“Have you ever seen one of those heads? The Indians bone ’em, and stuff ’em with spice and gums, and let ’em dry in the sun. They don’t look nice. I’ve seen one or two.
“But I tried to persuade him to let the head go. The Government has stopped that business, you know. Got a bit too thick. If you ordered a head, the Johnnies would just go out and have somebody’s napper.
“I missed old Davis after that. I was transferred to Manaos, up river. I don’t know what became of him. It was nearly a year when I came back to Para. Our people had had the clearing of that boat old Davis brought out, and I found some of his papers, still unsettled. I asked about him, in a general way, and found he hadn’t arrived. His tug had been back twice. When it was here last it seemed the native skipper explained Davis went ashore, when returning, at a place where they touched for rubber. He went into the village and didn’t come back. Well, it seems the skipper waited. No Davis. So he tootled his whistle and went on up stream, because the river was falling, and he had some more stations to do in the season. He was at the village again in a few days, though, and Davis wasn’t there then. The tug captain said the village was deserted, and he supposed the old chap had gone down river in another boat. But he’s not back yet. The boss said the fever had got him, somewhere. That’s the way things go here.
“A month ago an American civil engineer touched here, and had to wait for a boat for New York. He’d been right up country surveying for some job or another, Peru way. I went up to his hotel with the fellows to see him one evening. He was on his knees packing his trunks. ‘Say, boys,’ he said, sitting on the floor, ‘I brought a whole lot of truck from way up, and now it hasn’t got a smile for me.’ He offered me his collection of butterflies. Then the Yankee picked up a ball of newspaper off the floor, and began to peel it. ‘This goes home,’ he said. ‘Have you seen anything like that? I bet you haven’t.’ He held out the opened packet in his hand, and there was a brown core to it. ‘I reckon that is thousands of years old,’ said the American.
“It was a little dried head, no bigger than a cricket ball, and about the same colour. Very like an Indian’s too. The features were quite plain, and there was a tiny wart over the left eyebrow. ‘I bet you that’s thousands of years old,’ said the American. ‘I bet you it isn’t two,’ I said.”
We returned to the steamer in the late afternoon, bringing with us two Brazilian pilots, who were to take us as far as Itacoatiara. We sailed next morning for the interior. Para, like all the towns on the Amazon, has but one way out of it. There is a continent behind Para, but you cannot go that way; when you leave the city you must take the river. Para stands by the only entrance to what is now the greatest region of virgin tropics left in the world. Always at anchor off the city’s front are at least a dozen European steamers, most of them flying the red ensign. A famous engineering contractor, also British, is busy constructing modern wharves there; and Thames tugs and mudhoppers, flying the Brazilian flag, as the law insists, but bawling London compliments as they pass your ship, help the native schooners with their rakish lateen sails, blue and scarlet, to make the anchorage brisk and lively. Looking out from the “Capella’s” bridge she appeared to be within a lagoon. The lake was elliptical, and so large it was a world for the eye to range in. It was bound by a low barrier of forest, a barrier distant enough to lose colour, nature, and significance. Para, white and red, lay reflecting the sunset from many facets in the south-west, with a cheerful array of superior towers and spires. From the ship Para looked big, modern, and prosperous; and with those vast rounded clouds of the rains assembling and mounting over the bright city, and brooding there, impassive and dark, but with impending keels lustrous with the burnish of copper and steel, and seeing a rainbow curving down from one cloud over the city’s white front, I, being a new-comer, and with a pardonable feeling of exhilaration which was of my own well-being in a new and a wide and radiant place, thought of man there as a conqueror who had overcome the wilderness, builded him a city, bridled the exuberance of a savage land, and directed the sap and life, born in a rich soil of ardent sun and rain, into the forms useful to him. So I entered the chart-room, and looked with a new interest on the chart of the place. Then I felt less certain of the conqueror and his taming bridle. I saw that this lagoon in which the “Capella” showed large and important was but a point in an immense area of tractless islands and meandering waterways, a region intricate, and, the chart confessed, little known. The coast opposite the city, which I had taken for mainland, was the trivial Ihla des Oncas. The main channel of the river was beyond that island, with the coast of Marajo for the farther shore; and Marajo also was but an island, though as large as Wales. The north channel of the Amazon was beyond again, with more islands, about which the chart confessed less knowledge. One of the pilots was with me; and when I spoke of those points in the ultimate Amazons, the alluring names on maps you read in England, here they were, at Para, just what they are at home, still vague and far, journeys thither to be reckoned by time; a shrug of the shoulders and a look of amusement; two months, Senhor, or perhaps three or four. The idea came slowly; but it dawned, something like the conception of astronomy’s amplitudes, of the remoteness of the beyond of Amazonas, that new world I had just entered.
I crept within the mosquito curtain that night, and the still heated dark lay on my mind, the pressure of an unknown full of dread. I thought of the pale shipping clerk and his tired smile, and of Captain Davis, his face no bigger than a cricket ball, and the same colour, with a wart over his eye; and recalled the anxious canvass I had heard made for news of sickness up-river. A ship had passed outwards that morning, the consul told us, with twenty men on board down with fever.
And Thorwaldsen. I forgot to tell you about Thorwaldsen. He was a trader, and last rainy season he took his vessel up some far backwater, beyond Manaos, with his wife and his little daughter. News had just come from nowhere to Para that his wife had died in childbirth in the wilds, and Thorwaldsen had been murdered; but nothing was known of his daughter. There it was. I did not know the Thorwaldsens. But the trader’s little girl who might then be alone in the gloom of the jungle with savages, helped to keep me awake. And the wife, that fair-haired Swede; she was in the alien wilderness, beyond all gentlehood, when her time came. I could see two mosquitoes doing their best to work backwards through the curtain mesh. They were after me, the emissaries of the unknown, and their pertinacity was astonishing.