CHAPTER XX

STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN

Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a river that had changed its name from the Mahú to the Ireng while we were crossing it, strolled through a bit of bone-dry, bunch-grass prairie, and turned in at the first house. We could scarcely have missed it, for there was not another for many miles within the colony. Hart had built it himself, with the help of his “siwashes,” as he called the Indian boys who made up his indefinite retinue,—a temporary structure in the approved style and only available material of the region, the walls of brush and mud, an earth floor, and a thick, top-heavy roof of palm-leaves. Later on he planned to build a real house a few miles up the river. Cow-hides, worth nothing whatever in this region, but which his employees were obliged to turn in to prove that an animal was dead, were used for every imaginable purpose,—as doormats, wind-shields, rugs, even to stand on down at the “old swimming-hole” where we took a dip every night, though _pirainhas_ abounded and an alligator had recently eaten Hart’s best dog.

He lived as everyone does and must in those parts, with certain improvements of American ingenuity. A fire built on the ground was his cook-stove, though he made a kind of bread-cake in an iron pot turned into an oven, the only bread in all that region. We, too, ate _farinha_, however, either dry or wet down with beef broth. This Brazilian staff of life tastes exactly like sawdust, but swells to several times it original size and is very filling and evidently nourishing. Then his Indian boys cut up dried beef and boiled it; now and then Hart let go a gun at a chicken, and occasionally a steer was killed, when everyone—neighbors, servants, Indians, dogs, chickens, and buzzards—gorged themselves for a day on fresh meat, after which the rest was cut into strips, salted, and sun-dried. The dessert common to all that region was “coalhado,” milk turned sour and thick as pudding and eaten with sugar. Then there were plenty of eggs, and milk without limit was to be had for the milking, since Hart already had hundreds of cattle, as well as many horses, few of which he saw once a month. Hammocks hung under the long protruding roof, as well as inside the house, and a cool breeze was always blowing across the savannahs, as the British call what the rest of South America knows as _campo_ or _pampa_, in this region between three and four hundred feet above sea-level.

Hart’s closest companions were a pair of hounds, now with a litter of pups. As the cur dogs of the Indians make a great hullabaloo at sight of a white man, so breed dogs are at once friendly with an Englishman or an American, but will not let an unknown Indian approach the house while the master is away and never make friends with the aborigines. About the hut hovered three dog-like Macuxy Indian boys, who did all the odds and ends of work and lived on the odds and ends of beef and _farinha_, neither getting nor expecting any wages, except a place they might call home. They hung their hammocks under a thatched roof on legs some distance away and now and then received a few yards of cotton cloth which they turned into clothing, for it is surprising how these children of the wilds can make even a tolerably fitting jacket. These Indian boys were never hired, but were unconsciously acquired. One of them would turn up and go to work without a word, cooking, washing, milking, and doing the other tasks, all of which took perhaps four hours a day, and it would not be until they had remained longer than is customary for visitors that Hart realized they were permanent employees. Brazilians in this region may during the course of a year give a cowboy or an Indian servant a cast-off cotton suit; hence word of the greater generosity of the American had quickly spread and the difficulty was not how to get help, but how to keep rid of too much of it. There were also fourteen _vaqueiros_, who lived with the cattle and were rarely seen at the house, and to these Hart furnished _farinha_ and paid two milreis a day, not in money but in cloth and other goods, for though the milreis serves as a basis of computation, there is no fixed medium of exchange and barter is still almost universal. The little actual money with which he had arrived Hart had laid away months before and never seen since, and he had no fear of its being stolen, though he kept well-locked the back room in which he stored his piles of cloth. Indeed, when he set out with me on a trip that might have lasted two or three weeks, it never occurred to him to take money with him. The _vaqueiros_, of course, killed a steer whenever they wanted meat, turning in the hide to show that they had not sold the animal over the border. Neither Hart nor his “siwashes” spoke any Portuguese worth mentioning, so that their conversation consisted chiefly of grunts and brief gestures, with now and then an American or Portuguese word which happened to be familiar to both sides. The Indian boys had found that certain sounds represented certain actions, so that when they were told to “build fire” they knew what was wanted, though the separate words meant nothing to them. They had learned a few expressions so well that they even ventured to pronounce them, and each evening after the dishes had been washed and the fire put out, they filed solemnly past us, each emitting a dubious “Goot neety” on the way to their _barracão_. Their general attitude was about like that of a cat. They drifted in from nowhere and stayed unasked, quiet and unaggressive, yet in a way independent and in no way affectionate. They knew that some day Hart would give them a hat or a few yards of cloth, and even without that reward they were quite pleased to have the prestige of living with so “rich” a man.

More than 12,000 square miles of this back end of British Guiana is high, open savannah, splendid for cattle; but the government refuses to sell it and merely issues “permissions to graze” on little patches of fifty square miles, or 36,000 acres each, at the exorbitant rental of three pounds a year! Hart was the sixth man to be issued such a permit, one of the others being a German and the rest Englishmen, while in all the immense savannahs of British Guiana only four Brazilian _fazendeiros_ had chosen to remain after the boundary award. Hence, in addition to his legal holding, there were some 200,000 acres more over which his cattle might freely roam. The cattle, too, were obtained by barter. Soon after his arrival, by way of Brazil, Hart had an entire boatload of goods brought up from Georgetown,—dozens of cheap felt hats, belts, soap, particularly many bolts of coarse, strong cotton cloth in gaudy patterns. No one else for many miles roundabout had any such stock on hand; hitherto the Brazilians over the border had been obliged to go to Boa Vista, or even to Manaos, to get such things. Moreover, Hart did not take unfair advantage of them, but charged the same prices as prevailed in Manaos; that is, he asked 3$ or 3$500 for a yard of cloth that cost perhaps six pence in Georgetown, so that they were delighted to do their shopping so near home, and as they rarely had anything but animals to pay with, he had already bought twelve hundred head of cattle and eighty horses without making serious inroads on his boatload of cloth. A Brazilian rancher anxious to give his wife or his own legs a surprise would ride fifty miles or more across country, driving before him a cow and a calf, and sell them to Hart for 60$—that is for twenty yards of cloth which had cost Hart $2.50. The visitor would depart highly satisfied with the exchange, while Hart branded the animals and added them to his stock on “Good Luck Ranch,” known across the river as “Fazenda Americana.” A horse and colt came to about 350$, say a hundred yards of the best cloth, at an original cost of $14; a plump steer might be worth two felt hats and a belt; yet Hart’s prices were considered so reasonable that people flocked in upon him from all directions. Now it might be an Indian of some property, who dined while his wife and child waited out in the rain until he was done and called them in to eat what he had left; or it might be a fellow-rancher who had neglected to keep up his own supplies. Occasionally payment was long delayed, but was almost always sure. Sometimes he was paid beforehand, as when a _fazendeiro_ with whom he might spend the night would tell him to drive such and such animals home with him, promising to come over later and get some cloth. There was nothing of the skinflint about Hart. He followed the time-honored custom of the region, with an American generosity added; and of course there was the high expense and risk of boating the stuff up the rivers, keeping it under lock and key in his back mud room, and the shopkeeping bother of selling it. Once he lost an entire cargo worth $2000, when the Indians who were bringing it to him let the boat go over some falls. But he hoped to have four or five thousand head of cattle in as many years, and to come to the rescue of the world’s scarcity of beef and leather as soon as some means was provided for reaching the markets. Just now the greatest drawback was lack of transportation. The governor of the colony had recently made a trip to the savannahs, and a railroad was planned, but the war had postponed it. American capital would build the line, but only on condition of certain land grants, and the governor was set on having it a government railway.

Meanwhile, I soon discovered, it was much easier to come in at the back door of British Guiana than to get from there down to the front portal. Small as it looks on a map of the whole continent, England’s South American colony is more than twice the size of Great Britain. It was 340 miles down to the coast as the crow flies, and vastly more than that to any but winged creatures. With 78,500 square miles of unbroken forest and matted jungle, only the four-hundred-and-sixtieth part of which was even under woodcutter’s license, there is no means of travel back of the fringe of coast except by the rivers, and these are much broken by falls and dependent on the season. Hart’s latest letter from the United States had been five months on the way.

The first leg of a journey to Georgetown was to cross the divide between the Brazilian and Guianese river systems, some fifty miles in its narrowest part, but much more than that to the home of Commissioner Melville on the upper Rupununi, which for several reasons was the logical starting-point of a journey down to the coast. Hart had been planning to go over to Melville’s within the next few weeks, and we compromised on his getting ready as soon as possible, which was to be within ten days. The delay I spent to advantage, for Hart was a pleasant companion and the region full of interest. Now we trotted over several hundred of his acres looking for a troop of mares in charge of a tyrannical stallion; twice we roamed the lightly wooded savannahs checking up on his cowboys and their charges. One day we went back to Brazil to visit Antonino and his family, the only near neighbors and the most nearly educated and civilized people in the vicinity. We brought back with us twenty cows and as many calves, driving them to the river, lassooing and dragging them down the bank, rolling in mud and drenched with perspiration and tropical downpours, and taking each calf across in the leaky dugout, the mother swimming behind. There are no frontier formalities, the ranchers of both sides being their own sovereigns in all matters, and Hart was as free to import cattle as he was to drive them over to the Takutú at the beginning of high water and sell them to the barges from Manaos.

We set out for Melville’s on June 5. Hart said it was a four-hour ride to the St. Ignatius Mission, but I knew how deceiving distances can be in South America, as well as the many unexpected obstacles that often turn up in wilderness travel, and was not too pleased when we put off the start until some time after noon. Hart rode a gray stallion with Texas trappings and led a pack-horse carrying our baggage, as awkward as packs always are and requiring frequent halts for adjustment. My bay horse had plenty of life, but with only the precarious monkey-seat the English call a saddle I was kept busy thwarting his frequent attempts to leave me behind. The first hour across Hart’s broad grazing-lands was fairly dry, though our delay had brought on the rainy season again. Endless stretches of fine prairie-grass, alternating with thin scrub forest, lay beyond. The first house was a ruin in thatch once occupied by a Scotchman and his squaw; the next had belonged to an exiled Brazilian. Every ruined hovel had its story. There was, for instance, the one in which Hart had met and tamed the “Ocean Shark.” A giant negro from the thickly settled coast, charged with two murders and many lesser crimes, had so named himself when he fled to the interior. However good a government may be, it is far away and hard to reach in so sparsely populated a country, where every man must be his own law and protection. When Hart first came, this black outlaw was roaming these upper plains with a band of servile and frightened Indians, bullying even white men, if they would stand for it. An Australian had picked up the Indian woman abandoned by the Scotchman, with her daughter and son, and settled down with her in the hut in question. One day he came home and found the “Ocean Shark” already occupying his hammock.

