Across Unknown South America

by Arnold Henry Savage Landor

I drew the attention of my men to the wonderful sight.

"They are stars!" they replied contemptuously; "Have you never seen stars before?"

It was indeed difficult to enter into conversation on any subject with them without having an ardent desire to strangle the lot, they were so ignorantly offensive. I was thankful I had the sense always to go about unarmed, or I am certain some of them would have paid somewhat dearly for their impertinence. I was glad, too, that I never felt the weight of loneliness, as days and days would go by without my saying a word to them, barring perhaps a shout in camp to bring my breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

What was even worse than entering into conversation with them was to listen—one could not help it, they shouted so loudly all the time—to the conversation among themselves. We will not refer to the choice language they used, so inexplicably sacrilegious and indecorous that it would have set on edge the teeth of the coarsest specimens of humanity; but the subject—I say subject in the singular, mark you, for alas! there was only one subject—discussed in all its phases perhaps, but only one single subject—assassination. The accounts of different murders, in some of which the men boasted they had taken part, were nightly repeated in their minutest details to the assembled crowd—myself excluded—sitting around the fire, while the feijão—beans, so loved by them—were being stewed for hours and hours in a cauldron.

There was the story of one murder of which one of the men was particularly proud, in which he reproduced the facial expression as well as the smothered shrieks of the horrified victim. He gave a vivid description of how the blood squirted out like a fountain from the jugular vein of the throat as it was being severed. That story—most graphically narrated, I admit—had taken the fancy of that cruel crowd. Almost every evening, during the entire time those men were with me, many long months, I heard that story repeated amid roars of laughter from the company. Murder—when applied to others—was evidently for them a great joke!

Inconsiderate to a degree, they would get up and sing at the top of their voices in the middle of the night and keep everybody awake while the feijão was stewing. It took hours and hours before those awful black beans had boiled sufficiently to be edible, and the man who acted as cook had to sit up the whole night to stir them up and watch them. Yes, the position of cook for the camp was not an enviable one, for it meant marching all day and sitting up all night to prepare the feijão for the following day. Yet the love they had for their feijão—I never ate the beastly stuff myself—was so great that those lazy devils, who could not be induced on any account to do other work, did not mind at all having sleepless nights to watch over the stewing cauldron. With the feijão were placed in the pot large pieces of toucinho (lard). We carried quantities of feijão, for without feijão you cannot induce a Brazilian to do anything or go anywhere. Of the two he would rather sacrifice his life than lose his daily feijão.

It requires great ability, I believe, to cook feijão properly. I noticed that all my men in a body were ever superintending its preparation. When the cook in the early hours of the morning happened to let the fire go down, or in his drowsiness was not stirring it properly, there were angry shouts from the other men, who, every time they opened one eye in their sleep, invariably gazed towards the beloved cooking-pot.

We came to a second range parallel with the one described before and extending from north-east to south-west. Again a vertical natural wall was noticeable to the east. This range was subdivided into many sections, almost all of the same size and shape. The end section to the north-east—which made an exception—was about three and a half times the length of any of the others. I observed some deep vertical vents such as are frequently to be seen in the sections of volcanoes that have partly been blown up. These vents were particularly numerous in the north-easterly block, where broad corrugations and some narrow ones—ten in all—were also to be seen.

Two alternatives could explain the present configuration of that region. There had been either a great volcanic explosion or else a sudden subsidence. Personally I was inclined to favour the first hypothesis. I shall explain why. First because the great fissures between the various huge blocks and the grooves carved in those rocks would then at once explain themselves—caused naturally by the violent shock. They had apparently been enlarged in the course of time by erosion of water and wind, and possibly by the friction of the débris of the masses of rock settling down when the stratum was severed. The quantity of débris of shattered rock minutely broken into cubes and other angular forms would suggest that some great shock had occurred. Then the usual yellow pellets of polished lava, either globular or pear-shaped, or like an elongated oval ending in a point and well rounded at the other end, would also indicate that these missiles had been flying great distances through the air in a molten state before they had actually dropped. In fact, the flight was so long as absolutely to cool and solidify them before they fell—unless they had fallen in cold water—for they had retained their original form, instead of getting flattened at the heavier end, as could be expected had the lava reached the ground in a half-soft state. Large blocks of lava—which naturally took a longer time to cool and a shorter time to reach the earth after their flight through the atmosphere—had, in fact, become flattened on the lower side where they struck the ground. Others of a composite globular form had invariably been flattened into a slight curve on the side where they had come in contact with the soil.

Ovoid rocks as large as a loaf of bread and composed of compressed cinders were to be seen about, which, when easily split open, showed a band of slightly ferruginous matter, very brittle, in a crystallized condition. In the centre of these rocks were invariably found beautiful crystals of great limpidity, easily separated from one another by a slight pressure of the fingers.