We had plenty of opportunities for exploring Serpa, for the Amazon that rainy season was slow in rising, and consequently it would have been unsafe for us to venture into the Madeira. The tributary would have been full, but it was necessary for the waters of the main stream to dam and heighten the flood of its tributary before we could trust our draught there. We were nine days at Serpa. The Amazon would rise as much as a foot one day, and our distance from the shore would increase perceptibly, with strong whirling eddies which made the trip ashore more difficult. Then it would fall again. Some of the yellow Amazon porpoises showed alongside occasionally, and alligators floated about, though nothing was seen of them but their snouts.
Serpa is a small but growing place. It was but a missionary settlement of Abacaxis Indians from the Madeira in 1759, and was called Itacoatiara. When I was there it was renewing its old importance, because the Madeira-Mamoré railway undertaking had placed a depôt a little to the west of the village. The Doctor and I spent many memorable days in its neighbourhood, butterfly-hunting and sauntering. Though mosquitoes, anopeline and culex, are as common here as elsewhere in the Brazils—the lighters which came alongside with cargo for us conveyed clouds of them, and they took possession of every dark nook of the “Capella”—it is noteworthy that Serpa has the reputation, in Amazonas, of a health resort. I could find no explanation of that. There was malaria at Serpa, of course; but compared with the really lethal country, a country not so different in appearance and climate, of the upper Madeira, the salubrity of Serpa is perplexing. That virulent form of malaria peculiar to some tropical localities is a phenomenon which medical research has not yet explained. In the almost unexplored region of the Rio Madeira the fever is certain to every traveller, though the land is largely without inhabitants; and it is almost equally certain that it will be of the malignant type. Yet at an old settlement like Serpa, where probably every inhabitant has had malaria, and every mosquito is likely to be a host, the fever is but mild, and the traveller may escape it entirely.
By now you will be asking what Itacoatiara is like, that community contentedly lost in the secret forest. I am afraid you will not learn, unless, in the happy future, you and I select a few friends, a few books, and erect some houses of palm leaves to protect us from the too vigorous sun there, and so, secure from all the really urgent and important matters which do not matter a twinkle to the eternal stars, noon it far and secure until the time comes for the gentle villagers to carry us out and forget us; remembering us again when the annual Day of the Dead comes round. They will leave some comfortable candles above us that night.
There the earth is a warm and luscious body. The lazy paths are cool with groves, and in the middle hours of the sun, when only a few butterflies are abroad, and the grasshoppers are shrilling in the quiet, you swing in a hammock under a thatch—the air has been through some tree in blossom—and gossip, and drink coffee. Beyond the path of the village there is—nobody knows what; not even the Royal Geographical Society. One heard of a large and mysterious lake a day’s journey inland. Nobody knew anything about it. Nobody cared. One old man once, when hunting, saw its mirror through the forest’s aisles, and heard the multitude of its birds.
The foreshore of the village is rugged with boulders richly tinctured with iron oxide, and often having a scoriaceous surface. There we would land, and scramble up to a street which ends on the height above the river. It is a broad road, with white, substantial, one-story houses on either side. The dwellings and stores have no windows, but are built with open fronts, for ventilation. This is Serpa’s main street. It is shaded with avenues of trees. In the narrower side turnings the trees meet to form arcades. One day we saw such an avenue covered with yellow, trumpet-shaped blossoms. Ox-carts with solid wheels stand in the walks. The sunlight, broken in the leaves of the trees, patterned the roads with white fire, and so dappled the cattle that they were obscure; you saw the oxen only when they moved. There is a large square, grass-grown, in the centre of the village, where stands the church, a white, simple building with an open belfry in which the bell hangs plain, bright with verdigris. About here the merchants and tradesmen of Serpa have their places. The men, hearty and friendly souls, walk abroad in clean linen suits and straw hats, and their ladies, pallid, slight, but often singularly beautiful, are dressed as Europeans, but without hats; sometimes, when out walking late in the day, a lady would have a scarlet flower in her hair.