“You see dat tree over dere?” said the negro. “Well, jes’ yō swing yō hammock out dere. _I’se_ here now.”

The Australian, being a man who valued his skin more than his honor, complied, and the negro acted as his domestic substitute for a week before whim or rumor caused him to move on. He was constantly bullying the smaller ranchers and killing their cattle, and at length he let word drift out that he was going to do the same for Hart. The American, however, well over six feet and weighing 190 pounds without an ounce of fat, was built on “shark”-taming lines. Moreover, his partner had just left for the war and he was feeling very blue and spoiling for a fight when, on his way home to his new ranch, it was his good luck to find that the “Ocean Shark” had camped in the chief hut of a nearby Indian village. With him was his “secretary,” a small yellow negro named Cecil, for the “Sha’k” could not read or write.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Hart, riding up to the hut.

“Ah don’ know what dat got t’do wid yō,” answered the “Sha’k.”

“You black ——!” said Hart. “I asked you what are you doing here.”

“Don’ yō curse me!” screamed the negro, in the bold terms of the British “object” the world over, though already a bit tremulous from the seriousness of his situation.

Hart was by nature anything but a belligerent man, but his future in the colony depended on the evidence he gave at the start of being able to take care of himself. He sprang from his horse, drew his heavy revolver, and rapped the “Ocean Shark” over the head with the butt of it. Then he thrust the weapon back into its holster and waded into the negro in approved mining-camp style, rapidly changing his color from black to red, and ended by giving him ten minutes to pack his traps and remove his battered face forever from that corner of British Guiana. During that time the Indians who formed the negro’s band ran back and forth “just like ants” collecting his belongings, and every time his “secretary” had to pass the American he took off his hat, ducked as if to dodge a blow, and said, “Yessir! Yessir!” Soon the whole caravan was on the move and the “Ocean Shark” had never been seen in this region since, though fanciful tales continue to drift in of the “free city” he and his obsequious followers have founded in another corner of the colony.

At two in the afternoon we reached the Manarí Creek and found it too deep to cross on horseback, though when Hart had passed that way a week before it had not been knee-deep. That is the greatest difficulty of the overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown; one can only get up the Rio Branco in the rainy season, which is the very time when the savannahs are flooded and virtually impassable. Luckily I am fairly tall, and Hart was taller. We unloaded, stripped, and carried everything, including the saddles, across on our heads, the water just reaching my nostrils. Then we gave the horses a bath, for which they seemed grateful, went through all the loading process again, and rode on, the crossing having cost us more than an hour. There were more bogs and creeks, but all were passable, and we had only to stop occasionally to adjust the pack. All the time we kept drawing nearer the Kanuku Mountains, now a long blue range across the southern horizon. We had to pass around the end of this to get to Melville’s, which was almost due south, though I was supposed to be traveling north.

It was five o’clock when we reached the first inhabited house, that of a Brazilian family on a bank of the Takutú. The usual formalities included insistence that we wait for coffee, and as Hart did not care to risk making an enemy, we complied. These people assured us that all the _igarapés_ were so swollen from the recent rains that it would be impossible to get to Melville’s at this season. Not far beyond we came to a stream which Hart had easily forded the week before. I drove my horse in, expecting the water to come at most to his belly, when the animal suddenly dropped and took to swimming, with the water about my waist. There was no way of getting our pack-animal across without ruining everything. We returned to the Brazilian hut, and while I took such measures as my soaking and that of the saddle-gear demanded, Hart stripped, tied his clothes around his head with a strap under his chin to hold them, and swam the _igarapé_ to an Indian hovel where he arranged for a canoe and two paddlers. These dropped down the stream to us, and having hobbled the horses and put the saddles astride a pole always provided for such purposes under the eaves of rural Brazilian huts, we and the Indians lugged our baggage to the canoe and finally set out in pitch darkness to paddle up the river to what Hart called the “padre’s house.”

Like the one in which I had entered the colony, the canoe was a leaky old dugout with rotting boards nailed along the sunken gunwale, through which water gushed almost in streams. I had to hug the two bags on the seat beside me and at the same time bail water incessantly, while the Indian boys shoveled water at the bow and Hart made a poor job of steering in the stern, because it was impossible to tell the shadows from the tops of the trees under water near the bank, which we were compelled to follow closely in order to make any progress against the swift current. Even there and with the utmost effort we made barely a mile an hour, and every loss of a stroke for any reason left us so much farther down stream. The Takutú was about four times as deep as when I had last left it, and was now a real river. Several times I was nearly knocked off, bags and all, by unexpected branches of trees; then suddenly I discovered that the boat was filling faster than I could bail it out, the water quickly reaching my ankles and then my calves. It wouldn’t matter so much to Hart, who had brought only a few tramping necessities, but it was only a question of a very short time before all my South American possessions, including even my money in the valise, would be at the bottom of the Takutú, while I struggled ashore in my heavy brogans with only my hat and my reputation. I shouted to the Indians, who looked around and saw the water which they, being high in the bow, had not felt, and by sheer luck they managed in the darkness to tear a way through tree-tops and bushes to a spot on the bank with bare land enough to hold our baggage. Here we found that a snag had kicked a large hole in the stern of the rotten old craft and that water was pouring in as from a faucet. This repaired as best we could, we bailed out the boat and pushed on. For what seemed hours we fought against the current and bailed incessantly before a faint light far away in the night announced that we were approaching the mission. We could not seem to bring the light nearer, but finally managed to land in the mouth of a tributary, and, tearing through the jungle and stumbling over stony ground in the black night, lugging our baggage, we at last ended at nine o’clock the “easy four hours’ ride” from Hart’s ranch by entering the mission of an English Jesuit, Father Ignatius Cary-Elwess.

It was a big, two-story, thatched building on the bank of the upper Takutú, just across from Brazil. Indian men and boys, chiefly in loin-cloths, though some wore a shirt and some the remnants of trousers, swarmed about the place with perfect freedom, as the “padre” seemed to have an easy-going way that had weakened his control over them. He was a small, wiry man of middle age, dressed in an old soutane, quite English, yet also quite Jesuit, which made a curious combination. Eleven years before he had come out entirely alone and lived in their huts with the Indians, under exactly the same conditions as they, until he had learned the Macuxy tongue—at least as well as the average Englishman ever learns a foreign language. He knew no Portuguese, and the naked Indian youths spoke an amusing mixture of English and Macuxy, the former chiefly represented by “Fader, yes,” with which all statements began, usually continuing in the native tongue. The priest was “one of the boys” in the stories he told, but he often drifted away into dreams. After nearly four years in Latin-America it seemed strange to hear the English names of things I had only known in Spanish, Portuguese, or Quichua,—“bush” for _sertão_, “Savannah” for _pampa_ or _campo_, “’gator” for _jacaré_. It was sixty-three days since the padre had last heard a word of the world’s news, and the long time which elapsed before our generous supper was ready we spent in bringing him up to date, getting out of our soaked garments, oiling our revolvers, and swinging our hammocks.

When I rose in the early morning a cold wind was blowing across the open country. About the mission building was a cluster of huts for the converts, and many cattle were grazing nearby—for the good padre did not neglect the practical things of life. He was already saying mass before an outdoor altar set in the side of a mud house, assisted in his formalities by otherwise naked Indian acolytes in red robes. A creek near the mission, which one could generally step across, was so swollen that we had to borrow a canoe, and the top branches of high trees just peered out of the water. We soon came to another—whereupon Hart decided that we were sure to lose the horses if we tried to continue the trip with them. The only animal which can endure travel under such conditions is man, and we concluded to resort to the only means of locomotion left us. When we returned to the mission, the padre, who had been a famous athlete in his younger days, left off a cricket game he was playing in his flowing soutane with the Indian boys, and went with me to find us Indian carriers. His rule was too lenient, however, and the day drifted on without anyone offering to go. He would not order anyone to do so, as most of the Indians had come for some Catholic celebration and the padre felt that they could not be spared. “Anyway,” he mused, “by far the best carriers are the women—women”—his eyes fell suddenly on Hart, conspicuously masculine in his splendid frame and perfect condition—“we—er—well, I’ll send for the chief and see if he can’t get you two _men_”—the accent on the last word was probably unconscious.

It was afternoon before a father and his son were finally prevailed upon to make the one-day journey to the next village, and at two we were off across country. The man, about thirty-five in years, but already old for his race, was as ill-fitted for his task as the average white man of sixty, and was constantly being favored by his son of eighteen, in the prime of life. We were soon stripping to wade a stream neck-deep, clothes, revolver, kodak, and other odds and ends on our heads, and had barely dressed again when we came to a swamp of such extent that we swung our shoes over our shoulders for the rest of the day. It was stony here and there, but more often swampy, with bogs in which we sank to the knees and several streams waist or chest deep; but the water was lukewarm and the going almost pleasant, though we envied the Indians their natural leather soles. That evening we reached an Indian hut made entirely of palm-leaves, and swung our hammocks from poles with the family. Our carriers chattered long in the native tongue with our otherwise taciturn hosts, using the word “fader” in nearly every sentence. We made our own tea and ate our own _farinha_ and rather green bananas, to which the Indians added a square foot or more of mandioca bread, here called “cassava.” Gnats made life miserable for me, but Hart and the Indians took turns snoring all night, while the wife of our host stood or squatted in a far corner of the hut, stirring the fagot fire every half hour or so, darkness evidently being a cause for fear, and gently punching her fat husband every time his snoring grew uproarious. Not only the men and children, but cur dogs and fowls slept in the comfortable hammocks; but either it is immoral, by their tribal laws, for a woman to lie down while there is a stranger in the house, or it is the admirable custom for the woman to sit up all night and keep her lord’s fire burning. Yet there is a vast difference in the comfort of life between these tropical Indians and those of the Andes, a difference due mainly to one thing,—the hammock. Their floors may be as hard and as filthy, even as cold at times, but swinging above it in a soft, native-woven hammock is like living in another sphere. The hammock is the most important thing in the life of the Indian of this region, as, indeed, of all residents. He is conceived in a hammock, born in a hammock; a hammock is his chair, sofa, and place of siesta, it is his bridal bed and his death bed, and usually it is his shroud, for it is the custom to bury him in the hammock in which he dies. If he travels in light marching order, the Indian may leave everything else behind, except his loin-cloth, but he carries his hammock.

