After lunch some disappointment and irresolution crept into our holiday....There had been a time—but that was when Para was only in a book; that was when its mere printed name was to me a token of the tropics. You know the place I mean. You can picture it. Paths that go at noon but a little way into the jungle which overshadows an isolated community of strange but kindly folk, paths that end in a twilight stillness; ardent hues, flowers of vanilla, warm rain, a luscious and generative earth, fireflies in the scented dusk of gardens; and mystery—every outlook disappearing in the dark of the unknown.
Well, here I was, placed by the ordinary moves of circumstance in the very place the name of which once had been to me like a chord of that music none hears but oneself. I stood in Para, outside a picture postcard shop. Electric cars were bumping down a narrow street. The glitter of a cheap jeweller’s was next to the stationer’s; and on the other side was a vendor of American and Parisian boots. There have been changes in Para since Bates wrote his idylls of the forest. We two travellers, after ordering some red earthenware chatties, went to find Bates’ village of Nazareth. In 1850 it was a mile from the town. It is part of the town now, and an electric tram took us there, a tram which drove vultures off the line as it bumped along. The heat was a serious burden. The many dogs, which found energy enough to limp out of the way of the car only when at the point of death, were thin and diseased, and most unfortunate to our nice eyes. The Brazilian men of better quality we passed were dressed in black cloth suits, and one mocked the equator with a silk hat and yellow boots. I set down these things as the tram showed them. The evident pride and hauteur, too, of these Latins, was a surprise to one of a stronger race. We stopped at a street corner, and this was Nazareth. Bates’ pleasant hamlet is now the place of Para’s fashionable homes—pleasant still, though the overhead tram cables, and the electric light standards which interrupt the avenues of trees, place you there, now your own turn comes to look for the romance of the tropics, in another century. But the villas are in heliotrope, primrose, azure, and rose, bowered in extravagant arbours of papaws mangoes, bananas, and palms, with shrubberies beneath of feathery mimosas, and cassias with orange and crimson blooms. And my last walk ashore was in Swansea High Street in the winter rain! From Nazareth’s main street the side turnings go down to the forest. For, in spite of its quays, its steamers, and its electric trams, Para is but built in a larger clearing of the wilderness. The jungle stood at the bottom of all suburban streets, a definite city wall. The spontaneity and savage freedom of the plant life in this land of alternate hot sun and warm showers at last blurred and made insignificant to me the men who braved it in silk hats and broadcloth there, and the trams, and the jewellers’ shops, for my experience of vegetation was got on my knees in a London suburb, praying things to come out of the cold mud. Here, I began to suspect, they besieged us, quick and turbulent, an exhaustible army, ready to reconquer the foothold man had hardly won, and to obliterate his works.
We passed through by-ways, where naked brown babies played before the doors. We happened upon the cathedral, and went on to the little dock where native vessels rested on garbage, the tide being out. Vultures pulled at stuff beneath the bilges. The crews, more Indian than anything, and men of better body than the sallow fellows in the town, sprawled on the hot stones of the quays and about the decks. There was a huge negress, arms akimbo, a shapeless monument in black indiarubber draped in cotton print, who talked loudly with a red boneless mouth to two disregarding Indians sitting with their backs to a wall. She had a rabbit’s foot, mounted in silver, hanging between her dugs. The schooners, ranged in an arcade, were rigged for lateen sails, very like Mediterranean craft. The forest was a narrow neutral tinted ribbon far beyond. The sky was blue, the texture of porcelain. The river was yellow. And I was grievously disappointed; yet if you put it to me I cannot say why. There was something missing, and I don’t know what. There was something I could not find; but as it is too intangible a matter for me to describe even now, you may say, if you like, that the fault was with me, and not with Para. We stood in a shady place, and the doctor, looking down at his hand, suddenly struck it. “Let us go,” he said. He showed me the corpse of a mosquito. “Have you ever seen the yellow fever chap?” the Doctor asked. “That is he.” We left.