By the foreshore were the cabins, of mud and wood, of the negroes. Beyond the town, the roads run through the clearings, and end on the forest. In the clearings were the huts, wattle and daub, and of leaves, of the settled Indians and half-breeds. These were often prettily placed beneath groups of graceful palms. It was in the last direction that most often we made our way with our butterfly nets while other folk were sleeping during the sun’s height. The humid heat, I suppose, was really a trial. One did perspire in an alarming way and with the least exertion. The Doctor, who carries substance, would have dark patches in his khaki uniform, and would wonder, with foreboding, whether any more in this life he would catch hold of a cold jug which held a straight pint in which ice tinkled. But to me the illumination, the heat, the odour, and the quiethood of those noons made life a great prize. I will say that my comrade, the Doctor, did much to make it so, with his gentle fun, and his wide knowledge of earth-lore. There was so much, wherever we went, to keep me on the magic side of time, and out of its shadow. On the west of the town were some huts, with plantations of bananas, pineapples, papaws, and maize, where blossomed cannas, mimosas, passion-flowers, and where other unseen blooms, especially after rain, made breathing a sensuous pleasure. There we tried to intercept the swallow-like flight of big sulphur and orange butterflies, though never with success. We had more success with the butterflies in the clearings, where some new huts stood, beyond the village. Over the stagnant pools in those open spaces dragonflies hovered, fellows that moved, when we approached, like lines of red light. The butterflies, particularly a vermilion beauty with black bars on his wings, and a swift flier, used to settle and gem the mud about these pools. Other species frequented the flowering shrubs which had grown over the burnt wreckage and stumps of the forest. That area was full of insects and birds. There we saw daily the Sauba ants, sometimes called the parasol ants, in endless processions, each ant holding a piece of leaf, the size of a sixpenny bit, over its tiny body. Tanagers shot amongst the bushes like blue projectiles. We saw a ficus there on one occasion, of fair size, with large leathery leaves, which carried a colony of remarkable caterpillars, each about seven inches long, thick in proportion, blue black in colour with yellow stripes, and a coral head, and filaments at the latter end. They were pugnacious worms, fighting each other desperately when two met on a leaf. The larvæ stripped that tree in a day. We were not always sure that the people in this part of Serpa were friendly. Mostly they were half-breeds, varying mixtures of Indian and negro, and no doubt very superstitious. The rodent’s foot was commonly worn by the women, who, if we took notice of their children, sometimes would spit, to avert the evil eye. But when the thunder clouds banked close, and the air, being still, became loaded with the scent of the wood fires of the villagers, promising rain, we would enter a hut, and then always found we were welcome.
Even when kept to the ship for any reason this country offered constant new things to keep our thoughts moving. A regatao, the river pedlar, would bring his roomy montario, the gipsy van of the river, his family aboard—the wife, the grandmother, and the sad, shy, little children—and offer us fruits, and perhaps his monkey and parrots. Gradually the “Capella” added to her company. The Chief bought a parrot which had many Indian and Portuguese phrases. It tried to climb a funnel guy, in escaping the curiosity of our terrier, and fell into the river. We fished her out with a bucket. The vampire bats came aboard every night. They were not very terrible creatures to look at; but we discovered they frequented the forecastle for no good purpose. Again, stories filtered through to us of sickness on the Madeira, and abruptly they gave the palms and the sunsets a new light. One man was brought in from beyond and died of beri-beri. This shook the nerves of one of our Brazilian pilots, and he refused to go beyond where we were. As for me, there at Serpa the “Capella” was at anchor, and we were not near the Madeira, and seemed never likely to go. I watched the sunsets. The brief, cool evenings prompted me (fever in the future or not) to praise and grace. Crickets chirped everywhere on the ship then, and the air was full of the sparks of fireflies. You could smell this good earth.
There was one sunset when the overspreading of violet clouds would have shut out the day quite, but that the canopy was not closely adjusted to the low barrier of forest to the westward. Through that narrow chink a yellow light streamed, and traced shapes on the lurid walls and roof which narrowly enclosed us. This was the beginning of the most alarming of our daily electrical storms. There was no wind. Serpa and all the coast facing that rift where the light entered our prison, stood prominent and strange, and surprised us as much as if we had not looked in that direction till then. The curtain dropped behind the forest, and all light was shut out. We could not see across the ship. Knowing how strong and bright could be the electrical discharges (though they were rarely accompanied by thunder) when not heralded in so portentous a way, we waited with some anxiety for this display to begin. It began over the trees behind Serpa. Blue fire flickered low down, and was quickly doused. Then a crack of light sprang across the inverted black bowl from east to west in three quick movements. Its instant ramifications fractured all the roof in a network of dazzling blue lines. The reticulations of light were fleeting, but never gone. Night contracted and expanded, and the sharp sounds, which were not like thunder, might have been the tumbling flinders of night’s roof. We saw not only the river, and the shapes of the trees and the village, as in wavering daylight, but their colours. One flash sheeted the heavens, and its overbright glare extinguished everything. It came with an explosion, like the firing of a great gun close to our ears, and for a time we thought the ship was struck. In this effort the storm exhausted itself.