Rain fell heavily most of the night, and we did not once put on our shoes during the next day. Our feet were under water certainly half the time. Barely had we started when we had to wade a deep, muddy creek, followed by a long swamp; and similar experiences continued in swift succession. The vast savannah was dotted with scrub trees, but there was no sign of life except occasional birds. The Kanuku Mountains, everywhere heavily wooded and blue with the mist and rain that always hangs about them, drew slowly nearer on our left. This region might be dubbed the “Land of Uncertainty,” for one never knew what might be waiting a mile ahead, whether we would have to come all the way back, after struggling through most of the trip, because of some impassable obstacle. Particularly the Suwara-auru, a branch of the Takutú which foams down from the Kanuku range, was likely to prove such a barrier.

We were already soaking wet, so that we paid little attention to the roaring rain that soon began to fall, though I still strove to keep my kodak from being ruined. Even the shoes on our backs were as wet as if we had worn them. Our baggage, on the Indians’ backs, was covered with old pieces of canvas, but the rain poured down in cataracts upon it and promised to soak everything it contained. To make things worse, the Indians could not keep up with us. The aged thirty-five-year-old man was in sad straits, and we were in constant dread of his falling down in some mud-hole. At down-pouring noon we reached the base of the range of hills and began to skirt it, the storm making a tumultuous yet musical sound on the dense forest. In dry weather, no doubt, it would be screaming with parrakeets, though it is said always to be raining in the Kanukus. Deep in the woods we stopped among mammoth trees at the bank of a creek to assuage our gnawing hunger. It was pouring incessantly, yet the older Indian got a fire started, roofed by green banana-like leaves, and into this we thrust slabs of sun-dried beef spitted on sticks. We made tea, also, and each ate his rationed half-pint of _farinha_, which would soon swell to a quart. All this time we had not a suggestion of shelter and the water ran down us in streams throughout the meal, washing our fingers as rapidly as we soiled them. Yet somehow we felt in unexpectedly good spirits. Hart rolled three cigarettes, handed two of them to the Indians, and we were off again. The forest grew ever denser, and the rain became an absolute torrent. Only in crossing the Malay Peninsula years before had I bowed my back to such volumes of water, water which, as the ground grew a bit hilly, rushed down the narrow ruts worn by former travelers so swiftly as almost to sweep us off our feet.

With every step forward I grew more uneasy. We were drawing near the notorious Suwara-auru, situated where the forest that spills down a spur of the mountains is thickest and the rainfall is said to be the heaviest in all British Guiana, and which, according to Hart, “the devil himself often could not pass.” It may be knee-deep in the dry season, and a week later fill up the whole gorge or valley with a rushing current half a mile wide—a gorge still densely forested, too, for there are trees everywhere, except in the bit of space occupied by the creek in the dry season, and horses have been killed by the force with which the current hurls them against the trunks. Of course man himself can pass under almost any conditions; but it might well be impossible to get even such baggage as I carried across, and I might have to go clear back to Manaos, or wait for months until the rains subsided.

The gorge promised to be at its worst that day, for most of the streams we had passed were near their high-water mark. Yet the Suwara-auru was not. When we finally came to it I shouted above the storm to ask Hart if this almost placid stream, which barely reached the lower branches of the trees, was the mighty obstacle about which I had been hearing for days. But such is the tenacity of a bad reputation that my companion, never attempting to cross it as we had many others, tore his way upstream with great difficulty, gashing his feet and tearing his clothing in his fight with the jungle, to a half-submerged tree-trunk that offered a possible but precarious crossing. Meanwhile I, skeptic from birth, had thrown off revolver and kodak, waded in—and crossed with the water barely to my armpits! Before Hart could fight his way back I had taken the Indian youth over twice, with all my belongings on his head, though he was so much shorter that the water came to his nostrils and I had to walk close to him on the downstream side to keep him and, what was more important, my possessions from being washed away. Then, with my help, he carried his father’s load across, and the old man managed to cross “empty.” Through it all it kept raining as I had never seen it rain before, except once in the jungles of the Far East. Perhaps the most surprising part of the whole episode was the much greater fear of the elements shown by these children of the wilderness than was our own. The superiority of savages in struggles with nature, as compared with civilized man, is all very well in popular novels, but my own experience has been that in real life the balance tips the other way.

Evidently the sources of the Suwara-auru were so far up in the mountains that it did not respond to the rains as quickly as the other streams; and a day or two later it might have been quite as impassable as it is by reputation.

On the opposite bank was an immense rock with a sheer side up which we could never have pulled the horses, even had we succeeded in getting that far with them. Yet their loss on the trail would not have made Hart any poorer, for when he returned one had died of snake-bite and the other had injured itself so badly that it had to be killed. We coaxed the worn and frightened Indians under their packs again and pushed on in the drenching roar. For an hour or more we plunged on through dense forest; then, as the nose of the mountain we were flanking receded, the rain decreased and at length subsided almost to a drizzle, though the rest of the day was bathed in successive showers. Having flanked the range, our trail now turned more to the east and came out on swampy scrub savannah again. All day it had been barely a foot wide, and so seldom was it traveled, even by animals, perhaps not in months by a human being, as to be almost invisible, except where it was deep enough to be filled with water. But that was not the worst of it. Lack of travel had let the long, sharp prairie-grass grow out over the path from both sides so as almost to cover it, and the saw- and razor-edges of this cut and gashed my bare feet until the tops of them were a mosquito-net of bleeding scratches.

We expected to get a welcome and a plentiful meal that evening in “George’s Village,” a small settlement since the oldest foreign resident could remember, of which “George” was the Indian chief. Life itself depended on the food and supplies we were to get there. Our feelings may easily be imagined, therefore, when we came in sight of the village and found it only half a dozen patches of charred timbers and broken pots, even the heavy red-wood uprights that would not burn having been cut down. It turned out that “George” had recently died, though news is so sluggish in this region that few knew it. In much of tropical South America it is the custom, upon the death of a chief, to burn down his house, or even the whole village, after burying him in and under the hammock in which he has died, and then to abandon the locality to escape the “evil spirit” that has killed him. For no Indian of these regions ever dies a natural death. He is always killed by some supernatural spirit. “Did the spirit hurt him much?” the civilized man will ask the Indian informant. “Why, he broke every bone in his body,” the Indian will answer—no doubt because of the limpness of the corpse.

Miles farther on, across another thigh-wearying swamp, we sighted a cluster of huts, and our spirits rose, only to fall again, for these, too, had been abandoned, though not burned. There were half a dozen of them, including two large ones of oval shape made entirely of thatch palm, except the rounded ends, which had been plastered with mud. I arrived with a tooth-rattling chill, but our Indians had faded away behind us and we had no dry clothing. I stripped naked and rubbed down with my wet garments, that being at least preferable to standing in them in the penetrating chill of evening. We forced the door of the largest hut, which was no great task, and found it a single room large enough for fifty men, but chiefly full of emptiness. The only things left were some cracked water-gourds and a few woven palm-leaf fire-fans, scattered over a broad expanse of hard, uneven earth floor. When the carriers at last arrived, we built a fagot fire inside, swung our hammocks, and made tea of swamp- and rain-water with which to wash down our dry _farinha_, wondering the while what we would live on ahead. The old man was shivering with fever, and we feared he would not last much longer, even if both did not refuse to go any farther. They swung their hammocks side by side at some distance from ours and built another fire between them, which the youth kept going all night. Whenever they had occasion to go outside they went only in close company, like children afraid of the dark. The hut had no windows, and both doors were closed against insects, night air, and evil spirits. Yet the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I used my _mosquitero_ for the first time since buying it in Manaos. Also the tiny _mucuim_, or “red bug,” crawled up from the floor and bit our legs fiercely.

The moment I saw the darkness begin to gray through the many lapses in the grass wall I tumbled out and aroused the others. Hart and I had tea and dry _farinha_, but the carriers only the latter, for they did not “know” tea and preferred to breakfast on mandioca meal alone. Our great difficulty now was to get them not to abandon us. They had agreed to carry our stuff only to “George’s Village,” and now insisted on returning. They were at the outskirts of the Macuxy tribe, and to go farther was to run the risk that their enemies, the Wapushanas, would “blow on them”—not in the Bowery sense, but in correct English—and thereby cast a spell over or an evil spirit into them which would cause them to die soon after they reached home. It is likely that the superstition comes from the former custom of using blow-guns with poisoned arrows. The Wapushanas take up all the southern end of British Guiana and once fiercely warred against the neighboring tribes; and though they rarely resort to violence now, the younger generation, being meek and unwarlike, thanks largely to the man we were trying to reach, the ancient enmities remain and members of one tribe rarely enter the territory of the other for fear of being “blown on.” We had the one weapon of refusing to pay them anything if they left us in the lurch, which was not a particularly powerful one. Luckily, the youth had made one trip to Manaos and had not only learned enough Portuguese so that I could talk to him, but had dulled the edge of his superstitions, which eventually brought him on our side against his father. But all this would have been inadequate without the most powerful aid of all, the white man’s will-power, which, when brought into conflict with that of the aborigines, will almost always win out, if one has patience. For will-power, whether over fear or in argument, is rarely strong among savages.

