Part 15

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_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.

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_Jan. 26._ The forest is lower and more open, and the pao mulatto is more numerous. We saw the important village of Manicore 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.

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_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.

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