5
Religious geography is part of the art of living. To come to each new place on the chart called Earth, not in a spirit of mere jollity but with some reverence, gives a richness to life. Whilst some seek gold, others seek spiritual gold, the soul's possession, which is neither sentimental nor unreal but is indeed the one substance out of which in the beginning all things were made.
The apology of a world traveler that he did not see the Pacific before, from the heights of Tehuantepec, from the Golden Gate of San Francisco, from the stone eminence of the new city of Panama—he preferred to see it with Balboa's eyes, climbing a peak out of the jungle and looking also, and in like manner for the first time, in that way to perform a geographical rite in the world temple.
I traveled with Cecilie Lucarez and Victor Morales. One carried my pack and a gun; the other with his long knife slashed the passage clear of jungle growth. It was icy cold and burning hot at the same time, dank and steaming; perspiration soaked even through the leather of one's knee boots, but small cold airs crept out of the profound green shadow on either hand, chilling for moments the very marrow. Underfoot were innumerable water currents and mud and slime, and the giant trees above us dripped water all the while. A grave-like coldness crept about everywhere, and now and then a draught of air would lift my wet shirt and make it flap against the skin. Yet it was burning hot.
The Spaniards plunged across the isthmus in chain mail; I was in my shirt, my guides were without even a shirt. How the Conquistadores did it in complete armor gives a measure of the physical endurance of these men.
The ground is strewn with rotting yellow plums which have fleshy centers and bittersweet taste; monkeys hang from the trees looking at us, parrots innumerable flutter about the open spaces. And when we come to open spaces, how painful the sun! I am dazzled by the gleaming points of my eyelashes, eyes want to get right in, temples throb.
It is easier to cross the isthmus in January or February, the dry season, but Balboa crossed it in the wet. It is his September, and rains every day, as no doubt it did then. Up to the knees in soft mud, up to the waist in water each day, and the feet all swollen and broken by the treatment. The guides, with their bare feet and legs, seemed able to take the floods more easily, and Morales in mid-stream of a rushing torrent, with my knapsack balanced on his head and his gun on top of that, whilst water foamed against his bare breast—is a sight not easily forgotten. Apprehension of a lost knapsack stamped it on the mind.
We rested in a jungle village. I sat on a clay floor with a wild monkey on a string and noisy children and scarcely less noisy parrots. We were regaled with Kola wine and grated coconut and oil and rice and bits of fat pork and some of the ugliest preserves I have ever encountered. It was the time of the rice crop, and rice in the husk was drying in baskets in every little palm-leaf hut. Every hour the women took the rice baskets and shook them to help dry out the grain. Next day an aged Negro with grizzled wool led me on, and we found in the depths of the thicket that which I could not follow from Nombre de Dios—part of the Camino Real, now moss-covered and green, but unmistakable, a massive cobbling of large stones with a lateral, upturned stone along the edge for curb, just room for a panniered ass and no more, but now so overgrown in places that even a monkey could not pass on it. Trees have shot up and split the cobbling, the scrub has met over it, and for many miles it climbs amid the mahogany trees high up into the mountains.
It would be worth while for some one to employ natives and spend a month cutting clear and tracing this great treasure trail all the way from coast to coast. For there must have been resting places and perhaps even taverns upon it, and possibly a chapel half way.
The "Speakities," the colored people of the jungle, all believe in lost treasure and are superstitious regarding the evil spirits which are guarding it. Some have even bits of Spanish gold which have been found. Indeed, true treasure trove is frequent—if the treasure be not great.
We made but slow progress in the jungle. Rainy weather and consequent mud held us. I changed my guides three times. None cared to go far from home. Two nights were spent in the scantiest shelter. Thousands of flaming fireflies lit the floating mists which along the edge of a jungle clearing looked like phantoms living in dark houses. The wraiths were of unstable dimensions, now swelling to a bank of mist, now tailing away to nothingness. But the fireflies lighted their way—myriads of fireflies. I lay in all the clothes I possessed and in my boots and wearing gloves, but still the mosquitoes bit. How combat a foe that you actually take in with your breath!
Tongues of fire among white mists in intense darkness, howling of monkeys, the creaking and wailing and prolonged noise of insects in the trees, mosquitoes as noiseless and attentive as breath, the air not vital, suffocating—of such were the nights. In a hotel you would turn and turn, but something in the jungle constrains you to lie like one dead all the night long, and that something also banishes thought.
There breaks out the throb of a native drum, one only, but you cannot say where it comes from. It is far away, it is close at your ear—it is wandering in the jungle. Who could be beating it, and why? But it is no matter. Your eyes close. You fall into a light slumber and lie dreamlessly—you cannot estimate how long. But suddenly horror breaks upon your soul. You start up; you look around, you fall back in a cold sweat. A roaring as of lions has torn through your consciousness. You think a puma has found you, and then, as suddenly, you laugh and relax. It is a pack of night-howling monkeys, beating their hairy breasts high among the branches and howling like lost souls. A vague thought enters the mind, the lost souls of those who murdered Indians for their gold....