Having lost two hours in discussion, therefore, our caravan got under way again, Hart and I, knowing a long and hungry day was before us, setting a sharp pace. Swamps began again at once, and more than half the day’s walk was under water, from ankle- to chest-deep. In time this weighed so heavily on the thighs and the small of the back that they ached severely. The razor-like prairie-grass was almost incessant, even under water, and a tiny twig, thorny and sharp as a keyhole saw, hung everywhere across the faint path. In consequence, the tops of my feet were virtually flayed and every step was more painful than the last. Yet we could not have worn our shoes, for that would have been to lift some twenty pounds of water with every step. Rain began again almost as soon as we started, and kept up all the morning. The worry about my baggage was constant, for in it was nearly all I possessed, including twenty pounds in gold, and the will-power by which we had forced the Indians to continue might lose its strength, once they were out of our sight. Yet they could or would not keep up with us. If we waited for them, they grew slower and slower; if we took our own pace, we were soon out of sight of them, and I at least expected them to drop the stuff in the trail and flee from the “blowing” Wapushanas. Yet as between having to sleep out here on the flooded savannahs without food and losing a few paltry possessions, there was only one choice. So after several delays on a day when delay might be serious, until we caught another glimpse of two specks crawling along across the vast, scrub-wooded plains behind, as hard to see as an animal of protective coloring, we strode unhesitatingly on. By and by we came to some of the undulations of the Kanukus, hard and stony ridges that were torture to our feet, yet these were now so swollen that it would have been worse torture to put on our shoes. Down in a rocky hollow called the “Point of the Mountains” we managed to build a fire of wet wood, but waited in vain for our Indians. When we felt sure for the tenth time that they had abandoned us, they came snailing over the rise behind us and dropped down as if utterly exhausted. We divided with them the handful of _farinha_ left, and took a long time to coax them to their feet again. Swamps disagreeably alternated with stony patches. A hill in the blue distance was still three miles short of our goal. The sun came out for the first time in three days and quickly added sunburn and stiffness to our other troubles. The country was faintly rolling in places, and on the tops of slight ridges between lake-like swamps we glanced back, but though our carriers had disappeared from the landscape, we dared not halt. Hart assured me they would not abandon the stuff, and that if they did, it would sit safely on the trail, even in the unlikely event of anyone else traveling this route at this season, until other Indians were sent for it; but I had not so high a faith in human virtue.

In mid-afternoon we sighted the Rupununi, a branch of the Essequibo River that is the chief outlet to the coast; but Melville lived ten miles upstream, and the trail was almost completely lost on these deeply flooded savannahs. This greatly increased the chances of losing our baggage, for the carriers, being in enemy territory where they had never ventured before, could only guess at the road, while their fear of being “blown on” would be greatly increased by our absence. We struggled on through swamps and rocky spurs of hills, straining our thighs and backs against water made doubly burdensome in many places by bogs and mud. I seemed to be lifting a ton with every step, yet we were forced to make wide detours. Several times I reached what I thought was the point of exhaustion, yet kept on by force of will, that determination which Indians and other primitive peoples lack in comparison with the white man, because it is allied to reason. Toward sunset we came upon the first footprints we had seen in two days, during which the only signs of life had been the birds and a scattered herd of half-wild cattle. A line of trees ahead showed the edge of the Rupununi, which we could not pass, even in a boat, if we arrived there after dark. Just at dusk we reached an Indian hut on the bank, and even before we asked for it a woman brought us a bowl of _farinha_ wet with cold water, which we gulped down like starved savages. This quickly put new kick into our legs. But there was no boat on this side of the river, now miles wide and covering a large forest. An Indian youth climbed to the top of a tree and hallooed a peculiar musical call and the most pleasant sound I had heard in a long time was a faint answering hail. I fired my revolver to suggest the presence of white men, and by and by, after we had several times given up hope, there grew out of the night the peculiar thump-thump of paddles against a boat, common to all Amazonia, and then the voices of the paddlers fighting against the forest. At last there crept out of the flooded tree-tops a large canoe manned by four Indians, with a negro boy of West Indian speech in the stern. His was the first native English I had heard in the colony. We had crossed the divide between the Brazilian and the Guianese river systems.

The paddlers were a long hour fighting the trees and recrossing the swift river, born barely thirty miles above in the high forest and rising and falling many feet in a single day; but we were finally welcomed by Commissioner Melville in the best house I had seen since leaving Manaos, and I dropped into my first “Berbice chair,” joyfully stretching my weary legs out on the long folding arms of it. Two-story houses are rare sights in these parts, but here was one with good hardwood floors and all reasonable conveniences, of open bungalow build and covered with “shacks”—that is, un-tapered singles split with a “cutlass,” or machete—the servant quarters, kitchen, dining- and store-rooms below, and a real white-man’s home above. We were loaned dry clothing and given a mammoth supper, which left me highly contented with life, even though all I had left in South America was a soaked revolver and kodak and thirty pounds in five-pound bank-notes in an oilcloth pouch about my neck. I painted my feet with iodine, but could not wash them, though they were grimy and black as those of any Indian who had never known shoes. Then we swung our hammocks in the “guest-house,” a bungalow on stilts a few yards from the main building, and were heard no more until late the next morning.

All that day I hobbled about barefoot, as was every person in the region. To my astonishment and delight our Indians walked in toward noon with our baggage, though most of it was dripping, and even my indispensable kodak-tank, made of flimsy materials evidently stuck together with flour paste, after the hasty American manner, had fallen apart and warped out of shape. The bank-notes about my neck had been soaked, too, and had run with color until they were all but illegible. I spread them out in the sun to dry with the rest of my belongings, much more pleased to have water-soaked possessions than none at all. To the Indians I gave a gold sovereign, an exceedingly high reward for the region, where the white settlers pay native carriers three or four shillings for such a trip; but my generosity did them little good, for Melville’s half-Indian son took the coin, to which the Indians seemed to attach little value, and gave them each five yards of cotton cloth for it. The unadvised traveler cannot know until he gets there that what he should have brought to interior British Guiana is not money but goods.

Melville was an Englishman born in Jamaica, of good family and well educated. Some thirty years before, in his early manhood, he had come to British Guiana, soon striking out for the then unknown savannah. Here he had lived for fifteen years without a single civilized neighbor, often unable for a year at a time to hold communication with the coast. He spoke the native tongue so well that he was now an authority on it, even among the Indians, with whom he ranked as the “Big Chief.” No white woman had ever yet been in this region, nor, until recently, anyone with authority to perform marriages, so that the exiled Englishman could only seek companionship among the Indians. Of the several mothers of his children, none had ever spoken English, but the children themselves had been sent to school not only in Georgetown, but in England. John, the oldest, was a well-built man in the early twenties, as much Indian as Briton in manners and features, speaking his fluent English with a West Indian or Eurasian twist. All except this young man and a little girl of three were away at school. John gave the impression of being an improvement on the native stock, but his father, who was in a position to know, said it was his experience that there is no essential difference between an Indian and a half-Indian. Melville unconsciously had come to treat his women much as the Indians treat theirs, with a sort of servant-like indifference. The latest one he always referred to as “my cook,” and even then not unnecessarily, leaving her in her place below stairs, never unkind to her, yet never treating her as an equal.

Melville was a remarkable and rare example of a white man who has spent most of his life alone in the tropics without letting himself go to seed. Not only that, but he had made his isolation an opportunity to improve himself, until his mind was as keen, his will as firm, and his interests as wide as the best of his race living in civilization—with an added something of New World initiative which the average Englishman does not develop at home. With a large library on all subjects, considerably traveled in Europe and the United States, and apparently gifted with a remarkable memory, he had a veritable fund of sound, thorough, and ever-ready information about all parts of the earth and all the activities of mankind, and was practiced in everything from photography to astronomy, from medicine to British law. His isolation seemed to have rid him of the common trait of superficiality, and as soon as he found interest in, or reason to know, anything, he went at once to the bottom of it and did not stop until he had every detail at his tongue’s end. He spoke Portuguese as well as Wapushana, and was plainly a man equally at home barefooted among Indians or silk-hatted in London. Naturally, having lived nearly all his life among inferiors, Indians, negroes, and his own half-breed children, he had grown assertive, but his information was so wide, exact, and fluent that his dogmatism was rarely oppressive.

A generation before, he had found the Indians of the interior all “blow-gun men,” every man and boy carrying a long reed tube, a quiver of arrows, and the lower jaw of the fish known as _pirainha_. The arrows were made of the midrib of the large leaf of the _carúa_ palm, were pointed by drawing them between the razor-like teeth of the fish-jaw, made poisonous with _urali_, and notched in such a way that the point broke off in the victim and the arrow itself could be repointed and used again. _Urali_, obtained from a tree up in the Kanuku hills, acts on the nerves governing respiration and kills simply by halting the lung action, without poisoning the flesh of the victim. If respiration can be kept up artificially until the poison has run its course, death does not result. It is rarely fatal to salt-eating white men, and can be cured by rubbing salt on the wound at once. Melville had tried some of the arrow-points as phonograph needles and found them excellent, eliminating all harshness and giving the illusion of distance. Gradually he had broken the Indians of the blow-gun custom, so that now only a few old Indians know how to prepare the poison. He had long been accepted as the chief of all the tribes of the region, who have become so meek under this single-handed British rule that they now obey even a negro. Either Melville or his Scotch assistant and deputy had only to drop in at a village, call some Indian aside, and talk to him a few moments in a confidential tone to have him accepted as chief by all the rest, who thereafter took through him all orders from the government by way of Melville.

The Macuxys and Wapushanas (or “Wapusianas”) are, according to this authority, roughly of the Carib and the Arawak families respectively, with different linguistic roots, the former being cannibals up to a generation or two ago. The two tribes have always been enemies, with little in common, and habitually regard each other with aversion. The Wapushanas, in particular, are fatalists of passive demeanor. As an example our host mentioned the case of an Indian who had recently walked in upon another, lolling in his hammock, and announced in a conversational tone, “I have come to kill you.” “Very well,” said the other, throwing the two sides of the hammock over his face and allowing himself to be killed without making the slightest resistance. The religion of the Indians Melville had found entirely negative. They believe the Good Spirit will never do anything but good, hence give all their attention to placating the evil spirits, swarming everywhere, even in various pools of the rivers, which boats must therefore avoid. They call the rainy season the “Boia-assú,” or “Big Snake,” because the constellation we know as the Scorpion and they as the “large serpent” is then in the ascendancy.

