You will have noticed with what simple indifference the people who really know what they call the truth will shatter an illusion we have long cherished; though, as we alone see our private dreams, those honest folk cannot be blamed for poking their feet through fine pictures they did not know were there.
I had a picture of the Amazon, which I had long cherished. I was leaning to-day over the bulwarks of the “Capella,” watching the jungle pass. The Doctor was with me. I thought we were still on the Para River, and was waiting for our vessel to emerge from that stream, as through a narrow gate, dramatically, into the broad sunlight of the greatest river in the world, the king of rivers, the Amazon of my picture. We idly scanned the forest with binoculars, having nothing to do, and saw some herons, and the ciganas, and once a sloth which was hanging to a tree. Para, I felt, was as distant as London. The silence, the immobility of it all, and the pour of the tropic sun, were just beginning to be a little subduing. We had come already to the wilderness. There was, I thought, a very great deal of this forest; and it never varied.
“We shall be on the Amazon soon,” I said hopefully, to the doctor.
“We have been on it for hours,” he replied. And that is how I got there.
But the Amazon is not seen, any more than is the sea, at the first glance. What the eye first gathers, is, naturally (for it is but an eye), nothing like commensurate with your own image of the river. The mind, by suggestive symbols, builds something portentous, a vague and tremendous idea. What I saw was only a very swift and opaque yellow flood, not much broader, it seemed to me, than the Thames at Gravesend, and the monotonous green of the forest. It was all I saw for a considerable time.
I see something different now. It is not easily explained merely as a yellow river, with a verdant elevation on either hand, and over it a blue sky. It would be difficult to find, except by luck, a word which would convey the immensity of the land of the Amazons, something of the aloofness and separation of the points of its extremes, with months and months of adventure between them. What a journey it would be from Ino in Bolivia, on the Rio Madre de Dios, to Conception in Colombia, on the Rio Putumayo; there is another “Odyssey” in a voyage like that. And think of the names of those places and rivers! When I take the map of South America now, and hold it with the estuary of the Amazon as its base, my thoughts are like those might be of a lost ant, crawling in and over the furrows and ridges of an exposed root as he regards all he may of the trunk rising into the whole upper cosmos of a spreading oak. The Amazon then looks to me, properly symbolical, as a monstrous tree, and its tributaries, paranas, furos, and igarapes, as the great boughs, little boughs, and twigs of its ascending and spreading ramifications, so minutely dissecting the continent with its numberless watercourses that the mind sees that dark region as an impenetrable density of green and secret leaves; which, literally, when you go there, is what you will find. You enter the leaves, and vanish. You creep about the region of but one of its branches, under a roof of foliage which stays the midday shine and lets it through to you in the dusk of the interior but as points of distant starlight. Occasionally, as we did upon a day, you see something like Santarem. There is a break and a change in the journey. Moving blindly through the maze of green, there, hanging in the clear day at the end of a bough, is a golden fruit.
“Jan. 10. The torrid morning, tempered by a cooling breeze which followed us up river, was soon overcast. Disappointingly narrow at first, the Amazon broadened later, but not to one’s conception of its magnitude. But the greatness of this stream, I have already learned, dawns upon you in time, and if you sufficiently endure. It persists about you, this forest and this river, like the stark desolation of the sea. The real width of the river is not often seen because of the islands which fringe its banks, many of them of considerable size. The side channels, or paranas-miris, between the islands and the shores, are used in preference to the main stream by the native sailing craft, to avoid the strength of the current. We had the river to ourselves. The ‘Capella’ was taken by the pilots, first over to one side and then to the other, dodging the set of the stream. The forest has changed. It has now a graceless and savage aspect when we are close to it. There are not so many palms. At a little distance the growth appears a mass of spindly oaks and beeches, though with a more vivid and lighter green foliage. But when near it shows itself alien enough, a front of nameless and congested leaves. I suppose it would be more than a hundred feet in altitude. Sometimes the forest stands in the water. At other times a yellow bank shows, a narrow strip under the trees, rarely more than four feet high, and strewn with the bleaching skeletons of trees and entanglements of vine. There is rarely a sign of life. Once this morning a bird called in the woods when we were close. Butterflies are continually crossing the ship, and dragonflies and great wasps and hornets are hawking over us. The sight of one swallowtail butterfly, a big black and yellow fellow, sent the cook insane. The insect stayed its noble flight, poised over our hatch, and then came down to see what we were. It settled on a coil of rope, leisurely pulsing its wings. The cook, at the sight of this bold and bright being, sprang from the galley, and leaped down to the deck with a dish cloth. To our surprise he caught the insect, and explained with eagerness how that the shattered pattern of colours, which more than covered his gross palm, would improve his firescreen in a Rotterdam parlour.
“Early in the forenoon sections of the forest vanished in grey rain squalls, though elsewhere the sun was brilliant. The plane of the dingy yellow flood was variegated with transient areas of bright sulphur and chocolate. We were hugging the right bank, and so saw the mouth of the Xingu as we passed. At midday some hills ahead, the Serra de Almerim, gave us relief from the dead level of the wearying green walls. The sight of those blue heights with their flat tops—they were perhaps no more than 1000 feet above the forest—curiously stimulated the eye and lifted one’s humour, long depressed by the everlasting sameness of the prospect and the heat. Later in the day we passed more of the welcome hills, the Serra de Maranuaqua, Velha Pobre, and Serras de Tapaiunaquara and Paranaquara, their cones, truncated pyramids, knolls and hog backs, ranging contrary to our course. Bates says some of them are bare, or covered only with a short herbage; but all those I examined with a good telescope had forest to the summits; though a few of the inferior heights, which stood behind the island of Jurupari (the island where dreams come at night) were grassy. Those cobalt prominences rose like precipitous islands from a green sea. We were the only spectators. One high range, as we passed, was veiled in a glittering mesh of rain. The river, after we left Jurupari, bent round, and brought the heights astern of us. The sun set.
“The river and the forest are best at sundown. The serene level rays discovered the woods. We saw trees then distinctly, almost as a surprise. Till then the forest had been but a gloom by day. Behind us was the jungle front. It changed from green to gold, a band of light between the river and the darkling sky. Some greater trees emerged majestically. It was the first time that day we had really seen the features of the jungle. It was but a momentary revelation. The clouds were reflectors, throwing amber lights below. In the hills astern of us ravines hitherto unsuspected caught the transitory glory. The dark heights had many polished facets. One range, round-shouldered and wooded, I thought resembled the promontories about Clovelly, and for a few minutes the Amazon had the bright eyes of a friend. On a ridge of those heights I could see the sky through some of its trees. The light quickly gave out, and it was night.