Near the agent’s office we met an English shipping clerk, and he took us into a drink shop, and sat us at a marble-topped table having gilded iron legs, and called for gin tonics. We began to tell him what we thought of Para. It did not seem much of a place. It was neither here nor there.
He was a pallid fellow with a contemplative smile, and with weary eyes and tired movements. “I know all that,” he said. “It’s a bit of a hole. Still—You’d be surprised. There’s a lot here you don’t see at first. It’s big. All out there—he waved his arm west inclusively—it’s a world with no light yet. You get lost in it. But you’re going up. You’ll see. The other end of the forest is as far from the people in the streets here as London is—it’s farther—and they know no more about it. I was like you when I first came. I gave the place a week, and then reckoned I knew it near enough. Now, I’m—well, I’m half afraid of it ... not afraid of anything I can see ... I don’t know. There’s something dam strange about it. Something you never can find out. It’s something that’s been here since the beginning, and it’s too big and strong for us. It waits its time. I can feel it now. Look at those palm trees, outside. Don’t they look as if they’re waiting? What are they waiting for? You get that feeling here in the afternoon when you can’t get air, and the rain clouds are banking up round the woods, and nothing moves. ‘Lord,’ said a fellow to me when I first came, ‘tell us about Peckham. But for the spicy talk about yellow fever I’d think I was dead and waiting wide awake for the judgment day.’ That’s just the feeling. As if something dark was coming and you couldn’t move. There the forest is, all round us. Nobody knows what’s at the back of it. Men leave Para, going up river. We have a drink in here, and they go up river, and don’t come back.
“Down by the square one day I saw an old boy in white ducks and a sun helmet having a shindy with the sentry at the barracks. The old fellow was kicking up a dust. He was English, and I suppose he thought the sentry would understand him, if he shouted. English and Americans do.
“You have to get into the road here, when you approach the barracks. It’s the custom. The sentry always sends you off the pavement. The old chap was quite red in the face about it. And the things he was saying! Lucky for him the soldier didn’t know what he meant. So I went over, as he was an Englishman, and told him what the sentry wanted. ‘What,’ said the man, ‘walk in the road? Not me. I’d sooner go back.’
“Go back he did, too. I walked with him and we got rather pally. We came in here. We sat at that table in the corner. He said he was Captain Davis, of Barry. Ever heard of him? He said he had brought out a shallow-draught river boat, and he was taking her up the Rio Japura. The way he talked! Do you know the Japura? Well, it’s a deuce of a way from here. But that old captain talked—he talked like a child. He was so obstinate about it. He was going to take that boat up the Japura, and you’d have thought it was above Boulter’s Lock. Then he began to swear about the dagoes.
“The old chap got quite wild again when he thought of that soldier. He was a little man, nothing of him, and his face was screwed up as if he was always annoyed about something. You have to take things as they come, here, and let it go. But this Davis man was an irritable old boy, and most of his talk was about money. He said he was through with the boat running jobs. No more of ’em. It was as bare as boards. Nothing to be made at the game, he said. Over his left eye he had a funny hairy wart, a sort of knob, and whenever he got excited it turned red. I may say he let me pay for all the drinks. I reckon he was pretty close with his money.
“He told me he knew a man in Barry who’d got a fine pub—a little gold-mine. He said there was a stuffed bear at the pub and it brought lots of customers. Seemed to think I must know the place. He said he was going to try to get an alligator for the chap who kept the pub. The alligator could stand on its hind legs at the other side of the door, with an electric bulb in its mouth, like a lemon. That was his fine idea. He reckoned that would bring customers. Then old Davis started to fidget about. I began to think he wanted to tell me something, and I wondered what the deuce it was. I thought it was money. It generally is. At last he told me. He wanted one of those dried Indian heads for that pub. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘The Indians kill somebody, and make his head smaller than a baby’s, and the hair hangs down all round.’