When he planned to leave the region to return to civilization some years before, the government had induced Melville to remain, by certain concessions, including his appointment as commissioner for all the Rupununi district, so that now he was virtually the whole British Empire in the very sparsely inhabited southern half of the colony, being deputy chief of police, deputy customs inspector, deputy judge trying all cases in the back end of the country, and deputy almost anything one could name. A most earnest and efficient government officer he was, too, one of the few who rule well in the wilds without constant supervision and overseeing. He was the only man, also, who owned land in the far interior, another concession wrung from the unwilling government. The latter prefers that the territory remain crown land, so that the College of Keisers or Court of Policy, mainly made up of dark-complexioned natives, cannot interfere with it. His homelike dwellings overlooked what would be broad acres again as soon as the immense lake covering all the surrounding region subsided, with a golf links and half the sweep of the horizon beautified by blue range behind range of hills, the nearest peak four miles away, the others isolated mounds and hillocks scattered across the bushy but splendid grazing plains to far-off Mt. Roraima, highest in the colony. When we arrived the houses were on an island in a vast lake extending in all directions, with here and there the tops of trees appearing above it and the huts of most of the Indians inundated. Next morning more than half the lake had disappeared, and the river, which had been completely lost in the inundation, so that thirty hours before a boat could travel miles beyond it on either side, now showed ten feet of sheer bank. Nowhere have I ever seen water rise and subside with such rapidity.

We were still in the Land of Uncertainty. Melville expected any day a cargo-boat he had sent down to Georgetown months before, bringing him orders to go down a few days later; but though it might arrive to-morrow, it might also not be here in a month. It would have been a great advantage to continue my journey in a covered, well stocked government boat, with the greatest authority in southern British Guiana. When several days had passed without any news of the expected craft, however, I decided to push on alone, and Melville loaned me the only boat available—a fairly large but very ancient, worm-eaten dugout, with the usual submerged gunwales protected by boards nailed along the sides, through which water seeped constantly. With this he let me have a tarpaulin to cover the baggage by day and serve as a tent by night, a lantern, and necessary eating utensils, all of which, with the boat, I was to leave at the mouth of the Rupununi for his men to bring back with them. In his combined capacity as the government of the southern end of the colony, the commissioner required me to fulfill all legal formalities, writing out a detailed account of my arrival in the colony and an explanation of why I carried a revolver and how many cartridges I had. The onus for this I put on the Brazilians, rather than imply that they might be needed in so modelly governed a country as British Guiana, and formally asked permission to “carry them through the colony.” In reply, the one-man government examined my belongings, gave me an official letter saying I had reported to the constituted authorities, had been found harmless and in proper form, and need not be waylaid and examined by officials along the way, issued me a license to carry a revolver, gave me an unofficial sealed letter to the governor, which no doubt contained private opinions as to the reasons for my existence, and finally, inasmuch as I was “going down to town” anyway, intrusted to me several letters on official business, so that I was raised to the dignity of being “On His Majesty’s Service.”

All this took time, and even then I could not go without supplies, but must wait until they rounded up and killed a steer, sixty pounds of which was cut into large slices and packed in a drygoods box, with salt between, while every living carnivorous creature in the vicinity gorged himself on the rest of the carcass. A half-bushel basket of _farinha_, a can of matches, and two novels completed my outfit. All this was piled on saplings laid across the bottom in the center of the boat and covered with the tarpaulin. Our two Indians had not the slightest desire in the world to be transformed from carriers into paddlers, but preferred to go directly home as fast as their now restored legs could carry them. But a judicious mixture of moral suasion and enlarging upon the danger of being “blown on” if they traveled alone finally caused them to agree to go as far as the Protestant mission on the Yupucari, which was really nearer their own and from which Hart would return with them.

Several days after our arrival, therefore, we were off down a much swollen and hence swift river that carried us, without seeing them, over what most of the year were rapids with laborious portages and waterfalls, that were now only ripples and small whirlpools through which we raced at express speed. Hart and I, and a negro boy loaned us as guide through the first nine miles of rapids, sat in the stern, and our metamorphosed carriers steadily plied their paddles in the bow. There was a strip of forest along the bank, but sometimes only the tips of the trees were visible above the flooded savannah. At ten o’clock we stopped to cook beef and to exchange the negro boy, who was to walk home, for “Solomon,” an Indian chief and henchman of Melville’s, and the first aboriginal South American I ever met who spoke any considerable amount of English. We dropped him a few miles farther down, past what in the dry season would have been half a day of portaging. Travel and commerce in this region, I reflected, are about what they were in all the world before the age of money; it was not only like going back to nature, but back to the Stone Age. There was a good breeze, though not enough to drive off the clouds of _puims_ or _jejenes_, here simply called “gnats,” which seemed a weak term for those almost invisible pests with a bite that leaves a torturing red itch for a week afterward. Some name with a wide blue border would have been more appropriate.

We skirted close to the densely wooded Kanuku Mountains, now and then glimpsing a small monkey and a few birds, but otherwise finding nothing except insects and primeval solitude. About four o’clock we began to look for a place to land, cook supper, and camp, but this was by no means so easy as it sounds. The banks consisted of unbroken forest with little more than the tops of the trees above water and with no signs of land, the swift current making a halt doubly difficult. We did, however, finally drag ourselves up to a bit of elevated ground, where the jungle was so thick there was barely room for all of us to stand, to say nothing of lying down. Moreover, it seemed a pity to lose the swift, rapid-defying current that might be gone by morning, so after building a fire of green wood with great difficulty and roasting a few slabs of beef, we decided to travel until an hour or two after dark. We probably never will again. The plan would have been all right had there been landing-places; but surrounded on both sides by an absolutely unbroken forest-jungle without a foot of land above water, except far back among the flooded tree-tops where we could not penetrate, we soon found ourselves in a precarious situation. The stars were out, but there was no moon and a suggestion of mist, so that the darkness seemed a solid wall on either side of us. Only with the greatest difficulty could we see the river ahead or tell the shadows from the trees, and we were constantly on the point of smashing full-tilt into some snag or submerged tree-trunk that might easily have sunk the boat and all it contained, leaving us floundering in the trackless forest-sea.

Toward midnight we decided we must get a bit of rest somehow, and in the black darkness, increased by gathering storm clouds, we shot for the bank and grasped wildly at the endless, impenetrable forest-jungle as the river tore us past it at boat-smashing speed. The stupidity and fear of our Indians made the task doubly difficult. Several times we clutched at the slashing branches and tried to drag ourselves far enough into the flooded forest to get out of the current, for there was no hope of getting land under our feet; but each time we had to give up and tear on down the river, to risk all our possessions, if not life itself, by trying again. It was like attempting to catch an express train on the fly. In one such effort we smashed into a great tangle of immense branches through which the water tore and dragged us until we were certain the boat would be knocked to pieces, or at least that some refugee snake would drop upon us. Somehow we got through this, only to strike instantly a whirlpool that sent us spinning into the tops of several more trees out in what seemed to be the middle of the stream.

Then, unexpectedly, we struck a sluggish corner and were half an hour dragging ourselves in among the bushes. Once fire-ants drove us out, swiftly. Finally we tied up to a branch, from others of which I managed to hang our hammocks while Hart steered the craft in and out among the tops of the submerged trees. His own hung over the boat, but mine was far out from it, with no one knew how many fathoms of water beneath me and splendid chances of falling out among _pirainhas_, if not alligators. Should the water recede during the night, we might be left a hundred feet or more aloft.

The old Indian threw himself down on the cargo; the young one squatted out the night in the boat, bailing it occasionally. All night long an awful roaring came from off in the forest, a sound with which there is none to compare, though an enormous engine blowing off steam in short blasts, or an immense multitude of insane people screaming at some little distance might faintly suggest it. It came from howling monkeys, black apes about half the size of a man, according to Hart, who insisted that there was only one of them, though it sounded like at least a hundred in angry chorus. Everything portended an all-night downpour to add to our pleasures, but this did not come until the first peep of gray, just as we had gotten our hammocks down and stowed away under the tarpaulin. Then a roaring deluge, cold as ice-water, drenched us in an instant; but we could only sit and paddle and take it hour after hour. There was room for one of us under the tarpaulin, but that would have been selfish to the other. The rain beat so hard on the surface of the water that thousands of little fountains sprang upward under the impact. As it showed no signs of let-up, we decided we must build a fire and get something hot down our throats before we froze or shook ourselves to death. We grasped a piece of overhanging bank, which luckily did not pull loose and drop us into the racing stream, and dragged ourselves ashore. There was barely standing-room for the four of us, huddled and streaming in the pouring rain, the teeth of all chattering audibly. It was then that Hart and I broached the bottle of Dutch rum from Curaçao. It would have given us exquisite pleasure to have let a prohibitionist stand there without his share until he was convinced that “demon rum” sometimes has its uses. The fiery stuff may not have saved our lives, but it came very near it. He who has never tried in a raging downpour to light a fire of wood soaked through and through on ground an inch deep with water, himself running like a sieve and shaking until he can scarcely hold a match, has no notion of the high value of profanity. We fought tooth and nail for almost two hours before we finally got some hot tea, and more or less roasted four slabs of beef. The Indians had very little strength, and though it took most of my time to bail out the river- and rain-water, the rest of it I paddled hard in an effort to restore my warmth.