Morning comes and proves that each bad night was but a bad dream, a nightmare and not God's creation. For even over the "white man's grave" it is fresh, with fair rose colors in the sky.
The natives think that I am a gringo surveyor planning a new road, and are quite pleased. They have never heard of Balboa or of Drake, or indeed of any one except Morgan. They think the Camino Real was built about fifty years ago. They know nothing. But I found them extremely dignified and courteous. The women seemed especially modest and discreet, and those stories of the Speakities selling their young girls for a few dollars and of the Indians selling their children are not true except of the people on the coast, those corrupted by traders.
The men and women are not "married," but then there are no priests. Religion is nothing to them, but something of ethics is instinctive. They are said to be poor workers. It is hard to tempt them out of the jungle to do a day's work for pay. They do not want a victrola or a five-foot shelf of books. A few bright cottons for the women and powder for the men is all they ask. Money is scarce. In the depths of the jungle Chinamen keep little stores with a daily turnover of about twenty-five cents. An opened packet is a stock of cigarettes, and they sell them one at a time. They will even sell a half of a cigarette—the only people in the world who would undertake such a trade.
I wondered at the swarm of children of these Chinamen, begotten of their black wives. "What will you do with them when you make your fortune?" I asked one.
"The best boys I take with me to China—the rest I leave behind," he said.
I found that in the native huts I never had to pay for hospitality. It is true, however, that whole families enjoyed my provisions—gloated over tinned milk, drank mug after mug of dense Nombre de Dios coffee, ate chocolate as a wonderful novelty. In return, they would put in the midst of the red mud floor a large pot of rice and pieces of smoked fish and forest berries soaked in brine. They brought down branches of fat, little, cream-colored bananas from the roof. A parrot would lift itself by its beak on to my fingers whilst I ate, and in the same way up my coat to my shoulder, calling and out-calling its mate who was perched on an ox-limbed woman in colored overalls. In such a hut I met Martinez, a man with no arms and only one eye. He had lost his members dynamiting fish. Martinez had hooks tightly corded to the stumps of his wrists, and had learned to do all that most of us can do with hands—thus, he struck a match and lighted a cigarette, he shouldered my knapsack, he lifted down an old gun from the wall, he slung it on his back. Even using hooks for hands he was a good shot with a gun.
Martinez was by temperament a hunter, and was less interested in getting me to the Pacific coast than in following trails of wild beasts. He showed me a treesloth, hanging in the hammock of its own body high up among the branches; showed me a boa coiled like a cable and sleeping like a babe. That did not interest him. But the jaguar and the puma were ever in his thoughts. We came upon the footprints of a tiger, a grande gato, a perfect six spot in the mud. With bent back and staring eye Martinez was for following it—and he gave me his long knife. But I said "No."
"No carey?" he inquired, raising his brows. "No quiere?"
"No, Martinez; grande gato make nice meal you and me. Sabe, Martinez?" I made signs to him, pointing down my throat.
"Ah, you no carey?" he rejoined sadly, and set his face toward the sun. He threaded his way to an isolated hut surrounded by bog, where lived a bachelor acquaintance more ready to follow up the trail of the tiger. There we brewed coffee, and as I sat in the doorway sipping it I saw fly past like a flame the most beautiful bird I had seen in the jungle. The sportsmen missed it, but heavy as I was with clinging mud I started up to follow it. I was tired enough of tramping, wet to the waist, mud to the knees. I had fallen down several times. Armless Martinez had offered to carry me across one or two morasses and torrents and had actually raised me on his shoulders once, but I felt him waver under me and took my two hundred pounds down from his back. I was glad when we came once more upon a stretch of the Camino Real and could actually walk upon it. We stepped steadily upward, and I began to meditate climbing that "goodlie and high tree," for there were many such starting out of the marsh and the scrub and going straight to heaven. But then, suddenly and unexpectedly, coming out on the scarp of a commanding ridge, I saw the ocean. I did not need to climb a tree. From this ridge I also saw the Pacific, for the first time, far away, a blue triangle of water beyond the hills and the forests and the ridges. There was a wide and majestic view, and the great trees of the jungle made a framework on either hand like the extended plumage of an eagle.
To my one-eyed guide it meant nothing, and he could not understand why I paused in the way and called him back. But it was a great moment. A warm current ran through my veins and something seemed to lighten heavy boots. Wings came out from my heels and I stood on tiptoe and stared.
That phrase of Keats "a wild surmise" came very near to naming the feeling of rapture. The eyes of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the eyes of Francis Drake, the eyes of the one of the many! "It was all for this," I whispered.
Martinez restlessly waved his hooks and peered at me one-sidedly. "Grande Oceano," said he reflectively, as we resumed our tramp—and he led me to the sea. It was many hours, but they went easily, and we came out to the shore in the peace of late evening, and there in a little inn we drank blanco seco and toasted Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and Francis Drake, whom certainly the one-eyed man did not know. But I then counted out silver dollars for Martinez and paid him off. And he was pleased.