; and I went ashore.

There was a deserted beach of comminuted shells, its glare as bright as
snow in sunshine. It was littered with the relics of old wrecks, with
sea rubbish, and the carapaces of crabs. Beyond the beach was a
calcareous desert, with a scrub of palmetto and evergreen, and patches
of flowering coreopsis and blue squills. Hidden by the scrub were
shallow lagoons. It is hard to tell the sea from the land in warm and
aqueous Florida, for sea and land so invade each other’s dominions.
Water and land were asleep in the sun. I was alone in the island, and
sat in a decaying boat by the shore of a lagoon where nothing moved but
the little crabs playing hide and seek in the moist crevices of the
boat, and the pelicans which sat round the interminable flat shores.
Sometimes the pelicans woke, and yawned, and fanned the heat with great
slow wings.

In the early afternoon we were allowed to proceed to Tampa, which we
reached in three hours; and there we came once more to the press of the
busy and indifferent world. The muddle of roofs and steeples of a great
city were about us, and men met us and talked to us, but they had no
leisure for interest in the wonders of the strange land from which we
had come, and would not have cared if afterwards we were going to
Gehenna. We made fast under a new structure of timber and iron which was
something between a flour mill and the Tower of Babel, for it was wan
and powdered, and full of strange noises; and it had a habit of eating,
in a mechanical way, an interminable length of railway trucks, wagon
after wagon, one every minute. A great weariness and yearning filled me
that night. The strangulating fumes of the sulphur clung to all the
cabin, and puffed in clouds from the pillow when I changed sides; for
the wagons clanked and banged till daylight. I sat up and beat my
breast, and swore I would leave her and go home. The next morning that
inexplicable structure beside us began from many mouths to vomit floods
of powdered phosphate into us, and the “Capella,” in and out, turned
pale through an almost impalpable dust. Everybody took bronchitis and
cursed Tampa and its phosphate.

I spoke to the Skipper and the Chief about it, and they agreed that
nobody would stop with her now, who could leave her; but that yet was I
no pal to desert them. What about them? They had yet to see her safe
across the most ruthless of seas at a time when its temper would be at
its worst; and what about them? Though they admitted that, were they in
my case, they would certainly take the train to New York, and catch
there the fastest steamer for England. Then come with me to the British
Consul like an honest man, said I to the captain, and get me off your
articles.

The three of us left her, I for the last time. I turned upon the
“Capella,” and the boys stood leaning on her taffrail watching me; and I
am not going to put down here what I felt, nor what the lads cried to
me, nor what I said when I stood beneath her counter, and called up to
them. We came to a corner by a warehouse, and I turned to look upon the
“Capella” for the last time.

Tampa, the noisy city about us, was rawly new, most of its site but
lately a shallow lagoon, and one of its natives, the ship’s agent who
was entertaining us at lunch, did not fail to impress that enterprise
and industry upon us with great earnestness. Tampa was a large, hasty,
makeshift standing of depôts, railway sidings, cigar factories, wharves,
and huge elevators which could load I forget how many thousands of tons
of bulk cargo into a steamer in twelve hours, as though she were an iron
bucket under a pump. A town spontaneous unexpected and complete, with a
hurrying population in its sidewalks, pushing to secure foothold in
life, and not a book-shop there, and no talk but in its saloons and
commercial exchanges. We went into many of those saloons, the Skipper,
and the Chief, and the late Purser, shaking hands for the last time in
each, and then dropping into another to recall old affairs; and shaking
hands finally again, and so to the next bar.

That night I was alone in Tampa, with a torrent of urgent affairs
surging past. I could not find the railway station. Standing at a
corner, outside a tobacconist’s shop, a huge corridor train shaped among
the lights of the street, trundled down the centre of the roadway, then
edged close to the sidewalk, bumping past a row of shops as casually as
a tram for a penny journey, and stopped just where I stood with a
hand-bag wondering how I was to get to New York. New York was a thousand
miles away. The train was but a mere episode of the open street, and I
could not feel it bore out the promise of my railway vouchers. This
train, a row of lighted villas in motion, came down the roadway, out of
nowhere, while carts and women with market baskets waited for it to
pass, stopped outside a tobacconist’s shop, and the light of the shop
window illuminated a round of a huge wheel which stood higher than my
head. The wheel came to rest upon an abandoned newspaper. A negro was
passing me, and I stopped him. “Noo Yark? Step aboard right now!” His
word was all I had to go upon that this train would take me to the
precise point in a continent I did not know. A struggle for existence
eddied fiercely round the train, and assuming it was the right train,
and I missed it—it was an unbearable thought! The train had to be
mounted. It was like climbing a wall; but I would have cast my luggage,
scaled more than walls, and dealt conclusively with any obstruction if
the way home left me no other choice. The traveller who has been in the
wilds and has lived with the barbarous, though he has not allowed his
thoughts to look back there, yet he knows something of that eagerness
which dumb things feel when he turns about. I took my train on trust, as
one does so many things in the United States, found we should really get
to New York, in time, and lay listening to the beat of the flying wheels
beneath my berth; tried to count their pulse, and fell asleep.