All things have an end, however, and at last the sun came out and, broken by a couple of showers that drenched us again, stayed with us the rest of the day. In mid-afternoon we sighted the first human beings, a group of Indians with file-pointed teeth and wearing more or less clothes, who stood in the edge of the jungle beside two small deer they had shot with ancient muskets, and which they were now skinning and preparing to roast or smoke over a fire on the ground. We tried to buy one of the chunks of venison, of some ten pounds each, that lay about them, but we had no money except gold and paper. Any coin would do; in fact, the chief Indian asked “one coin”; but he was a wise old trader of some experience with civilization, and refused even my pocket-mirror. As a last resort we offered him two boxes of matches, a very high price; but he had evidently once been in Brazil and had set his heart on a milreis. We had none, nor any coin that resembled one, so we tossed the meat back at them and went on. Though we wore socks against the insects, shoes would have been a burden in the ever possible necessity of swimming for our lives, and our feet were constantly in water. We were now past the Kanuku Range, and one side of the river broke into savannah, though it was bushy along shore, while on the other side stretched the unbroken forest wall. Along this little monkeys dropped from high trees to the branches of others much lower with a crash that set them swiftly to vibrating. Big noisy toucans now and then flew past in gorgeous couples, their tails streaming. We heard the howling monkeys again, but by day their uproar was nothing like so weird and terrifying as it had sounded high up in the flooded tree-tops of the boundless forest the night before.

The best time anyone had ever made from Melville’s to the Church of England Mission at Yupukari, even in high water, was four days. It was a most agreeable surprise, therefore, when long before sunset on this second day Hart suddenly recognized some landmark and swung us into a little back-water in which we soon tied up at a landing in the silent woods. Here, taking a Sunday afternoon stroll along a trail cut through the jungle, we met Parson White and his wife, the first Caucasian woman I had seen since leaving Manaos, followed by their baby and a Hindu nurse. The parson, being the upholder of civilization in wild regions, had not succumbed to bare feet, but wore stout shoes and golf stockings, with “shorts,” or knickerbockers, above them. His knees were bare in defiance of the swarms of gnats, perhaps as a sort of penance, but in spite of this and our unexpected appearance, he greeted us like an Englishman and a parson. He was a very effective man, his methods being quite the opposite of those of his Jesuit fellow-missionary. He believed in keeping a curb-bit on the Indians, never allowing them to come into his house and ruling them with military sternness. When I told him that I needed three Indians to go on with me as soon as possible, he did not go out and ask if there were any who wished to go, but answered, “Of course; you shall have them to-morrow morning.”

We swung our hammocks under a new thatched roof over a split-palm floor on stilts. The Church of England Mission to the Macuxy Indians, into whose territory we had come again, was built on high ground some little distance from the Rupununi, though mosquitoes and gnats were still so troublesome as to force us to put up our nets. Well built and clean Indian huts stood at a respectful distance from the parson’s bungalow, where there was an air of business efficiency. The mission had many cattle, and numbers of Indians worked for it, though they were also given a certain amount of instruction. In British Guiana the predominating church has some of the faults of unrestrained Catholicism in the other lands of South America, the bishop, for instance, owning personally large numbers of cattle; but having no confessional or oath of celibacy to spring leaks in weak vessels, the result is mild commercialism rather than widespread social corruption. The parson did not believe in teaching the Indians English, but in learning their mother tongue, perfecting it as much as possible, reducing it to writing, and using it as the medium of instruction. He had found its grammar excellent, with many things shorter and sharper than in English; but it was impossible to teach them arithmetic because of their awkward counting system. For “six” they said “a hand and one over on the other hand,” and larger numbers were whole sentences. A few Indian children he had found remarkably bright. He said that the tribe scarcely knew what it is to steal, but that those members who had come in contact with negroes in the “balata” camps quickly became expert thieves. Their greatest fault was irresponsibility. Show a man or woman how to do a thing every day for a month, then impress it upon them that it must be done that way daily, and at the end of three days it would be found that they had ceased to do it, had succumbed to atavism and sunk quickly back into the ways of their ancestors.

Two youths in the Indian prime of life and a boy of sixteen who looked about twelve, but who spoke English and was to act as my interpreter as well as steersman, were ready at dawn. The parson’s orders to them were concise. “You will take this gentleman down to the “balata” camps as rapidly as possible, and bring the boat back here,” he commanded, and the Indians showed no tendency to argue the matter. Out of their hearing he told me to pay them for six days,—two down and four back—and that five shillings each for the trip, either in money or goods, would be a fair wage. Hart was to walk back home—much nearer from here than from Melville’s—with our other Indians, carrying various things that had come up the river for him. Intrusted with the parson’s big tin letter-box, well padlocked, for the bishop in Georgetown—so seldom does anyone “go down to town” at this season—I became doubly His Majesty’s Royal Mail Train.

It began to rain the instant we set off, but this time I could crawl under the edge of the tarpaulin, though huddled and cramped as I had not been since I hoboed under the hinged platform over Pullman steps. The Indians, of course, got wet, but having stripped to their red breech-clouts as soon as they were out of sight of the mission, this seemed to trouble them little. Notwithstanding their rounded stomachs, full to capacity of that miserable hunger antidote made of the mandioca, they showed some energy. It is a fallacy, however, that wilderness people are necessarily robust because they lead simple lives. They are patient and enduring, but exposure and alternate stuffing and fasting are not conducive to robust health. Sunshine and showers alternated throughout the day. Here and there were patches of savannah, but most of the time we were surrounded by endless forest walls and utter solitude. When I felt it must be near noon, I gave orders to land at the next opportunity and start a fire. We were doing so when I heard curious mutterings and stealthy movements among the Indians and to my question “Vincent” replied in a low voice, “Black men.” The story of the “Ocean Shark” still fresh in memory, I at once buckled on my revolver and took the direction indicated, only to find a group of negroes of the West Indian type, who rose to their feet as I approached and addressed me as “sir.” They were part of the crew of Melville’s long expected boat, which had left Georgetown three weeks before, and they were waiting for the black policeman in charge, who had gone up an estuary with twelve paddlers to arrest a native. We boiled some beef, which my boys ate with dry _farinha_, refusing beef-broth, and pushed on.

During the day we thoroughly boxed the compass, running to every point of it with the winding river. It was broader and more placid down here, though still swift and reaching to the tops of many good-sized trees. Hour after hour the steady, rhythmic thump of the paddles against the boat continued with the glinting lift of the gleaming blades as the two boys in the bow shoveled water behind them. Their idea of good paddling appeared to be to throw as much water into the air with each stroke as possible, and this sort of “grandstand play” and the constant monotonous scrape of the paddles on the edge of the boat seemed much wasted effort. Yet we bowled along much faster than the swift current. I paddled considerably myself, but though I was visibly much stronger than the Indian youths, and gave much more powerful strokes, I could not hold their pace. They were remarkably constant in keeping it up, going faster and faster until the bowman gave a signal by throwing water higher than usual, whereupon they started anew with a deeper and more measured stroke, which in a few minutes became fast and forceless again. They did very little talking, though they were natural and unembarrassed enough. “Soldiering,” such as letting go the paddle to feel of a toe or caress a scratch, never brought protest from the others, as it would under like circumstances from civilized workmen. Clothing was still largely ornamental and a fad with them, and their wrecks of shirts and trousers were more often discarded than worn, except in the case of “Vincent,” with whom they seemed to be a sign of his higher social standing. But under the useless garments forced upon them by the missionaries each wore a bright-red loin-cloth always kept carefully in place by a stout white cord about the waist. Like most savages, though they were indifferent to the lack of other clothes, they were far more careful not to show complete nakedness than are most civilized men.

I had planned to camp at dark, but to my surprise the Indians preferred to go on, saying that the mosquitoes and gnats were too thick to make sleep possible. Near sunset, therefore, we stopped to cook, and were off again at dark. The deadly stillness of night at times was not broken even by the faintest sound from the floating boat, but only by the occasional howling of some animal, evidently a “tiger,” off somewhere in the jungle. It was too cold to sleep; besides, my back ached with much sitting and there was not room to stretch out. Hour after hour the boys went on, sometimes paddling, sometimes floating and talking. Then the clear sky grew overcast, distant lightning flashed, and the rain began again. I crawled under cover, though too cramped to sleep. It must have been at least midnight when I heard the Indians snatching at bushes while it still rained, and peered out to find them on land looking for a place to sling my tarpaulin. They got it up after a fashion in the dense darkness and constant drizzle, though with barely room under it for my hammock and net. Then they swung their own hammocks outside and dug good clothes and blankets from their bags; but though they had made their own hammocks, insect pests did not seem to trouble them enough to induce them to make themselves nets.

I was aroused by the bashful, girl-of-twelve voice of “Vincent,” whose English was probably similar to the soft language the Indians use to one another in their own tongue, in which there never seems to be a harsh word, telling me that it would soon be daylight. We bailed out the boat and reloaded it, all in wet weeds, sore feet, and constant drizzle, and were off in the phantom of false morning. The soft, velvety tropical dawn came quickly, as if fleeing before the mammoth red ball that pursued it up over the horizon. Pairs and trios of parrots flew by in the fresh morning, chattering cheerily to one another. Chirruping black birds with long queenly tails were the most conspicuous of many little singing birds; a big white or gray, ponderously moving bird, like a heron, was the largest of many species. Trees and bushes of innumerable kinds were interwoven into solid walls along either bank, “monkey ropes” galore swinging down the face of it, but they were peopled with none of the playful creatures of our school geographies. I gave the boys a big dinner, which was unwise, for feast or famine is their natural way of life and, like hunting dogs, they were of little use when gorged. The river was lower and had turned far more sluggish for lack of fall, and our speed depended mainly on paddling. I ached from head to foot from sitting cramped for four days, particularly from the “jiggers” that had burrowed into my bare feet on the tramp to Melville’s, a tiny insect which lays its eggs under the skin and especially under the edges of the nails, where they begin to swell and produce acute pain until they are cut open and squeezed out. No one had any notion where we were or whether we would get anywhere that day; but it was evident that we could not make the mouth of the Rupununi, and at dusk we pitched camp in a site cleared by other travelers in the edge of the sloping woods, where the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I took refuge under my net while supper was cooking.

