Part 21

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 tapere.

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.'