Darkness fell, almost with the swiftness of a snuffed candle. For an hour Rosendo had been straining his eyes toward the right bank of the river, and as he gazed his apprehension increased. But, as night closed in, a soft murmur floated down to the cramped, toil-worn travelers, and the old man, with a glad light in his eyes, announced that they were approaching 367 the quebrada of Caracolí. A half hour later, by the weird, flickering light of the candles which Reed and Harris held out on either side, Rosendo turned the canoe into a brawling stream, and ran its nose into the deep alluvial soil. Plunging fearlessly through the fringe of delicate ferns which lined the margin of the creek, he cut a wide swath with his great machete and uncovered a dim trail, which led to a ramshackle, thatch-covered hut a few yards beyond. It was the tumbled vestige of a shelter which Don Nicolás had erected years before while hunting wild pigs through this trackless region. An hour later the little group lay asleep on the damp ground, wrapped in the solitude of the great forest.
The silvery haze of dawn was dimming the stars and deepening into ruddier hues that tinged the fronds of the mighty trees as with streaks of blood when Rosendo, like an implacable Nemesis, prodded his little party into activity. Their first day’s march through the wilderness was to begin, and the old man moved with the nervous, restless energy of a hunted jaguar. The light breakfast of coffee and cold arepa over, he dismissed the bogas, who were to return to Boque with the canoes, and set about arranging the cargo in suitable packs for the cargadores who were to accompany him over the long reaches of jungle that stretched between them and Llano. Two macheteros were sent on ahead of the main party to locate and open a trail. The rest followed an hour later. Before the shimmering, opalescent rays which overspread the eastern sky had begun to turn downward, the little cavalcade, led by Rosendo, had taken the narrow, newly-cut trail and plunged into the shadows of the forest––
“the great, dim, mysterious forest, where uncertainty wavers to an interrogation point.”
CHAPTER 38
The emotion of the jungle is a direct function of human temperament. Where one sees in it naught but a “grim, green sepulcher,” teeming with malignant, destructive forces, inimical to health, to tranquillity, to life, another––perhaps a member of the same party––will find in the wanton extravagance of Nature, her prodigious luxury, her infinite variety of form, of color, and sound, such stimuli to the imagination, and such invitation to further discovery and development, as to constitute a lure as insidious and unescapable as the habit which too often follows the first draft of the opium’s fumes. There are those who profess to have journeyed 368 through vast stretches of South American selva without encountering a wild animal. Others, with sight and hearing keener, and with a sense of observation not dulled by futile lamentations over the absence of the luxuries of civilized travel, will uncover a wealth of experiences which feed the memory throughout their remaining years, and mold an irresistible desire to penetrate again those vast, teeming, baffling solitudes.
It is true, the sterner aspect of the South American jungle affords little invitation to repose or restful contemplation. And the charm which its riotous prodigality exerts is in no sense idyllic. For the jungle falls upon one with the force of a blow. It grips by its massiveness, its awful grandeur. It does not entice admiration, but exacts obeisance by brute force. Its silence is a dull roar. Its rest is continuous motion, incessant activity. The garniture of its trackless wastes is that of great daubs of vivid color, laid thick upon the canvas with the knife––never modulated, never worked into delicate shading with the brush, but attracting by its riot, its audacity, its immensity, its disdain of convention, its utter disregard of the canons cherished by the puny mind that contemplates it. The forest’s appeal is a reflex of its own infinite complexity. The sensations which it arouses within the one who steps from civilization into its very heart are myriad, and often terrible. The instinct of self-preservation is by it suddenly, rudely aroused and kept keenly alive. Its inhospitality is menacing. The roar of its howling monkeys strikes terror to the timid heart. The plaintive calls of its persecuted feathered denizens echo through the mysterious vastnesses like despairing voices from a spirit world. The crashing noises, the strange, weird, unaccountable sounds that hurtle through its dimly lighted corridors blanch the face and cause the hand to steal furtively toward the loosely sheathed weapon. The piercing, frenzied screams which arise with blood-curdling effect through the awful stillness of noonday or the dead of night, turn the startled thought with sickening yearning toward the soft charms of civilization, in which the sense of protection is greater, even if actual security is frequently less.
Because of Nature’s utter disregard of the individual, life is everywhere. And that life is sharply armed and on the defensive. The rising heat-waves hum with insects. The bush swarms with them. Their droning murmur crowds the air. The trunks of trees, the great, pendent leaves of plants, the trailing vines, slimy with dank vegetation, afford footing and housing to countless myriads of them, keenly alert, ferociously resistive. The decaying logs fester with scorpions. 369 The ground is cavernous with the burrows of lizards and crawling forms, with centipedes and fierce formicidae. Death and terror stalk hand in hand. But life trails them. Where one falls, countless others spring up to fill the gap. The rivers and pantanos yield their quota of variegated forms. The flat perania, the dreaded electric eel, infests the warm streams, and inflicts its torture without discrimination upon all who dare invade its domain. Snakes lurk in the fetid swamps and lagoons, the brilliant coral and the deadly mápina. Beneath the forest leaves coils the brown adder, whose sting proves fatal within three days.
To those who see only these aspects of the jungle, a journey such as that undertaken by Rosendo and his intrepid little band would prove a terrifying experience, a constant repetition of nerve-shocks, under which the “centers” must ultimately give way. But to the two Americans, fresh from the mining camps of the West, and attuned to any pitch that Nature might strike in her marvelous symphony, the experience was one to be taken in the same spirit as all else that pertained to their romantic calling. Rosendo and his men accepted the day’s stint of toil and danger with dull stolidity. Carmen threw herself upon her thought, and saw in her shifting environment only the human mind’s interpretation of its mixed concept of good and evil. The insects swarmed around her as around the others. The tantalizing jejenes urged their insidious attacks upon her, as upon the rest. Her hands were dotted with tiny blood-blisters where the ravenous gnats had fed. But she uttered no complaint; nor would she discuss the matter when Harris proffered his sympathy, and showed his own red hands.