Monotonously the wide river, now placid and mirror-like, with very little current, slipped slowly along into the vista of endless forest walls. The sun poured down like molten iron. In mid-morning we passed the only boat we had thus far met on the trip, carrying an Indian family, the woman steering, two full-grown girls with no visible clothes, and several men paddling, a cur dog gazing over the gunwale. They, too, tossed water high in the air with every stroke. I alternated between paddling, bailing the boat, soaking salt meat for the meal ahead, reading, writing, and sitting stooped forward or leaning back to ease the cramp of my position. At least one did not need to go hungry on such a trip, as does frequently the traveler on foot through the wild places of the earth. Not half an hour below where we stopped to cook dinner beneath a majestic tree in the cathedral woods we passed the first human habitation I had sighted from the river since leaving Melville’s, though I had expected to see scores. It was an Indian hut, or rather shelter, for it had no walls; and close beyond were two or three more, one of two stories, though consisting merely of thatched roofs on poles. The women were naked as the men, except for bead bracelets and anklets, and sometimes an old skirt, though more often they had only a beaded apron a foot or more square in lieu of the fig-leaf. Little girls wore the same ornaments, including a smaller apron, as they began to approach puberty. Formerly all the native women confined themselves to this costume, but the advent of missionaries and ranchers, with their “civilizing” influence and the payment of everything in cloth, has begun to breed an unnatural prudery.

It was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon when the Chinese wall of forest was broken, or rather spotted, by a large, rough wooden building with a sheet-iron roof, a cluster of smaller ones about it. This was “The Stores,” headquarters of three rival “balata” companies, and the only place, except Boa Vista, on the journey from Manaos where goods are professionally for sale or buildings are made of imported material. We halted at the third and last among many canoes and “perlite” negroes, just before the Rupununi flows into the Essequibo.

The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter, was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation. I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it, the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks, perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness. I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his own individuality.

Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who gather a cheap rubber similar to the _caucho_ of Brazil. “Balata” boats had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over, as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks; and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host.

Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off” year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before.

We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move, and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again. We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong, good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English, which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later, lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris” wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs. Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men, but she knew only an academic reason for doing so.

Our errand was not allowed to interfere with household duties, so while “Harris” lolled in his hammock and the rest of us squatted on stumps and stones in the shade of his roof, the woman peeled the mandioca-roots, washed them, grated them on a native implement, and ran the mash into the open end of a snake-like _matapi_, or press made of woven flat fibers. This she hung by the upper loop from a beam-end and attached a weight to the lower end, thus squeezing out a yellowish juice that is deadly poison. This is carefully guarded from children and dogs, but, being volatile, is easily eliminated by boiling. The residue is then dried, sifted through basket sieves, and finally baked into cassava bread, the most horrible imitation of food extant, great pancake-like sheets of which were even then spread about the thatch roofs. Though similar in origin, cassava is far more trying to the civilized stomach than the bran-like _farinha_ of Brazil.

Negotiations were opened again in due season. I agreed to the princely price of ten dollars, food down and back for the whole party, even including the wife, and promised of my own free will a premium of a dollar for each day gained over the usual time for the trip. But here we struck another snag. The only paddlers available were the three I had brought with me; and they absolutely refused to go. They insisted that the Reverend White had told them to come straight back from “The Stores,” and that he was a man to be obeyed. I knew it; yet I was not going to be held a prisoner in the jungle for months to suit the convenience of three Indians, even with a parson thrown in. I put it to them strongly. If they would go down to Potaro mouth with me, I would pay them good wages and give them good food for both the down and the up trip and write a letter of explanation for them to carry back to the missionary. If they did not go, they could sit here twirling their thumbs without food, for I would not let them have the dugout until I was done with it. They had a gun and bows and arrows with them, and no doubt other Indians would not let them starve and might even lend them a boat; yet I felt that if I made my bluff strong enough, the pressure of the white man’s will would win in the end, barring some untoward incident. So I assured “Harris” that I could get plenty of paddlers, if these wished to starve, assuming great indifference, though fearing all the time that I might not be able to coerce them, and told him that it would save me paying what I owed them, though of course I should have given them what I had agreed upon with the parson. Leaving that bug in their ears, we finally ended our long and leisurely diplomatic conference, “Harris” agreeing to come down to “The Stores” next morning with his neighbor’s new boat, his own wife, and one man, while I was to furnish four paddlers, including Langrey, to provide all supplies, and to advance him five dollars upon his arrival.

All the way back I let the paddlers stew in their own thoughts, purposely saying nothing and reading a novel, as if my mind were at peace. Like all children, whether of the wilderness or merely in age, coaxing, I felt sure, would be far less effective with them than moral pressure. Time, patience, and, above all, propinquity would eventually cause their primitive wills to yield to mine. As we passed one of the huts along the bank, they shouted a conversation in Macuxy at those about it, perhaps getting some promise that a boat would be sent for them. Ignoring this and their former vociferous refusal, however, I called “Vincent” aside when we landed and said, in the tone one might use to a pouting child, “You talk it over with the other boys, and when you have made up your minds, come and tell me and I will get you food to cook.” As they had not eaten at all that day and were, if my own appetite was any gauge, half-starved, I depended on hunger as my most important ally.

The Scotch-Irish native, who addressed his negroes as “Mister,” and was chary of running foul of the official “Protector of the Indians,” as well as having the Englishman’s fear, several times multiplied, of the unprecedented, could not for a long time be talked over. Finally he agreed mildly to lend his aid, and sitting down on his doorstep, like a justice holding court, he called the three boys before him and addressed them in laborious pidgin-English. “Now can’t leave gentleman here, you see. Me going supply provisions. You paddle he down ...” and so on; after all of which they mumbled and went back to the bank of the river. But my most powerful ally eventually got in its work, and about sunset, having meanwhile visibly wept, they came to me and said they had decided to go—whereupon I gave them a meal that left “Vincent’s” little paunch protruding like a chicken’s crop. Then they came again, in a far more cheerful mood, and wanted a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a belt respectively, whether to gloat over them or merely to see the color of my coin I do not know. These things I gave them on account from the storehouse, and they were soon beaming and gay as happy children.

But I was not yet done. The law required a certified bowman and more paddlers. “Had you not been recommended to me by Melville, I could not let you go on without a permit from the Protector of the Indians,”—who never stirs out of Georgetown—added my charming host, much impressed with himself as an officer of the law, like all wooden-headed authorities. We debated another hour or more before he agreed, with the air of doing my whole nation an extraordinary favor, to consider me one of the paddlers and my best boy an experienced bowman. Then, out of the kindness of his heart, he permitted me to buy from his store—at prices I found later to be between five and six times those of Georgetown—the rations required by law,—seven days’ supplies for seven people, or forty-nine rations, each of which must include a pound of flour, half a pound of rice, two ounces of pork, ditto of beef, twice that of fish, two ounces of sugar, and so on through about twenty items, not to mention milk and cocoa and many other extras for “the captain, Harris” and myself. The fact that the manager himself gets twenty per cent. on all sales from the store may or may not have made him so insistent on full compliance with the law. When the list was completed he handed me a bill for $22.71, and then growled because I paid him with a five-pound note, instead of in gold.

When I fancied everything settled at last, Langrey came to me with tears struggling over his eyelids and said, “So sorry, sir. I was so _interested_ in this trip. But I can’t go.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because, sir, I have not the passage money from Potaro mouth down to Georgetown.”

“How much will that be?”

“$2.08, second-class, sir.”

“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have earned that much?”

“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.”

“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you to that extent to get back home?”

“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into his more habitual speech.

This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars.

These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store. Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were 48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices, because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This is a very large member of the _sapote_ family, the bark of which the “bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough, yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata” concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia.

Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170. Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years, he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the “bullet-tree.”

In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot, many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own, saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on, each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load, though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were considerably increased.

My host maintained his reputation to the very moment of our departure. The company having abandoned Langrey half-sick from injuries sustained in their employ, and I having agreed to take him all the way home, one would have supposed that a slight parting kindness would not have bankrupted the corporation. As we were on the point of leaving, I said, “By the way, that man of yours we are taking down with us has no paddle, unless you can lend him one.”

“He’s no mon of ours!” hastily and half-angrily answered the provincial Scotch-Irishman. “If I lind a paddle, it will be to you personally, and I will hold you responsible for getting it back to me!”

Thereupon he got a miserable old cracked and mended paddle about the size of a lath and tossed it out to us. I promised to send it back by special messenger.

So at last, on June 18, we were off at eleven in the morning. My three now tanned and tamed paddlers were in front, the rather useless Langrey and “Harris’” paddle-less wife and her parrot on the seat back of the tarpaulin-covered baggage and supplies, while I was cramped in between them and the certified “captain-and-pilot” squatting on the stern. It seemed foolish to take pictures or keep notes of the trip, so slight were the chances of ever getting them back to civilization. I took the laces out of my heavy shoes, however, so that I could kick them off and at least have a fighting chance to save my own hide.

In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle.

We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to “communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed couples.

We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris” and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was “more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was “most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right, sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to hear.

Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word “negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese.

A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad, and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a “scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it, putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must always call _me_ when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault, that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of the Brazilian mulatto or _cabra_ and the Englishness of these Guianese negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction.

Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town, though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who had never set foot in the wilds. Our _farinha_ had run out, more’s the pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling; and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law.

Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a “scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots, as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height, some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming, mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation, in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life.

Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river.

We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract, sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a _falls_!” The emphasis on the last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran, constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so, for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine; for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless, foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness, with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent.

“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which “Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and, having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him. The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there, though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead.

“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in, an’ get in de boat an’ gone.”

The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore, always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving “fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians” has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour, and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of which Langrey chanted as we approached them:

It’s go’n’ drownded me, An’ ah ain’ come back no mo’, EE-tah-nah-meeee!