There were some more days and nights, and all the passengers of the
earlier stages of the journey had passed away. Then the train slowed
through imperceptible gradations, and stopped. I thought a cow was on
the line. But the negro attendant came to me and told me to get out.
This was New York. Outside there was a street in the rain, the stones
were deep with yellow reflections, and some cabmen stood about in shiny
capes. No majestic figure of Liberty met me. A cab met me, on a rainy
night.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was on one of those huge liners, and the steward told him they would
reach Plymouth in the morning. He was packing up his things in his
cabin. England to-morrow! The things went into his trunks in the lump,
with a compressing foot after each. It did not matter. All the clothes
were in ruins. The only care he took was with the toucans brilliant
skins, the bundle of arrows, the biscuit tins full of butterflies—they
would excite the Boy—and the barbaric Indian ornaments for Miss Muffet
and the Curly Nob; how their eyes would shine. His telegram from
Plymouth would surprise them. They did not know where he was.

But he knew, when they did not, that there was but one more day to tick
off the calendar to complete the exile. He had turned back that day to
the earlier pages of the diary and found some illuminating entries;
“Gone,” or “That’s another,” were written across some spaces which
otherwise were blank. It was curious that those cryptic entries recalled
the hours they stood for more vividly to his mind than those which had
happenings minutely recorded. He threw the diary into a trunk; the long
job was finished.

The sunshine all that day was different from the well remembered burning
weight of the tropics. It was a frail and grateful spring warmth, and
the incidence of its rays was happy and illuminating, as though the
light had only just reached the world, and so things looked just
discovered and interesting. A faint silver haze hung upon a pallid sea,
and the slow smooth mounds of water were full of fugitive glints and
flashes. You hardly knew the sea was there. The mist was the luminous
nimbus of a new world, a world not yet fully formed, for it had no
visible bounds. Night came, and a nearly full moon, and the only reality
was the stupendous bulk of the liner. She might have been in the clouds,
herself a dark cloud near the moon, with but rumours of light in the
aerial deeps beneath. It seemed another of the dreams. Would he wake up
presently to the reality of the forest, with the sun blazing on the
enamel of its hard foliage?

He wanted some assurance of time and space. He would stay on deck till
the first sign came of England. So he leaned motionless for hours on the
rail of the boat-deck, gazing ahead, where the outlook remained as
unshapen as it had since he left home. Far on the port bow appeared the
headlight of a steamer.

He watched that light. This, then, was no dream sea. Others were there.
But was it a headlight? ... No!

The Bishop’s! England now!

The steward came again, peeping through his curtain, and said,
“Plymouth, sir!” and turned on the glow lamp, for it was not yet dawn.
There was an early breakfast laid in the saloon; but he went on deck.
The liner had hardly way on her; the water was but uncoiling noiselessly
alongside. There were shapes of hills near, with villas painted on them,
but so bluish and immaterial was all that it might have rippled like the
flat water, being but a flimsy background which could be easily shaken.
The hills drew nearer imperceptibly, grew higher. A touch of real day
gave a hill-top body; and there was a confident shout from somebody
unseen in plain English. The vision grounded and got substance. Not only
home, but spring in Devon.

From the train window the countryside in the tones and flush of the
renascence absorbed him. He went from side to side of the carriage. What
was most extraordinary was the sparsity and lowness of the trees and
bushes, the fineness of the growth. The outlines of the trees could be
seen, and they crouched so near to the ground and were so very meagre.
The colours were faint enough to be but tinted mists. The biggest of the
trees were manageable, looked like toys. The orderly hedges, the clean
roads, the geometrical patterns of the fields, gave him assurance once
more of order and security. Here was law again, and the permanence of
affairs long decided upon. He closed his eyes, sinking into the cushions
of the carriage as though the arms under him were proved friendly and
could be trusted....

The slowing of the train woke him. They were running into Paddington. He
got his feet fair and solid on London before the train stopped, and
looked into the crowd waiting there. A flushed youngster ran towards him
out of a group, then stopped shyly. He caught The Boy, and held him
up.... Here again was the centre of the world.

                                THE END





End of Project Gutenberg's The Sea and the Jungle, by H. M. Tomlinson