We have been passing it for nearly a week. It should have convinced me by now that it is something material. But why should I suppose it is that? We have had no chance to examine it. It does not look real. It does not remind me of anything I know of vegetation. When you sight your first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye. The mind is not deceived by what merely shows. Wherever the steamer drives the forest recedes, as does the sky at sea; but it never leaves us.
The jungle gains nothing, and loses nothing, at noon. It is only a sombre thought still, as at midnight. It is still, at noon, so obscure and dumb a presence that I suspect the sun does not illuminate it so much as reveal our steamer in its midst. We are revealed instead. The presence sees us advancing into its solitudes, a small, busy, and impudent intruder. But the forest does not greet, and does not resent us. It regards us with the vacancy of large composure, with a lofty watchfulness which has no need to show its mind. I think it knows our fears of its domain. It knows the secret of our fate. It makes no sign. The pallid boles of the trees, the sentinels by the water with the press of verdure behind them, stand, as we pass, like soundless exclamations. So when we go close in shore I find myself listening for a chance whisper, a careless betrayal of the secret. There is not a murmur in the host; though once a white bird flew yauping from a tree, and then it seemed the desolation had been surprised into a cry, a prolonged and melancholy admonition. Following that the silence was deepened, as though an indiscretion were regretted. A sustained and angry protest at our presence would have been natural; but not that infinite line of lofty trees, darkly superior, silently watching us pass.
One night we anchored off the south shore in twenty fathoms, but close under the trees. At daybreak we stood over to the opposite bank. The river here was of great width, the north coast being low and indistinct. These tacks across stream look so purposeless, in a place where there are no men and all the water looks the same. You go over for nothing. But this morning, high above the land ahead, some specks were seen drifting like fragments of burnt paper, the sport of an idle and distant wind. Those drifting dots were urubus, the vultures, generally the first sign that a settlement is near. To come upon a settlement upon the Amazons is like landfall at sea. It brings all on deck. And there, at last, was Itacoatiara or Serpa. From one of the infrequent, low, ferruginous cliffs of this river the jungle had been cleared, and on that short range of modest, undulating heights which displaced the green palisades with soft glowings of rose, cherry, and orange rock, the sight escaped to a disorder of arboured houses, like a disarray of little white cubes; Serpa was, in appearance, half a basketful of white bricks shot into a portico of the forest.
That morning was no inducement to exertion, but when an Indian paddled his canoe alongside our anchored steamer the Doctor and the Purser got into it, and away. The hot earth would be a change from hot iron. Besides, I was eager for my first walk in equatorial woods. Our steamer was anchored below the town, off a small campo, or clearing. The native swashed his canoe into a margin of floating plants, which had rounded leaves and inflated stalks, like buoys. I looked at them, and indeed at the least thing, as keenly as though we were now going to land in the moon. Nothing should escape me; the colour of the mud, the water tepid to my hand, the bronze canoeman in his pair of old cotton pants split just where they should have been scrupulous, and the weeds and grass. I would drain my tropics to the last precious drop. I myself was seeing what I had thought others lucky to have seen. It was like being born into the world as an understanding adult. We got to a steep bank of red clay, fissured by the heat, and as hard as brickwork. Green and brown lizards whisked before us as we broke the quiet. From the top of the bank the anchored steamer looked a little stranger. Aboard her, and she is a busy village. Now she appeared but a mark I did not recognise in that reticent solitude. The Amazon was an immensity of water, a plain of burnished silver, where headlands, islands, and lines of cliff were all cut in one level mass of emerald veined with white. The canoe going downstream appeared to dissolve in candent vapour. Cloudland low down over the forest to the south, a far disorder of violet heights, waiting to fill the sky at sunset and to shock our unimportance then with convulsions of blue flames, did not seem more aloof and inaccessible to me than our immediate surroundings.
The clearing was a small bay in the jungle. A few statuesque silk-cotton trees, buttressed giants, were isolated in its centre. A bunch of dun-coloured cattle with twisted horns stood beneath them, though the trees gave them no shade, for each grey trunk was as bare of branches for sixty feet of its length as a stone column. The wall of the jungle was quite near, and as I stood watching it intently, I could hear but the throb of my own life. The faint sibilation of insects was only as if, in the silence, you heard the sharp rays of the sun impinge on the earth; your finer ear caught that sound when you forgot the ring and beat of your body. It was something below mere silence.
We approached the wall to the west, as a path went through the harsh swamp herbage that way, and entered the jungle. The sun went out almost at once. It was cellar cool under the trees. We had no idea where the path would lead us. That did not matter. No doubt it would be the place desired. The Doctor walked ahead, and I could just see his helmet, the way was so narrow and uncertain. I kept missing the helmet, for everything in the half-lighted solitude was strange. One could not keep an eye on a white hat on one’s first equatorial ramble, and only when the quiet was heavy enough to be a burden did I look up from a puzzling leaf, or some busy ants, to find myself alone. There was a feeling that you were being watched; but there were no eyes, when you glanced round quickly. Do you remember that dream which sometimes came when we were children? There were, I remember, empty corridors prolonging into the shadows of a nameless house where not a sign showed of what was there. We went on, and no words we could think of when we woke could tell what we felt when we looked into those long silent aisles of the house without a name; for we knew something was there; but there was no telling what the thing would be like when it showed. That is your sensation in a first walk in a Brazilian forest.
I stopped at lianas, and curious foliage, trying to trace them to a beginning, but rarely with any success. There were some mantis, which commenced to run on a tree while I was examining its bark. They were like flakes of the bark. For a moment the tree seemed to quiver its hide at my irritating touch. Then the Doctor called, and I pushed along to find him stooping over a land snail, the size of a man’s fist, which rather puzzled him, for it had what he called an operculum; that is, a cap such as a winkle’s, only in this case it was as large as a crown piece. I do not know if it was the operculum, for my knowledge of such things is small; but I did feel this was the only twelfth birthday which had come to me for many years.
Presently we saw light, as you would from the interior of a tunnel. Some beams of sunshine slanted from a break in the roof to where a tree had fallen, making a bridge for us across an igaripe, a stream, that is, large enough to be a way for a canoe. The sundered, buttressed roots of the tree formed a steep climb to begin with, but the buttresses going straight along the trunk as handrails made crossing the bridge an easy matter. Raising my hand to a root which was hot in the sun, and watching a helicon butterfly, a black and yellow fellow, which settled near us, slowly open and shut his wings, I jumped, because it felt as though a lighted match had dropped into my sleeve. But I couldn’t douse it. It burned in ten places at once. It was a first lesson in constant watchfulness in this new world. I had placed my hand in a swarm of inconspicuous fire ants. The dead tree was alive with them, and our passage quickened. We rubbed ourselves hysterically, for the Doctor had got some too; and there was no professional reserve about him that time.
After crossing the igaripe the character of the forest changed. It was now a growth of wild cacao trees. Nothing grew beneath them. The floor was a black paste, littered with dead sticks. The woods were more open, but darker and more dank than before. The sooty limbs of the cacao trees grew low, and filled the view ahead with a perplexity of leafless and tortured boughs. They were hung about with fruit, pendent lamps lit with a pale greenish light. We saw nothing move there but two delicate butterflies, which had transparent wings with opaque crimson spots, such as might have been served Titania herself; yet the gloom and black ooze, and the eerie globes, with their illusion of light hung upon distorted shapes, was more the home of the fabulous sucuruja, the serpent which is forty feet long.