For hours we fought this greatest rapids of them all, struggling through the woods by roaring branches, over rocks, fallen trees, sudden falls, and a hundred dangers, the men in the water clinging to the boat, when we were not “dropping her down” backward from tree to bush, with the woman and our baggage in it. All of us were soaked and weary when we finally camped at five o’clock, but “Harris” said we not only had passed the worst part of the river, but had made the longest journey over it in one day that he had ever known. In the morning I found that an army of wood-eating ants had attacked my wooden-framed Brazilian valise, and I had to take out and brush every article I possessed, to the expressionless delight of the Indians, who, of course, had been dying to know what I had in it. As these ants eat even clothing, extreme vigilance was the only possible way of saving what I had spent much trouble, time, and money to bring from Manaos, so that several times thereafter I had to spread out and repack everything. Truly, the Indian who travels with a loin-cloth, a hammock, and a bow and arrows is best accoutered for these wilds. The itching of old insect bites was augmented now by what I at first took to be boils, but which turned out to be tropical ulcers, to which most white men fighting the Amazonian jungle are subject. Then the jiggers I had gathered on the walk to Melville’s ripened daily, especially with the feet constantly wet, and though I frequently cut new nests of them open and squeezed out the eggs, my feet ached—“like dey was poundin’ you wid hammers on de haid, yes, sir,” as Langrey concisely put it—especially at night, robbing me of sleep.

Though I had thought they were over, we had troubles again next day from the start, and this time came almost to disaster. The men were letting the boat down over a rapids, “Harris” and Langrey holding it and my three worthless Indians clinging to the chain painter. At the crisis of the falls the boys were told to let go the chain and leave the rest to the pilot and the negro, as quick work was necessary. Instead, finding the water deep, they clung to the chain in fear and let the rushing water pour into the boat in such volume that only by using my stentorian voice to its capacity did I save it from sinking in another five seconds. As it was, the baggage was filled with water, but my own was luckily in a water-proof bag. Do not talk to me of “brave untamed savages.” Those Indian boys, though big, strong fellows, were the most unmitigated cowards, like horses in their senseless fear, compared with any three average American boys of the same age, who would have considered such a trip a lark.

To my astonishment, there came signs of the end sooner than I expected. During the still early afternoon of the fourth day, at the last bad rock-and-boulder falls, below two convenient portages through the woods, we met a big new “tent-boat,” belonging to one of the “balata” companies, on its way upstream. There was an Indian crew of twelve, under an Indian captain, all commanded by several pompous negroes sitting comfortably under canvas awnings, dressed in ostentatious town clothes which looked unduly ludicrous here in the untamed wilderness. The Indians and several blacks, all but naked, were in the water and on the rocks, struggling to drag the boat upstream, the most burly negro under the awning shouting, as we sped past, to a young black evidently new at this game, “Keep yō nose above de watah, mahn; den yō ain’ go’n’ drownded!” I congratulated myself that I was traveling down rather than upstream. Scarcely an hour later, a brilliant sun giving the broad, placid river the appearance of a vast mirror, we sighted the “balata” camps at the mouth of the Potaro, and my troubles dropped suddenly from me like cast-off garments. Two days more, by launch, train, and steamer, would carry me to Georgetown, with a record, rarely equalled, of thirty-four days from Manaos, which I could perhaps have cut considerably shorter by not having halted with Hart or Melville.

Though they had been rather sluggish the last few days, the sight of the end caused my three boys to paddle so hard that they splashed water into the boat and had to be rebuked for their enthusiasm. As we drew near the sheet-iron buildings at the mouth of the black branch river, stretching away between the familiar bluish, unbroken forest walls, I lived over again the pleasure it had been to get back to nature, and beneath my joy at returning to civilization and entering new scenes was an undercurrent of regret at leaving the primitive world of gentle, guileless savages behind me—tempered, to be sure, by curiosity to know what the other world had been doing during the long month in which I had not heard a hint of news from it.

Of the forty-nine rations, we had eaten twelve, the Indians generally preferring their own food. When I settled up with them, I found that even in their own tongue they used not only the words “dollar” and “cent,” but our numbers, no doubt to save themselves from their own complicated “one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand” system. “Vincent,” interpreting my remarks to the other boys, used such expressions as “t’ree dollar fifty-seven centes,” which, sounding forth suddenly amid a deluge of Indian discourse, were almost startling. The words seemed to have little more than an academic meaning to them, however; such sums as two shirts and a pair of trousers would have been much more comprehensible. The Indians do not want money, but the government thinks it knows what is best for them, and the law forbids their being paid in anything else—though there are easy ways to circumvent it. The trip from Manaos had cost me about eighty dollars; it might have come to vastly more both in time and money.

Several days’ travel up the Potaro are the Kaieteur Falls, four hundred feet wide and eight hundred and twenty feet high, loftiest for their width in the world—unless a neighboring cataract recently discovered by Father Cary-Elwess proves greater. The sight of these, thundering along in the heart of the unknown wilderness, is said by the few who have viewed them to be impressive in a way that civilized and harnessed Niagara can never be again. But it would almost have doubled my time in British Guiana to go and see the Potaro take its famous plunge; and the ever-increasing call of home was urging me to hurry on. The launch that came down the branch next morning from some gold mines owned by Chinamen was a filthy old craft under a negro captain; yet anything that runs daily seemed beautiful in this region. I took Langrey with me; but “Harris,” with the instability of his race, had decided after all not to “go down to town,” dreading the great metropolis, perhaps, as some of our own countrymen do the rush and roar of Broadway. Langrey was useful to cook and bring me lunch from the private stores I had left, for nothing was served on the launch and without my own valet and servant I should have been considered a common person indeed. We plowed the placid, tree-walled Essequibo without a pause until two in the afternoon, coming to Rockstone, a bungalow rest-house on stilts surrounded by tall grass and the forest, where I not only had a real meal again, but slept in a bed for the first time in thirty-three days—and found it hard and uncomfortably high in the middle. I was the star guest at the Rockstone hotel, not merely being the only white man, but because—if so incredible a statement could be believed—I had arrived without ever having been in Georgetown, making me as awesome a curiosity as if I had suddenly crawled out of a hole from China. Rare, indeed, are the travelers who enter the Guianas by the back door.

A little train with a screeching English engine and half a passenger-car rambled away next morning through forest and white-sand jungle, the charred trunks of trees standing above it and several branch lines pushing their way out in quest of the valuable green-heart timber. Within an hour we were at Wismar on the Demerara River, a small stream compared with the great Essequibo, about the width of the Thames and barely two hundred and fifty miles long. I had passed, too, from the mammoth County of Essequibo, forming more than two thirds of British Guiana, to the comparatively tiny one of Demerara, containing the capital and often giving its name to the whole colony, which is completed by the several times larger County of Berbice on the east. The colony was first settled along the three large rivers which drain it, and the counties took their names from them. The _Lady Longden_, a river-steamer that seemed luxurious against the background of wilderness travel behind me, descended a stream yellowish-black in color, like most of the inhabitants. Indian features had almost completely disappeared, though the mixture of races was perhaps greater than in Brazil. Besides the ubiquitous West Indian negroes, with their tin bracelets and their childish prattle, there were many Chinamen and Hindus. Celestials so Anglicized that they could not speak a word of Chinese—though one surely could not praise the English of most of them—mingled on the wharves (here called “stellings”) with East Indians dressed in everything from their original home costumes to the complete European garb of those born in the colony. Chinese women in blue cotton blouse and trousers, exactly as in China, came down to see off sons and daughters dressed like summer strollers along Piccadilly, and who carried under an arm the latest cheap English magazine. It startled me constantly to hear English spoken around me, not only by those I subconsciously expected to speak Portuguese or some other foreign tongue, but by ragged negroes who carried the mind back to Brazil, by East Indians, and by broken-down Chinamen lying about the “stellings.”

For the first time the country was really inhabited, with frequent towns breaking the forest wall and sometimes a constant succession of bungalows, shacks, and churches, all built of wood and having an unmistakable Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As in Brazil, the seacoast of the Guianas holds the overwhelming majority of the population. Every few miles we whistled and slowed up before a village, often half hidden back in the bush, with only a few canoe “garages” on the waterfront, to pick up from, or toss into, a “curial” paddled by blacks, Chinese, or Hindu coolies a passenger or two, a trunk, or a letter. We saw a great many of these Guianese dugouts during the day, the negroes using any old rag as sails to save themselves the labor of paddling upstream, so that some were wafted along by former flour-sacks and others by what had undoubtedly once been trousers. Several times we overtook rafts of green-heart logs lashed to some lighter wood, as green-heart will not float, with whole families living in the improvised boathouses in the center of them. Even before we sighted Georgetown I had undoubtedly seen more human beings in one day than during all the rest of my time in British Guiana.

The river grew ever broader, its immediate shores more swampy and less inhabited, with an intertangle of mangrove roots that showed the mark of the tides. Cocoanut-palms appeared again, for the first time since leaving Pará; then an occasional royal palm and the belching smokestack of a sugar plantation, of which many on this coast have been cultivated continuously for a hundred years, yet which rarely stretch more than ten miles up country. An ocean breeze began to fan us; down the now wide and yellow river appeared a blue patch of open sea. Makeshift tin and wooden shacks commenced to peer forth from the bush, which itself gradually turned to banana patches, and suddenly, about four o’clock, Georgetown burst forth on a low nose of ground at the river’s mouth. Though it seemed to jut out into the sea on a point of jungle shaped like a plowshare, there certainly was little inspiring about the approach to it—a low, flat city, as unlike the towns I had so often come upon in the past three years as the smooth, kempt hills of England are like the picturesque helter-skelter of a half-cleared South American wilderness.

As to a hotel, I had been recommended to the “Ice-House,” which seemed so strikingly appropriate to the climate that it was with genuine grief that I gave it up. But it turned out that it housed negroes also, and one’s caste must be kept up in British Guiana, even though one pay several times as much for the privilege. In the most exclusive hotel a negro servant came to look me over when I applied, and to report on the color of my skin and my general appearance before the white manager came to repeat the inspection while I stood gloating over an armful of mail. Then with an awed whisper of “All right, sir,” the servant led me to a chamber—which, after all the fuss, was not inordinately luxurious—turned on the electric-light and backed away, asking whether “de gentleman” desired hot water.

“_Hot_ water?” I exclaimed, my thoughts on my correspondence.

“Fo’ yo’ shavin’, sah,” replied the model servant.

Verily, I had wholly forgotten many of the common luxuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization.